Free software downloads

Al Hart

I was talking with a potential client from Dallas Thursday, and he said that some of his friends had discovered a way to download and use IRender nXt for free.

I told him that I had tried to find a site which let you do this, but that I always wound up on a site which wanted me to enter a credit card number before they shows me their "secrets". I was vary hesitant to enter a credit card number on a Warez site, so I never went any further.

He said that his friend had not needed to enter a credit card number. Perhaps I should have pressed him for more details, but I didn't.

So - does anyone know any sites where you can download the "Crack" for IRender nXt? If so, send me a PM (I would prefer that you don't publish the information here on the forum.) If we can see how any such crack works, then we can fix future versions so they are harder to crack.

If you have any other thoughts or comments (not including hints on how to crack this or any other software), please respond here in the forum so we can all share in the discussion.

Al Hart

@unknownuser said:

I just did a Google search for "IRender nXt" and near the bottom of the page there is a list of related searches...EVERY one of those searches leads to cracked versions of IRender nXt...I never clicked through to any of the sites, but they may help you discover how people are stealing your software.

(I am putting this here on the forum - because I doubt that learning that Google searches often lead to links for Crack sites will help anyone - above the age of 6 - learn how to crack software)

I know there are a lot of Crack sites which list my software. One reason I know is that Google provides a nice service sending me an email every time they add a site which references "IRender nXt" or "Render Plus" to their search engine. Most of these are crack sites, (such as "Serial irender nxt Download Serial irender nxt free full from XXX") - although some are legitimate, (such as a new page on the Novedge site telling about our new Forum page)

The question in this topic was whether anyone had experience trying to get an illegal license for IRender nXt. Of course no one would admit it - But perhaps if you heard from someone else that they had done so - you might let me know how they did it.

In the early days of Cracks I found a site which showed how to beat the authcode system for a product of ours. It was actually quite interesting, because they had disassembled the C-code and discovered a way to change to code to jump over the section which checked validation. I'm sure some of these smart people are still out there, but because there are so many bogus sites claiming to provide software cracks, it may be much harder now to find a legitimate crack. (I hope)

Chris Fullmer

I'm going to guess that cracks are still alive and well. I have no idea how people do it, its a bit over my head. But I am not convinced that you can do much about stopping it. No one else has figured out how to do it yet.

I think that some companies are releasing free versions of their software to attempt to reduce pirating. If there is a free version, with little or no reduction in functionality, perhaps that is enough for people to be able to try the software and see if they like it enough to buy it. Short demos rarely prove to be long enough to determine if a software is worth buying <opinion of the author>.

Plus you get people hooked on your product, preferably students, then when they go on to work in firms, they push the firm to use the software they like. Bingo - big sales to a multi-seat firm.

Anyhow, those are some of my initial thoughts.

Chris

Al Hart

@chris fullmer said:

But I am not convinced that you can do much about stopping it. No one else has figured out how to do it yet.
Chris

But, of course, that is the intellectual challenge here. If I can download a crack version that works, then I must be able to stop it. Even though they can crack the next one, at least I would slow things down a bit.

I am willing to pay one of these sites to let me see their crack. (A good trick for doing this without exposing yourself too much is to purchase one of the prepaid credit cards - if you can find one which works for on-line purchases - then you haven't sent them your real credit card number). I would love to see the cracked version so I could see what I did wrong.

For "important" software (IRender nXt is not quite that important yet), it can be easy to crack the software. If you have a working version on one machine and another non-working version on another machines, you can start both programs using a debugging tool - which traces every line of machine code - until you find in instruction in the non-working version which jumps to a different place then the same instruction in the working version. Then you change it to jump to the same place as the other one.

For instance if I wrote code like:


password = get_user_password();
real_password = get_required_password();
if (password != real_password)
    return(false);
else 
    return(true)

Then the hacker can find this, and change the return(false)to a return(true).
(In the machine code .DLL or .EXE - not the source code)

The hacker does not get to see the source code - but while tracing both copies of the program at the same time he/she can easily find this subroutine which returns true for good versions and false for bad versions, and patch it to always return true.

And of course, a good hacker can write a program to do all this automatically. he/she does not actually have to sit and walk through each instruction.

Interestingly - this would be much easier to do for compile C++ code, and much harder to do for programs which do password checking in encrypted ruby code.
(Of course, a really good hacked could un-encrypt SketchUp's encryption scheme. If they can unencrypt AutoCADs DWG, then they can probably unencrypt almost anything.

xrok1

To quote bill gates "if people are going to steal software I'd hope their stealing mine" or something to that effect

tbd

@al hart said:

Even though they can crack the next one, at least I would slow things down a bit.

you will only slow down your product development. they have a lot more experience in this and more dedication and can break protections that are lot stronger than whatever you can come up to (if it is possible to crack 768-bit RSA, imagine cracking your simple encryption that can have a lot of holes)

"if it works on user machine, it can be cracked" - anonymous cracker

you can play with crackmes and see protections and how they are defeated.

EscapeArtist

I don't want to risk giving any lurkers ideas about getting warez, but there other ways to get illegal cracks, keygens, etc... than just sites offering warez for a fee. Entering your financial info in a site already admitting to doing something illegal is pretty foolish to begin with. It wouldn't be worth your time or money to get a crack from these sites. PM sent to you.

xrok1

i'm sure if you wanted to you could easily spend more time protecting your software than developing it! you should be flattered that your program actually recieved enough attention to be cracked. do a search for other SU renderers that have been cracked and you'll find you're in an elite group.

Al Hart

@xrok1 said:

do a search for other SU renderers that have been cracked and you'll find you're in an elite group.

I searched for: SketchUp render Crack - and it seemed like a very large group - not an elite group.

I'm not too worried about the people using the cracked version - for most of them its not a decision between "should I pay" and "should I steal" , but rather "who should I steal from today" - meaning that we probably aren't losing actual potential sales dollars to cracks.
Still - I think it would be fun to see how they are doing it.

john.warburton

I spoke with the developers of a software package for whom I am a beta tester about this issue.

When searching on Google for information about the application I was given lots of links to illegal download sites. I pointed this out to the developers and their pragmatic answer was that they saw little point in wasting effort going after these guys or developing new security code for them to crack as in their view most of the people using cracked versions would probably never be prepared to pay for the application anyway.

The logic seems to be that they are not actually losing anything to the crackers and having more people out there using the application would not be such a bad thing!

Adobe seem to have a technically better solution for dealing with cracked software, making their software phone home every so often. Crackers disable this feature of course, but another check monitors the time since the last successful call home and if there were no successful calls after a certain period the app is disabled or switches into demo mode with the user allowed to purchase a genuine licence. Probably overkill for your app, though.

thomthom

Someone once made an interesting thought on software and piracy - their claim was that frequent updates of their software kept the pirates at bay - or at least lagging behind. Instead of building up for large updates they updater more often with smaller updates.

Of course - there's a balance here. Update too often and it's just annoying for the customers - but you get a long way with an built-in automatic updater.

If every update you make require a new crack it's soon going to be tiresome for those frequently using the software. And no one wants to wait for the latest and greatest. So you might be able to convert non-casual users into paying customers.

Interesting idea.

tbd

@al hart said:

I think it would be fun to see how they are doing it.

I put a link in my previous post where you can see lots of protections and how they are defeated (see solutions).

there are a lot of bogus links (e.g. Podium download 700mb when the entire setup is 2mb) full of crap malware, so better wear protection

xrok1

@thomthom said:

Someone once made an interesting thought on software and piracy - their claim was that frequent updates of their software kept the pirates at bay - or at least lagging behind. Instead of building up for large updates they updater more often with smaller updates.

Of course - there's a balance here. Update too often and it's just annoying for the customers - but you get a long way with an built-in automatic updater.

If every update you make require a new crack it's soon going to be tiresome for those frequently using the software. And no one wants to wait for the latest and greatest. So you might be able to convert non-casual users into paying customers.

Interesting idea.

frequent updates also give owners and potential owners of your software a sense that your software is always evolving and on the edge (better value), also that the development team is striving to make it the best. so... probably time spent developing features is much more productive and valuable than time spent developing crack protection.

baz

A young friend recently introduced me to the wonders and pitfalls of torrents. He found, installed, and verified a 1500 dollar suite of software in under an hour. ( I have the same app, but kosher, so now he has to learn how to use it:). Then he tried to dl'd a tv series, but it wasnt, it was a nasty virus, at which point i went home to carry on working with my legal software.
The fact of it is, that you can get anything that is on the web. Anything.
As was mentioned before, there are smart people on both sides, so it is not stoppable imho, apart from employing delaying tactics.
My point tho, most people who want to use an app for serious reasons, are sooner or later going to go legal, it's simply too much bother otherwise. So, as mentioned, I agree, let em go for it.
There is a caveat tho. Its about upgrades. I have a legal macromedia suite MX,(2003). Adobe bought em out,and now its up to csv5. i had a look and theres lotsa stuff there for the uber designers, but really it's like SU7 with every plugin ever invented pre installed. It's a nightmare. And if I'd kept up with every upgrade offered...
...it' bs.

Sketchup and its Affiliates are showing the right way to go about this, incremental upgrades, pay for some, not for others, depending on the value delivered.

s'cuse me, gotta go, su9 has just dl'd, gotta install and check out the new features!

baz
Ps: that was a JOKE about SU9!

pilou

@unknownuser said:

that was a JOKE about SU9!

Of course because we have yet all Su10

solo

IMO software piracy is an epidemic but not a calamity. Sure every software worth anything or of any benefit will be pirated, there is no way around it.
But who are the people stealing it?

Frankly they are people that do not actually use it, most download it because they can and never really spend the time to learn it, hence never really use it. Take 3ds Max as an example, it's the most pirated app as far as I know, yet most folk use it only to convert max objects to other formats and do not actually spend the time to learn it. Vue also is very pirated but because of it's upgrade system and objects, texture, atmospheres that are locked to license it's difficult for a prospective pirate to really take advantage of the stolen software, let alone get any forum support as one needs to register with a valid license.

As far as render solutions go, Vray is the most pirated app by far, but mostly by kids learning the app who will either get over the render thing and flip burgers at Mcdonalds one day or graduate and use the skills they learned with pirated software in a firm that have legitimate licenses and acquire an additional one for their new upcoming render master.

Who really gets screwed is the content providers, like Evermotion who have high quality models which are freely distributed around the web, this is the real problem IMO.

baz

@unknownuser said:

@unknownuser said:

that was a JOKE about SU9!

Of course because we have yet all Su10

bugger!!!

baz

Curiously, I was thinking of solos byline when I wrote my rave before. I meant to paraphrase it.

"The average non-paying stealer of software never reads user guides and tutorials, that's why they are only non-paying-stealers of software".

The non-average will get into it which probly equals paid up member.
baz

Solo's byeline... The average user never reads user guides and tutorials, that's why they are only average.

BTW: I'm going off deadlines, whooshing or otherwise.

pilou

(off Topic : but as you are Australian and make 3D...
Today is a sad day Brian has left us and has gone to the artist heaven.
Maybe you have crossed him on some 3D forum?
It was a very enthousiastic guy about 3D!

baz

@unknownuser said:

(off Topic : but as you are Australian and make 3D...

Sorry, I did'nt know him.
baz