scott Ford wrote: >What about theft of software products ? We all know it goes on ... >How do you prevent it ?
Yaaaa, tell me. As a private programmer (moonlighting) years ago writing programs in Turbo Pascal, Clarion, Clipper, etc. on PCs in those good DOS days, it is pretty easy for them to steal my work forcing me to build in 'nagging' prompts, something like 'pay me in x days or this thing dies' (Not these exact but blunt words of course, but you get the idea. ;-p ) I do that twice, one for deposito pay and another for final pay, then all these nagging disappear forever after I gave them the passwords (not stored of course) upon payment. Tampering with BIOS date/time and filesystem timestamp immediately expire my products. That was before shareware and open-source became the norm. Back to IBM. Many years ago, we once enabled in IFAPRDxx the 'Toolkit Debugger and Dissambler' after telling IBM and in their presence, we want to see if we can use these goodies for IVP and for later formal activation. After testing we immediately disabled that. We could of course not tell IBM, but there is a probability that IBM could do an audit, which they do now and them. Groete / Greetings Elardus Engelbrecht ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
