Anti-piracy software with remote management

ByteShield announced the release of ByteAdmin, an online tool for publishers and developers to remotely manage all PC Game/Software licenses protected by ByteShield Software Usage Management.

ByteShield’s technological approach to protecting software acknowledges that any protection created by man can eventually be cracked by man given sufficient time, effort and hardware. The real issues are the number of hurdles involved, the time to overcome each, whether they must be overcome one at a time or can be programmatically overcome.

Conventional software protection technologies (Copy Protection/DRM) are often based on only a few hurdles and usually cracked quickly. In contrast ByteShield’s Software Usage Management (SUM) has high numbers of multiple hurdles, including removal of small but critical pieces of the code it protects and replacement of them at run-time. A cracker is forced to find and “fix’ one piece at a time. Even if a cracker can “fix’ each independent and different hurdle, each one will take a certain amount of time and if there are 1,000, 10,000 or even 100,000 pieces of code that need to be “fixed’, one by one, then the total cracking effort required will simply be too great to be worthwhile. ByteShield’s technology not only achieves this novel approach to software protection but does so with extremely low or no performance impact on the execution speed of the protected software.

ByteAdmin enables the following features for publisher/developer remote usage control and management:

• General License Control – Publishers can use many different license types (e.g. full feature trial, try to buy, rentals, rent to buy, floating or not, subscriptions or purchase) with full time period control (e.g. 8 hours, 30 days, perpetual, a specific start date/time and end date/time) or the number of launches or a combination of these parameters. This is especially useful for pre-release products that need to be tightly controlled prior to commercial release. Publishers also control the number of installations, activations, concurrent users (even across multiple offices in multiple locations) and off-line runs. For downloads, this provides infinite flexibility. For CDs, it provides the opportunity to offer the end user an easy way to change the license.
• Individual License Control – Publishers have control of each license’s parameters on the fly e.g. if a user pays by credit card, downloads and then calls the credit card company to block the payment, that user can be shut off. Your customer service can use the database to help users with forgotten passwords, downloads if the CD is lost etc.
• User Friendly Activation Codes – ByteShield’s codes are random, un-hackable and can be uncomplicated.
• Use Activation Codes To Get Sales Channel Data – By inserting a sales channel (for example, a store chain) identifier into the activation code, publishers get up-to-the-minute sales data for that channel.
• Customize All ByteShield messages – Publishers can customize e.g. an illicit copy of the application/game can open with a prompt asking the end-user to chose a legit license, so creating a new sales opportunity.
• IP Group Control – Publishers can exclude certain IP groups, if so desired.
• Usage Reports – Publisher has access to license usage reports.
• Automate Mandatory and Optional Updates – Publisher can save time by providing mandatory (e.g. patches) and optional updates through the central server. The ByteShield server can even be used to remove ByteShield protection.