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So, I have this program. But I fear if I give it to someone, they will give it to their friends and they will give it to their friends et al until 100 people are using this program and I only wanted one or two to.

Is there some method of generating a unique password for each instance of the program, that only I know?

If it has already been asked before, forgive me as I am new to programming and am ignorant of the jargon used.

That being said you should probably start from square one with me. :P

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Software vendors have asked themselves this question for ages. Experience tells us that, if you're program is worth the trouble, somebody will crack it. Take a look at stackoverflow.com/search?q=piracy+is:question. – Dennis Feb 8 at 18:34
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Unless you are selling this software why do you care if people give it to their friends? Furthermore the best way to protect your software is if your software requires a web backend that you have 100% control over. This includes say extending a feature into say a ( Android, iOS, Windows Phone 8 ) version of the application or verify the license for the software which has a response that can't easily be forged, or say some other feature say downloading account data that requires a subscription to access. – Ramhound Feb 8 at 19:01

closed as off topic by Dennis, Tog, techie007, Sathya♦ Feb 8 at 19:09

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2 Answers

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The answer would really depend on if you can modify the source code to the program (or adequately wrap it to secure it from being decrypted). If you have this level of access + Internet access (or physical access to the PC you want it shared with) you could look for unique hooks in the PC (like MAC addresses, hardware configuration and/or other fingerprints) and then produce either a modified binary to only match where those parameters/identifiers match or require they be authenticated against an Internet enabled server you control.

As Dennis said - if someone really wants to get round this, and has good enough technical skills they can, but this knowledge is out of reach of the large majority of people.

If you just want to share your copy of a program you have bought/stolen with someone else who you don't fully trust, and that program consists of more then a small handful of files, the answer is not practically.

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If you don't think it will be cracked, and you can modify the source... you could have it phone home and request a "session" of sorts. Lots of enterprise softwares do this. A corporation is granted unlimited installs but only X instances of the program can run at once.

Of course, you run into issues where your server or their computer cannot connect, etc.

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