Of course VMWare is only an example - any environment with full virtualization has the same impact. So, why it’s bad for shareware? Imagine you wrote a great piece of software and wrapped it with (for example) Themida or any other decent protector to make crackers’ lives more difficult. You sold few copies and suddenly people stop buying your software. You can’t find any crack / keygen on the net, so what happened? Among many other possibilities, there is a chance that one legit copy was installed on a virtual machine that is [...]

http://www.idleloop.org/?p=7

This technique can be hacked too. Emulating the server is only as difficult as finding all the correct challenge/response pairs. If you're sending actual code thats not going to be a large dataset.

Not to mention that (remote) server based protections are totally anti-consumer. Who wants to buy a piece of software (or song, movie, etc) when the ability to use it relies on being online (not always possible) and the continued maintenance of the server.

Its already happening to fans who purchased downloadable videos of MLB games. See

xttp://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20071107-major-league-baseballs-drm-change-strikes-out-with-fans.html

This tactic won't last long if the suppliers play games like this...

This technique can be hacked too. Emulating the server is only as difficult as finding all the correct challenge/response pairs. If you're sending actual code thats not going to be a large dataset.

You are right, but that doesn't mean finding all correct challenge / response pairs is always simple. Imagine 3dsmax was splitted into GUI and calculations were performed on the server, what then? I don't take the connection speed into account in this example.

Not to mention that (remote) server based protections are totally anti-consumer. Who wants to buy a piece of software (or song, movie, etc) when the ability to use it relies on being online (not always possible) and the continued maintenance of the server.

C'mon, who doesn't have Inet connection atm? Only poor people

regards,
morel

By your own admission such an application would be impractical. The most likely implementation would be a small segment of code (or several small bits) would be downloaded to enable key parts of the program. Server side computation of each user's data would become not only a productivity bottleneck but a privacy/security issue as well.


As to who doesn't have an internet connection..

People who work on planes, or in hotels that don't have internet (the number is getting smaller, but they are still out there).

Add to that if something happens to your connection (has your ISP never had outages, cable/dsl modem failure?) you can't use the application?

Its a bad idea from the user's perspective and requires significantly more support resources from the vendor's standpoint.