Path: csiph.com!usenet.pasdenom.info!aioe.org!.POSTED!not-for-mail From: Roedy Green Newsgroups: comp.lang.java.programmer Subject: Arranging free trials for online services. Date: Mon, 03 Dec 2012 10:45:47 -0800 Organization: Canadian Mind Products Lines: 27 Message-ID: Reply-To: Roedy Green NNTP-Posting-Host: K2Qzzs3EAqXk5RLzfhxcSw.user.speranza.aioe.org Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Complaints-To: abuse@aioe.org X-Notice: Filtered by postfilter v. 0.8.2 X-Newsreader: Forte Agent 6.00/32.1186 Xref: csiph.com comp.lang.java.programmer:20074 I was disturbed when a grammar checking online service wanted my credit card before they would even let me see the product. I declined. Then I started to wonder what such a service could to prevent people from getting endless free trials. Software you install can hide something in the registry, but what can online software do? They have used a credit card number, which presumably they can check for validity, and prevent reuse, then issue a login/password for the trial period. It would be nice if people had unique ids. Perhaps someday everyone will get a code-signing cert to use as online ID. You could track IP, but a student at a university plugging in anywhere to a campus net would get a different IP and many students would get the same IP. You could run some JWS signed code to snoop on the CPU ID, but that can be turned off and AMD chips don't have one. Ideas? -- Roedy Green Canadian Mind Products http://mindprod.com Students who hire or con others to do their homework are as foolish as couch potatoes who hire others to go to the gym for them.