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Comment by whstl | Hacker News Reader

This is the kind of thing that puts me off the most about those complicated copy protection schemes.

They always rely on kernel extensions, undocumented functionality and hiding a lot of stuff in your hard drive, in locations that are often in your (and Apple's) interest to protect, or even to routinely clean.

I also remember some scandal a couple decades ago with some plugin scanning your /etc/hosts file for their domains. I'm pretty sure there's more egregious stuff going on.

I swore off iLok about a decade ago when I had to go into a studio and couldn't get the goddamn thing to authorise anything and had to spend a few hours in support. On my local machine I could just buy stuff then immediately pirate it for stability, but on a studio that was not possible.

I'm ok with other people using, but I'm tired of those software makers treating my computer as if it was their playground.

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iLok, even when it was just a dongle-only protection, had a 100% chance of crashing and/or not working at all in any live setup I can think of. I learned the hard way about always exporting any stem of any track to lip-sync them as a last resort.

Even to this day I've kept the habit of doing any production or live stuff on a dedicated, offline-only box, and treat it as if it were an analog synth or dsp.

You're totally right. In a studio, a bit of downtime or crashing is not good, but used to be just a "fact of life".

Live? Different matter altogether.

I never did sound live professionally, but I still perform. I don't even have third-party plugins in Mainstage anymore.

The USB licensing dongles used in Cubase [1] were clunky and annoying, but were pretty effective. A lot easier to manage than Flex-LM, assuming you weren't roaming around too much.

[1] https://www.steinberg.net/elicenser/

> I also remember some scandal a couple decades ago with some plugin scanning your /etc/hosts file for their domains

Given that this used to be enough to prevent Adobe CS5 and CS6 from phoning back home and detecting you used a keygen, some sort of "sanity check" against the license server endpoint IPs does make sense.

> … some sort of "sanity check" against the license server endpoint IPs does make sense.

No it doesn’t. If you want to verify the response from a given endpoint, cryptographically sign the response and verify the signature. TLS + hostname verification for the license server is pretty close too (with the proviso that you’re trusting the CA cabal to not let someone else spoof you).

There’s no world where it’s okay for software or even hardware to mess with networking or DNS.

> with the proviso that you’re trusting the CA cabal to not let someone else spoof you

And keep in mind that usually, the user has ultimate control over the "CA cabal". Since the user is the antagonist in the world of DRM, relying only on HTTPS might not be the best idea.

But then again, the whole effort of preventing the user from doing what they want on hardware and an OS they have total control over might not be the best idea in general.

Wholeheartedly agree with you, but I want to check my own understanding, which is: iLok became this weird monopoly because it let all the makers of actual music software stop doing all this weird shit, right? Like hiding registration details on your computer, making hardware dongles, etc.

Back in the ... 1990s, I think? It was like Cubase had their dongle, Studio Vision had... I forget, but something... but eventually they just mostly all went iLok. I dabble in music computer stuff for fun, and I feel like outside of Linux, it has been 15 years or so that it is basically just de facto all-iLok. Even though I am buying from like 10 or more companies.

I feel like we are now to the "inevitable result" part of any company gaining that kind of monopoly.

There's also some companies that moved away from it. I think Waves, and all the companies in Plugin Alliance.

I try to "vote with my wallet" for those cases. Now I'd rather not have something that is cool but requires iLok.

yes, Cubase used a parallel port dongle in the 90s and then in the 2000s a not-iLok USB dongle called eLicenser. They have switched to software activation for their products since 2022.

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