Nice review. I like the fact that you have taken the
time to discuss any shortcomings with the producer and
reported their responses.
So have you tried to crack it? Have you ran filemon and
regmon at the same time you tried or installed a
trial-ware app? If so, could you spot the place where it
stored the # of times the app had ran?
Regardless, these license systems are pretty meaningless
today. with sn.exe being a small tool, crackers ship the
hacked exe with sn.exe and simply register the hacked
exe as an assembly which shouldn't be verified by the
CLR of signature corruption. With sandboxie or even a
VM, trialware is really simple to circumvent.
It's sad really, but at the same time it's good to know
so spending time and/or money on a protection scheme
isn't worth it. It took crack groups 5 years to crack
mine but eventually they did. I worked around xheo in 5
minutes and I didn't even try hard. (I did that to see
if I should use them as a license system. It was too
easy to work around by an office worker so I didn't go
for it and wrote my own).
If it's too hard, people will simply use a stolen CC and
purchase a valid license and distribute that. I'm sure
you've seen the same things happen to typemock as what
happened to our work. Next version will have a simpler
trial scheme, which might be easier to crack, but so be
it. They'll do it anyway eventually, so spending money
on this is really not worth it.