No. 5

一篇評論:關於WM marketing上,工具下載的保護措施.

Anti-Piracy Policies in Marketplace for Mobile Criticized

Microsoft is receiving some criticism for its measures to protect its developers from piracy for applications submitted to and sold from Marketplace for Mobile, Microsoft's store for applications which is set to launch on October 6 with Windows Mobile 6.5. According to the latest white paper published by the Redmond, Washington software maker, there will be two levels of piracy protection offered to developers--standard and advanced, of which only standard measures are available for applications that debut initially with the launch of the store.

Read on to find out more about the piracy protection schemes offered under standard and advanced.

Standard protection is a very primitive and basic. The protection scheme offered is that the cab file will be downloaded over the air (OTA) onto the device and will be deleted automatically after installation. Furthermore, it is implied from WMPowerUser that although you can purchase applications from the desktop, users cannot download cabs to the desktop for future transfer with this standard anti-piracy protection. WMPowerUser thinks that the OTA cab file is "unprotected" and that the auto-deletion of the cab file can be circumvented by "something as simple as a soft-reset during installation."

Next up is the advanced level of protection, which won't be available at launch. According to WMPowerUser, this involves "adding Microsoft’s license checking code into your application, which will check against a license store unique to the hardware. A little better, but unfortunately code added in such an obvious manner can also be very simply patched over not to run at all. The protection is flimsy at best, and the application should run without issue if the code is removed."