PACE Launch iLok Cloud - Cloud Based Alternative To Hardware iLoks

[chk071]

Would be great to no longer have to be paranoid about losing my dongle while traveling

Then you'll have to be paranoid about dropouts with the WiFi connection.

I recently fixed that by installing another wi-fi adapter. I think it's really but a handful of adapters, which cause problems. Probably rather the cheap ones.

[kbaccki]

My theory is that the dongle protection scared more and more people off, and, before vendors change to another solution, they want to offer something which is less of an annoyance.

Until I see some of the early returns, I'm skeptical this scheme will have a positive first year or two... and this is just based on the marketing blurbs, which say that authorization is per-product, and individual products will do periodic verification. So you don't necessarily need 100% Internet connectivity, but for practical purposes, the likelihood of having zero phone homes on any given day is exactly the same as having 20 phone homes. People who truly want/need to go offline for extended periods are going to get p!ssed, and ilok will say "just use the dongle if you don't like it!". What these DRM solutions need is online authorization with generous offline capability. This whole "we'll only check once per week" or "maybe we'll check once and a while, but maybe not, who knows" is kinda weak, IMO. In the case of ilok cloud, the per-product nature might end up being a PITA.

Think about it... to enable use of a product on a machine you need to log into an account, download the necessary license, do it's secure enclave encryption thing, then you're good. Let's say they've addressed the license security completely so that it's "as good as a dongle", you can't just upload the necessary registry and other bits to a website... so the only key that matters is the user credential. No user credential, no license, period. However, that doesn't mean you can't share a credential for casual copying. Presumably, I can't publish a credential to a website and have 10,000 people use it to download my license... but I could share a credential with my buddy -- how would iLok know? With dongle you can't do that, with disk token you can kinda do that but it would not be convenient (you have 2 authorizations)... so what's up with cloud licensing? They make it sound like it's very flexible for the end user, not tied to hardware, etc.... so what are the limitations? Total active authorizations? Authorizations within a time period? And if those factors are in the user's favor then there must be some loose goosey on the licensing side. Like iLok will say: "listen, we can keep 100 people from using a single one of your licenses, but we can't keep 3 people from sharing one license".

Don't know... will be interested to see how this actually works and how it's adopted by both sides...

[Aloysius]

''When warm, wet air rises, it cools, and water vapor condenses out to form clouds.'' Think I'll stick with my hardware dongle. I don't think that cloud thing will be too reliable.

[chk071]

I'm sure, if then, companies will give several options. I'd take cloud over dongle every day though.

[RealToLogic]

I'm thinking of purchasing a library that requires iLok, and I don't have a dongle so was planning to use the new iLok license manager to put the licence on my mac. I'm new to iLok and I have three quick questions that I'd greatly appreciate help with:

1) If I put the license on my mac do I need to have my mac connected to the internet every time I use the sample library?
2) If yes, is that just when I first load the library or continuously?
3) If I purchase a dongle, can I then use the library without an internet connection?

Thanks