DONGLE BLUES...

[Jaeson Merrill]

Dongles are ridiculous.

Well....it's a ridiculous name for them, I agree.


Surely crackers remove traces of original serial numbers etc don't they? If not, how come these people haven't been prosecuted by said companies? Yeah, I take the point about we the users still pay extra for the dongles...

challenge and response are a bit cleaner to crack i think, because they just have to figure out the algorithm of the protection, and then they can make a serial for any name they like..

so no...

cause most softs are challenge and response.

which i dont mind actually, its not as good as serial but MUCH better than dongle.

Thats what i likED about samp, before the codemeter thing came along.. o well.. deal with it i guess..

and there are different.... ways.... to ... deal...

with those pesky dongles!!!

[TeeLangSun]

Hads a bit of bother installing new software today as usual its the dongle problem..

SO here is what i think is a true statement

"sonar uses a serial number where as cubase uses a dongle and i bet theres as many people outhere using cracked versions of cubase as there is sonar..."

So whats the point in a dongle ?

It at least keeps YOU honest. lol

[Angus_FX]

Dongles, dongles everywhere...

First Steinberg put 'em on all their VSTis... now in the past couple of months Antares, IK Multimedia and Korg have all caught the bug.

What d'you all make of this?

[Beardedone]

Frankly. I find it alarming. I do not feel any confidence that dongles will not screw up my PC as I have observed countless times with friends suffering with Cubase.

[op519]

Dongles, dongles everywhere...

First Steinberg put 'em on all their VSTis... now in the past couple of months Antares, IK Multimedia and Korg have all caught the bug.

What d'you all make of this?

wasn't Antares always dongle?? I thought they used the iLok key. I really don't know as I don't use Antares stuff (you know perfect pitch I have here and all haha - right)

Anyway, what all these comanies chosing dongles means, at least for me is that I will not be supporting them with my purchase. That is my personal choice and nothing Squids or CharlieS can say will make me change my mind on that. I prefer to support companies who appear to care more about their customer. Companies who (unlike steinberg/korg/and yes even iK) actually provide customer service in a positive way. Companies much like your own Angus (although I do have a feeling FXPansion might be one of the next to jump on this dongle bandwagon)

[ericj23]

The question for the synchrosofts of the world is can you make a programs protection so difficult to crack that it will have been updated before (or shortly after it is cracked) - i.e. can you leave the p2p users a step behind - so they can use an old program and lust after the new one - at that point hopefully generating sales

i think they suspect they can

i suspect they might well be able to

[james0tucson]

So whats the point in a dongle ?

As far as I'm concerned, the point of a dongle is to ensure that my money is not a factor in the demand curve. It has worked very successfully, by the way.

[c_huelsbeck]

I still doubt that it really helps selling more product in the long run... warez users don't all of a sudden buy the stuff because it has a good protection. Actually I believe that it can hurt a product if it is overly protected, because it punishes the legit users and might stay with a small user base, thus not getting enough exposure to make it a must-have product for other "paying" producers...

Then there is the issue with flexibility. I make extensive use of Software Samplers with huge sample libraries and they are very demanding to CPU and Memory. So I use FX-Teleport to spread the load over several Computers. With a dongle like HALion3+ uses now, such a thing is not possible anymore without buying more full boxed HALions. So the technology limits it to single computer (not merely single user) use, which I find alarmingly restrictive. Heck, why do companies even allow to use multiple instances of their plugin? Why not restrict that too?

[kahrayzee]

Heck, why do companies even allow to use multiple instances of their plugin? Why not restrict that too?

Shhhh...

You'll give them ideas...

Personally I was interested in the Newest Korg and Antares stuff until I saw they required a Dongle... guess I'm happier with what I've got now though

[heeb]

Heck, why do companies even allow to use multiple instances of their plugin? Why not restrict that too?

That one is easy: just make sure that one instance already uses more than 50% of your CPU power. No way you can succesfully start a second instance then

[james0tucson]

I've outlived a hundred software companies. I don't want any software that I'll have no control over my right to run, in twenty years. I believe this is a completely reasonable position.

[Angus_FX]

wasn't Antares always dongle?? I thought they used the iLok key.

Nope, they used to use PACE Challenge/Response.

Companies much like your own Angus (although I do have a feeling FXPansion might be one of the next to jump on this dongle bandwagon)

Doubtful. I'm no fan of dongles, and I'm certainly no fan of the shady snake oil vendors that provide some of them.

There's only two situations I can see where we'd ever "go dongle":-

- if the big retailers refused to sell our products without;

- if the dongles prove uncrackable, and it becomes apparent that people are allocating their software budgets preferentially towards dongled SW (i.e. paying only for what can't be cracked, and cracking the rest which can be). I don't see any evidence for this right now.

It remains to be seen whether near-uncrackable dongles (Logic, SX3) will be the exception or the rule.. and it may simply be that the crackers become more proficient at breaking dongles.

[AndrewSimon]

whilst on the subject of dongle's does anydbody know how many license's 1 dongle can hold ?

ive got 3 on mine , hundreds maybe ? just wondering.

Yes, hundreds but there is a serious problem with that (read this rant of mine from another forum)

It's wasting computer resources.
It forces me to raise my latency from 64 samples to 128 samples because the USB dongle is hogging the PCI bus.
OK so 1 software no big problem but what happens when we start giving into these dongles and every manufacturer will start adopting them?
How would you like to have 25 of these on your computer?
What will happen to computer resources when not 1 but 25 plugs need to communicate back and forth with their dongles?
True some of these are more or less universal and you can put several licenses on one key but that is a very dangerous thing to do.
If the key breaks the developers will only issue a replacement authorization if you send in the bad key.
Note this has to be the specific key(they have serial number) that the plug is authorized to and you can only authorize it to one key at a time.
But if you only have one key what do you do?
You can only send it to one developer.
You are basically out of luck and you lost your plugs. (most developers suggest you insure the key to cover this loss.... yeah you heard it right)

There is also a new tendency not to include these keys with the products.
An I-Lok cost $40.
If I want to be on the safe side I will have to buy a key for each plug (and a very large USB hub)
So $40 x 25 ...... yeah it gets expensive.

And all this for what? To prevent piracy?
But guess what? they pirate them no matter what.
So here I am, a paying customer, frustrated because my computer is choking from endless dongles while my neighbor the "pirate customer" has no choking problems and his computer is flying as fast as ever.
He also paid "much less" then I did for his setup.

I understand developers need to protect their investment, it's just that they need to come up with a better system that doesn't choke my resources.

[Beardedone]

Quote:

Companies much like your own Angus (although I do have a feeling FXPansion might be one of the next to jump on this dongle bandwagon)



Doubtful. I'm no fan of dongles, and I'm certainly no fan of the shady snake oil vendors that provide some of them.

There's only two situations I can see where we'd ever "go dongle":-

- if the big retailers refused to sell our products without;

- if the dongles prove uncrackable, and it becomes apparent that people are allocating their software budgets preferentially towards dongled SW (i.e. paying only for what can't be cracked, and cracking the rest which can be). I don't see any evidence for this right now.

It remains to be seen whether near-uncrackable dongles (Logic, SX3) will be the exception or the rule.. and it may simply be that the crackers become more proficient at breaking dongles.

Good to hear these words of reason from you Angus. Thanks.

Gordon

[c_huelsbeck]

wasn't Antares always dongle?? I thought they used the iLok key.

Nope, they used to use PACE Challenge/Response.

Companies much like your own Angus (although I do have a feeling FXPansion might be one of the next to jump on this dongle bandwagon)

Doubtful. I'm no fan of dongles, and I'm certainly no fan of the shady snake oil vendors that provide some of them.

There's only two situations I can see where we'd ever "go dongle":-

- if the big retailers refused to sell our products without;

- if the dongles prove uncrackable, and it becomes apparent that people are allocating their software budgets preferentially towards dongled SW (i.e. paying only for what can't be cracked, and cracking the rest which can be). I don't see any evidence for this right now.

It remains to be seen whether near-uncrackable dongles (Logic, SX3) will be the exception or the rule.. and it may simply be that the crackers become more proficient at breaking dongles.

Angus,

you have definitely the right attitude, congrats. I'm happy that I bought DR-008 a while ago... fine piece of software.