Digital Workshop

Hello DW

Last November I wrote:

"Dear DW
I am in the process of preparing some demo cds for a client to pass on to potential buyers but I have realized that the time period for demos in Opus Pro XE 4.0 IS NOT working! as well as the proper id for key generation and key for publication is not quiet right

After the period expired, still it let you continue using the product!
Has anybody noticed this?

I have to re-do the project on Opus Pro XE 2.8 since my client need this in a hurry (they always needs something in a hurry!)"

We were told that this issue will be resolved in the next patch. Well, this "new patch" has come and gone and still the issue has not been resolved.

Still is not working! The user can re-setup the date in his/her computer and the pub will work like nothing has happened.
Also the key generator is still giving problems.

Could you please tell us why this "very important" option in XE 4.0 has not been resolved.

I am about to start a huge project for a client that need this evaluation option but I did a quick test and still the problem is there.

I have completely deleted the program, delete the registry entry, re-installed, applied the last patch and still IS THE SAME!

What is going on? You told us that this issue will be resolved in the next patch.

German

Hi,

Thank you for your enquiry.

The evaluation feature was one of the most heavily-tested aspects of the 4.30 update and other users who were affected by the original issue have confirmed that this update has resolved the problem and allowed them to publish and distribute their projects.

I have created a quick 30-day evaluation publication which appears to be timing-out correctly and preventing access to the publication. Here is the procedure I used:

- Launch Opus Pro XE 04
- Create a blank new publication
- Click Publication > Publication Properties
- Select the Security tab
- Enable the Evaluation option
- Set the 'Days to timeout' to 30
- Enable the 'Display standard evaluation dialog' option
- Click Apply and OK
- Now click Publication > Publish and publish as a standalone executable to a location of your choice
- Once published, please test the resulting executable. A dialog should appear stating that you are on Day 1 of the evaluation. Click the 'Continue with Trial' button and the publication should launch
- Now double-click on the system clock in the bottom-right corner of the screen and advance the system date by 2 months
- Once the date has been changed, try running the published executable again. The dialog should now state that the publication has expired and only offer an 'Exit' button. Click on this and the dialog will close without showing the publication

This therefore appears to be working correctly. I then tried to reproduce the problems you have encountered with the Registration ID using the following procedure:

- Go back into the evaluation publication you have just created and click Publication > Publication Properties
- Select the Security tab
- Enable the Registration ID option and type the word hello into the field provided
- Click Apply and OK to confirm the changes
- Click Publication > Publish and publish the project to a standalone executable in the same location as before (thereby overwriting the previously-published version)
- Once the publish process is complete, click Test. The dialog should again state that the publication has expired but will now ask for an Unlock code
- Highlight the code displayed in the 'Registration Code' field and press Ctrl + C to copy this to the clipboard
- Please launch the Publication Key Generator (by clicking Start > Programs > Opus Pro XE > Publication Key Generator)
- In the 'Publication Registration ID' field, type 'hello'
- Click inside the 'User Publication Code' field to display the flashing text input cursor and press Ctrl + V on the keyboard to paste in the publication ID
- Click 'Generate Unlock Code'. The unlock code should appear in the bottom field
- Click 'Copy to Clipboard' to copy this code
- Go back to the publication displaying the evaluation dialog and click inside the 'Enter unlock code' field to display the flashing cursor
- Press Ctrl + V on the keyboard to paste in the unlock code
- Click 'Unlock'. A message should appear confirming that the publication is unlocked
- Click the 'Run full version' to launch the publication
- Exit out of the publication and try running it again. The dialog box should no longer appear and you should be taken directly into the publication

If the above procedures work on your system, you should hopefully be able to identify what may be causing the problem in your publication. If not, please forward me your publication .imp file and I will be happy to investigate further.

Kind regards,

[quote="Robin Garrett"]Hi,


- Now double-click on the system clock in the bottom-right corner of the screen and advance the system date by 2 months
- Once the date has been changed, try running the published executable again. The dialog should now state that the publication has expired and only offer an 'Exit' button. Click on this and the dialog will close without showing the publication

This therefore appears to be working correctly.

Yes Robin, that part work ok, the real issue is the following and please try to reproduce it:

1-Before you advanced the pc clock 2 months to see if the executable will be block, and everything worked as planned.

2-Now try to go back to your "normal, today's date" and you will see that the publication re-set itself and let you use the pub again.

3-Now go back one year in your pc clock
from the date you first run the pub for first time and you see it will let you re-start your trial again! (this will happen if you go back one month, two months, etc from the frist day you run the pub)

The point is that people can reset the date to when initially run/installed the pub and it will re-start another period of transition. This can be done indefinitely rendering this option obsolete. Please check the pic I attached to this message.

Sincerely
German

German --

Very interesting what you have discovered. In 2.81 if you messed with the system clock and went forward, when you reset it current or went backward, the Pub was smart enough to remember that a later date had been entered, so it would NOT work.

I agree, if the viewer can simply reset the system clock, they have beaten the Expiration feature.

Now that DW is aware of what you have found, I'm sure they can make the fix. Sometimes identifying the exact problem is the first positive step in fixing something.

Hi Fred,
This is exactly my point!
There is no use for a feature that does not work. For us developers, this is extremely important, the reason of upgrade to XE.

Robin, please could DW resolve this as a matter of urgency!

German

Hi,

Thank you for your enquiry.

There does appear to be a problem with the 'Standard Evaluation Dialog' not permanently locking-out a publication once expired and our developers are currently looking into this as a matter of priority.

However, you should find that you can still use the dedicated evaluation script actions to permanently lock out the publication even if the user sets back their system clock. I would therefore recommend taking a look at the Evaluation Demo sample which comes supplied with Opus Pro XE 04 to see how you can incorporate these actions into your publication and eliminate the problems you have encountered.

I hope this helps. Please do not hesitate to contact me if you have any further queries.

Kind regards,

Keen eye Koala.
However I think it may have been better to quietly show DW the problem rather than anounce to the world how to bypass an evaluation system that others may have in place.

Hi Swan
I respectfully disagree with you on the basis of the nature of this forum. We are a community of developers and our livehood depends on the tools we use in our work, therefore, if something so important that could potentially affect my business is discover I would like to know immediately for many reasons, one being legal issues that can be rise out of a project that I finish for a client and then my client have problems with the protection of his/her copyright work. Issues like this can go back to bite you big time swan.

Another issue is the commitment of the software creator (in this case DW) to distribute a software that at the best of their abilites is free of bugs which in this case is not. Even when I can firmly say that I am totally happy with the way DW deal with all bugs in the system I believe that it is always better to have a software with no bugs or close to it.

Imaging if this software was owned by Microsoft and we have been discovering bugs again and again. Do you realize that all hell would broke loose on Microsoft?

Again, I am very satisfied as a customer with all the service and support of DW. There is no way comparable to other services around. They are simply the best I have come across on service and reliability and I totally understand that big programs like Opus are difficult to produce and get it right at the first time but sometimes the bugs can be so serious, like this security bug, that practically can have ramifications for your work.

Yes, there are other options available encrypting an using variables to bypass this issue. I myself have worked on a temporary solution for my immediat problem with this client but the questions remains... Do all the opus users have the ability or the time to go to into other solutions for this? or Is this the reason why people buy a product like Opus XE 4.0 in order to produce projects with a minimum of fuss and this is the reason why the product sell on the basis of all these extra features that are offered?

Again, this is my humble opinion. I do no want to clash with anybody and certainly it is not my intention to give bad publicity to DW which to me are worldclass. All that I want, and I am sure everybody in this forum, is to have a product that give us 100% satisfaction everytime we use it. Is this too difficult to understand?

I believe that posting a problem in a public forum also helps for a quick solutions of the issue. Don't you think? and a quick solution is on benefit of all of us...

Sincerely

German

I think German is spot on. The security issue is very important and should be publised on the forums to warn other authors who may not be aware of the problems, and yes there can be a problem with hackers seeing the posts, howether in my experience the response from DW regarding this type of issue is usualy swift and decisive, so I would expect to see an update very soon.

As a point of interest we always add extra security to publications using read/write registry values (amongst other functions).

Andy Piddock

Hayward Design
Kent UK

The evaluation feature, like the CD protection, was never intended to be a bullet proof solution in all cases – such a thing is not possible. Determined hackers will always break any software protection. Many software packages do not implement any “roll back” protection.

Having said that, there is already such protection built into the Opus publication evaluation system – however it is not enabled if you are using the standard expiry dialog.

If you disable the standard dialog and implement your own expiry page then, when a publication expires, Opus will set a flag that prevents the publication working if the clock is rolled back. See the example provided with Opus Pro XE 04 for more information on how to do this.

We will look into changing the standard dialog to do this as well – although this will have potential side effects; which is why we did not implement it as standard. If your publication expires during development you will have no simple way to unlock it again (since there will be no way to call the Change Publication Evaluation action). You would have to republish with a custom expiry page; reset the expiry data from that page and then switch back to the standard dialog for your release version.

Be aware that a determined thief will always manage to work round these things anyway – there are several ways to circumvent any date based scheme (which I will not discuss in public). It all depends on how much trouble a thief wants to go to.

Duncan
Could you please tell me then, why this feature works perfect on XE 2.8 and not on the "more advance" version of XE? Is XE 4.0 so different in term of coding and all that that this feature need to be totally re-written?
Could you write to me privately and let me know the "other options" that you are talking about in your post? Keep up the good work on DW!
German

Publication evaluation mode is a new feature for Opus Pro 04 XE; it was not available in 2.81. I'm not sure what you mean.

Duncan, now I am confused...
I believe that XE 2.8 has a evaluation time out feature and it worked well. This is the same evaluation time out feature that it is now not working on XE 4.0 (check all the previous post here).

I am attaching a pic of the evaluation feature on XE 2.8 so you can see that this version also have this.

Cheers

German

Sorry, forgot about that. The changes to add the ability to "unlock" publications are new for 04 and are what has changed the implementation of the old evaluation code.

Hi,

Thank you for your enquiry.

I think some clarification is in order...

Opus Pro XE 2.81 offered an Evaluation Timeout feature which allowed you to specify the number of days for which the publication could run. However, these options gave no feedback to the user and no indication was given of how many days remained in the evaluation (unless you created your own warning using the inbuilt variables).

In Opus Pro XE 04, we have provided a new "Standard Evaluation Dialog" which automatically displays what day of the evaluation period the user is on. However, there appears to be a bug in this dialog which prevents the publication becoming permanently locked-out once the evaluation period is over. This means that if the user sets the system clock back to an earlier date, the evaluation is 'rewound' back to that date and can still be viewed.

However, if you disable the "Standard Evaluation Dialog" setting, the Opus Pro XE 04 publication will behave in exactly the same way as an Opus Pro XE 2.81 publication and will be permanently locked-out once the evaluation period is over, even if the user tries to change the system date.



These features have not been 'totally rewritten' - we have simply offered additional features to complement the core evaluation security features (which still work in the same way as XE 2.81). Regrettably, one of these new features appears to adversely affect the behaviour of evaluation publications and we are looking in this as a matter of priority. In the meantime, I would recommend disabling the 'Standard Evaluation Dialog' option and using the inbuilt <PUBLICATION_EVALUATION> variable if you wish to display the current day of the evaluation to the user.

I hope this helps. Please do not hesitate to contact me if you have any further queries.

Kind regards,