Point me in the right direction...

What reference material, or tutorial, will take me closer to this:

I want a program to be tied to a specific computer after delivery, by download from a web site. And if the program is e-mailed to another end-user, by the purchaser, it will show a splash screen informing them they don't have the authorization to enable the program.

I would rather read, experiment and learn on my own. But some simple source code would get me thinking in the right direction. Sometimes I don't know, what I don't know... Unless someone pushes me!

Is this possibly done with a third party control???

Thanks for any help you can give me!

[Negative0]

There is no absolute way to do what you are trying to do. You can set some values in the registry and hope the user doesn't find them, but there is no way to make sure that the program does not get distributed to others. People have been trying to do this for years, but all of pirated software is proof that there is no way to make sure that the program is only used on that one machine.

Hope this helps,

[Sam Finch]

I think Kedman Mentioned Some Idea About being able to get The Serial Number off th Hard Drive, In your setup Exe Get This Value (I think Ked knows how), Encrypt it and store it in the registry, then Check this number against The Number in the registry every time the program runs. That Should Do It.

Publishers

The most common distribution model for today's electronic document publishers requires the seller to prepare a unique copy of the file for each buyer. PDF Merchant removes this barrier by enabling publishers to encrypt the content once, distribute it everywhere, and sell the access keys to consumers. Since the keys are tied to the buyer's computer, no one other than the buyer is able to access the document. Someone trying to open a file without a valid key is sent to the seller's Web site to purchase it.

Taken from the Adobe web site... at http://www.adobe.com/products/pdfmerchant/who.html

Adobe is charging $5,000 US Dollars for Adobe PDFMerchant!!!

[tweekmonster]

Screw all that, require that a user has to register with your C0. or if they're just reinstalling, make them confirm thier registration, or the program will uninstall after a certain time. Another thing you can do is to compile each new distributable copy (w/ the version auto-increment set), one-way encrypt it to get a...maybe a hexidecimal value, and make that value a registration code that you distribute to registered customers.

You have to register this idea w/ me or you can't use it.

[kedaman]

Well this code has to be used with my registry module, you can download it from my homepage, well the encryption includes the harddisk serial number but it's not too safe, you can encrypt it further with random seed encryption, i'll soon have my encryption documented and sent to Karl so that he can make it a tip on this site.

'Kedamans Application & Registry & HDD Fingerprint 8 digit Serial Number V 1.0
'Requires Kerareg.bas, scrrun.dll, converters.bas
Sub main()
Dim fso As New filesystemobject, serialNo&, x&, RegSN&, AppSN&, HDDSN&, CompleteSN&
    AppSN& = Val(Left("" & Str2num(Left(App.Title, 4)), 8))
    If Len(KedaReg.RegVal("HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Kedasoft\Apps\Fingerprint\Serial")) Then
    Else
        Randomize Timer
        KedaReg.RegVal("HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Kedasoft\Apps\Fingerprint\Serial") = Int(Rnd * 100000000)
    End If
    RegSN = KedaReg.RegVal("HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Kedasoft\Apps\Fingerprint\Serial")
    Rnd -1
    Randomize fso.GetDrive(Left(App.Path, 1)).SerialNumber
    HDDSN = Int(Rnd * 100000000)
    CompleteSN = RegSN Xor 12345678 Xor HDDSN
    Do
        Select Case InputBox("Enter 8 digit serail number")
            Case "": End
            Case CompleteSN: Exit Do
        End Select
    Loop
    frmmain.Show
    Do While Forms.Count
        DoEvents
    Loop
End Sub