Path: csiph.com!usenet.pasdenom.info!gegeweb.org!eternal-september.org!feeder.eternal-september.org!mx04.eternal-september.org!.POSTED!not-for-mail From: Daniele Futtorovic Newsgroups: comp.lang.java.programmer Subject: Re: Arranging free trials for online services. Date: Tue, 04 Dec 2012 16:02:10 +0100 Organization: A noiseless patient Spider Lines: 32 Message-ID: References: Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Injection-Date: Tue, 4 Dec 2012 15:02:07 +0000 (UTC) Injection-Info: mx04.eternal-september.org; posting-host="25d050c21eff40478dba64da9495aa4c"; logging-data="31406"; mail-complaints-to="abuse@eternal-september.org"; posting-account="U2FsdGVkX1/soN8bB9LKDq61hfHcS6Mk" User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 5.1; rv:12.0) Gecko/20120428 Thunderbird/12.0.1 In-Reply-To: Cancel-Lock: sha1:xK7RWWWCtp4ywsJuz/qOU/hMHss= Xref: csiph.com comp.lang.java.programmer:20091 On 03/12/2012 19:45, Roedy Green allegedly wrote: > 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? I'm not enthused, to say the least, by your suggestion to fix certain people's business model by an invasion of everyone's privacy -- not to mention the inevitable statist structure which maintaining such a scheme would require. -- DF.