License Auto-Pause

[Amaroq_Starwind]

This is something I just thought about regarding licenses: If none of the devices currently connected to an account are running (as in, specifically turned off), and that happens to be the case for longer than a certain amount of time, should the license automatically pause until one of those devices comes back online? There are probably a lot of checks that could be done to prevent abuse.

[exile360]

Unfortunately it would be easy to abuse this by keeping the licensing servers blocked and updating the databases offline, though if they got tougher on enforcement by requiring frequent check-ins with the licensing server to retain the paid features I suppose that would be OK, but I don't know how all users would feel about that.  It would help a great deal to curb piracy though.

[Amaroq_Starwind]

Ideally speaking... just not having internet access would not be good enough here. Your computer would have to actually be turned off, and if you didn't have internet access it would still have to count the remaining time on your license client-side and whatnot (preferably in a way that couldn't be tampered with).

Determining whether a computer was legitimately turned off during that time is probably tricky to do, but managing whether or not to "pause" or "resume" the license would have to be done entirely on the server's end. (More likely, it would probably be more like turning back the clock on a license, rather than pausing it outright, but what do I know.)

[Amaroq_Starwind]

An unrelated idea that could also curb piracy would be License Communism; It'd be like a crowd-funded system where you could effectively pay to extend the existing licenses of other Malwarebytes users, even if you don't know who they are. If everyone contributes, everyone benefits, and you could pay however much or however little you wanted; suppose you don't want to pay extra and already bought a license for yourself, that's perfectly fine. And really, Malwarebytes wouldn't lose that much money from License Communism either, since it would only even have an effect as long as people voluntarily participated, so Malwarebytes would still be getting the money.

It probably wouldn't work that well in practice however, and while it  hopefully wouldn't require any extra money to run, it would still require money to set up and would effectively be no different from donations... And with the sheer number of existing licensed users, and the fact not all of them are super good-natured, there's a chance that anyone who did pay would probably not be doing a lot good unless the math was intentionally skewed in some fashion, and may as well be trying to pay for everyone's licenses through cryptomining.

[Amaroq_Starwind]

36 minutes ago, HOssam said:

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Since we’re spitting errors at eachother, how’s this one?

16 16 16 16 - ATLAS CONNECTION FORBIDDEN. TRAVELER ENTITY NOT RECOGNIZED.

[exile360]

I don't know about the donation/communal licensing idea.  That could get real complex real fast and I doubt enough people would contribute for it to be worthwhile, but it's not a bad idea for a startup or open source software company for fostering a new/growing community to support and promote their software.

As for the pause/resume thing, that would be tough to determine off vs disconnected from the net.  It might be possible to somehow log hours online while the software runs, but preventing users from tampering with or deleting the data could be difficult if not impossible (even if encrypted, they could just delete it before it syncs with the servers which would mean it would have to fall back to the normal way of handling license duration, which is likely all they'd do anyway).

The only way I could see to really pause a license would be if everyone were forced to use the My.Malwarebytes.com license management system and as long as a license isn't active on any devices, the remaining duration of the license is unaffected, but as soon as any device is activated, the clock starts/resumes on the license term and continues until that device/all devices are deactivated again.