Cigar wrote: > What I want: > - the simplest thing that could possibly work!
A splash screen that informs the user that it's confidential data, and that unauthorized use will lead to prosecution? Besides, I think it's not the program you need to protect, but the data. Think about that. Who cares about a hardware dongle if they can access the information you're trying to protect in notepad or via ODBC and MS query etc. She's as vulnerable if someone prints out a listing of the clients and takes that, as if someone copies the program. If you have the ability to generate lists of data, you might not want that feature to be accessible to "normal" users. Finally, there's another nice trick that you can do, now that most computers are hooked up on the net. Make the program report when it's being used. The easiest way might be to make it send an email, but I'm not quite sure how you set it up to do that on a windows box without asking the data-thief about email settings. Virus-programs obviously do this, so it can't be too hard. (Actually, to do something in your program that will alert anti-virus programs might be a good protection!) You could also make the program "phone home" via a socket etc, but that requires a server that can be reached on the net. But as others have said, you should make this a client-server app, and make sure the server is physically protected, difficult to break into (a DOS box or an old MAC?) and only serve the right kind of data to an authenticated user connected locally. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
