Virtual PC 5.0.2 Improves Performance — Connectix has released Virtual PC 5.0.2, a free update to the company’s PC emulation software for both Mac OS 9 and Mac OS X (see "Virtual PC Adds Features, Mac OS X Compatibility" in TidBITS-610). Chief among the improvements are a wide variety of performance enhancements aimed at addressing complaints about glacial performance under Mac OS X. Other areas receiving attention include PPTP virtual private networks when using Shared Networking, better diagnostics, printing to Canon printers, better serial port emulation, enhanced scripting support, and crashes when plugging or unplugging USB devices. Be sure to read the release notes and the Vital Information for Updates 5.0.2 document for details. The update is a 10.5 MB download. [ACE]

<http://www.connectix.com/products/vpc5m.html>

<https://tidbits.com/getbits.acgi?tbart=06668>

<http://www.connectix.com/downloadcenter/updates /updaters_domestic/vpcm502_readme.txt>

<http://www.connectix.com/downloadcenter/updates /updaters_domestic/vpcm502_vital_ information.txt>

<http://www.connectix.com/support/vpcm_ online.html>

EIMS Server 3.1.1 Available — Glenn Anderson has released EIMS 3.1.1, a free update to his Mac OS mail server. (See "Two Mac Mail Servers Go Home Again" in TidBITS-613.) Version 3.1.1 fixes a handful of bugs and includes a workaround for some problems with command pipelining with some other SMTP servers (most notably those at Yahoo). Version 3.1.1 also fixes LDAP authentication problems and authentication issues using NTLM with Microsoft’s Outlook email program, and speeds up processing of the Incoming Mail folder. The updater is a 76K patch to the EIMS 3.1 application. [GD]

<http://www.eudora.co.nz/updates.html>

<https://tidbits.com/getbits.acgi?tbart=06693>

Blue World Releases Lasso Professional 5 — Blue World Communications has released Lasso Professional 5, the latest version of its database middleware for Internet publishing and development (see "WebObjects: WO Is Me, Part 1" in TidBITS-584 for an overview of what programs like Lasso do). Essentially, Lasso sits between a database and a Web server, making information stored in the database accessible via the Web. TidBITS has long used Lasso to make our FileMaker-based article database and TidBITS Talk archive available via the Web.

<http://www.blueworld.com/Lasso5/LassoPro/>

<https://tidbits.com/getbits.acgi?tbart=06465>

<http://www.tidbits.com/search/talk.html>

Lasso Professional 5 adds a number of high-end features, including an integrated version of the open-source MySQL database (plus a database builder for defining and managing your own databases), substantial enhancements to Lasso’s scripting language, completely revised documentation, and extended security and administration tools (including real time monitoring). Lasso Professional 5 can connect to remote MySQL and FileMaker Pro databases, and developers can create connectors for other database systems – connectors already exist for 4D, FrontBase, PrimeBase, and ODBC databases. With these undeniably high-end features comes a high-end price tag: Lasso Professional 5 Standard Edition costs $1,200 and handles an unlimited number of clients (upgrades from the full version of Lasso 3.5 run $600); a separate single-user Developer Edition is available for $350 (and a 30-day evaluation version is available for free). More-expensive "Deluxe" subscriptions add a year of free upgrades and priority technical support. All versions of Lasso come with electronic documentation; printed documentation costs $100 extra and should be available later this month. Lasso Professional 5 supports Apache and WebSTAR Server Suite V under Mac OS X, and IIS under Windows 2000 – users of Mac OS 9 and earlier have to stick with Lasso 3.5. [GD]

<http://www.mysql.org/>

<http://www.filemaker.com/>

<http://www.4d.com/>

<http://www.frontbase.com/>

<http://www.primebase.com/en/>

<http://www.blueworld.com/Lasso5/LassoPro/ evalRequest.lasso>

Argh! Forgot the easyDNS Link! Well now, don’t we feel stupid. Somehow our article on easyDNS ("Make DNS Easy with easyDNS" in TidBITS-619) managed to go through writing, technical editing, staff review, and three copy editing passes without anyone noticing that it didn’t include a link to easyDNS’s Web site. The URL is easy to guess – <http://www.easydns.com/> – but that’s still no excuse. We’ve started the pots of water boiling in preparation for wet noodle lashing for the entire staff. Apologies all around. [ACE]

<https://tidbits.com/getbits.acgi?tbart=06741>

<http://www.easydns.com/>

Font Reserve, from DiamondSoft, is a font management utility to which I’ve been enthusiastically addicted for years. Simply put, it stores your fonts (or aliases to them), helps you explore them, and activates and deactivates them as needed. You may have lots and lots of fonts; yet with Font Reserve you never lose track of them, and your Font menu never gets longer than needed.

<https://tidbits.com/getbits.acgi?tbart=04180>

Font Reserve 3.0 adds support for Mac OS X – though, as with many other old favorites that have entered this brave new world, its abilities don’t quite match those of previous versions. Still, it works well enough that I’m glad to have it.

<http://www.fontreserve.com/products/frmac.html>

Abilities and Disabilities — As before, Font Reserve consists of four chief components: the Vault, the folder where Font Reserve keeps fonts and aliases; Font Reserve Browser, the application in which you add fonts and remove them from the Vault, view fonts, and control the enabling of fonts; Font Reserve Database, the invisible background application that does the real work; and Font Reserve Settings, the application (formerly masquerading as a control panel) that handles preferences for the Font Reserve Database. The Font Reserve Extension no longer exists; the feature added by this extension in version 2, where opening a document would automatically activate any fonts it referred to, doesn’t work in Mac OS X.

A characteristic of Mac OS X, either valuable or a nuisance depending on your perspective, is that fonts can live in four locations: the System’s Fonts folder; the top-level Library’s Fonts folder; your user Library’s Fonts folder; and your Classic System Folder’s Fonts folder. Font Reserve wants to help you straighten out this situation. When you first start up Font Reserve Browser, you’ll choose System Font Handler from the File menu, producing a dialog that shows all the fonts in those four locations. It then offers to let you remove those fonts not required by the system itself and hand control of them over to Font Reserve. This, by the way, does not contradict the multiple-user orientation of Mac OS X: by default, the vault lives in the Shared folder where all users can access it, but you are free to give different users different vaults instead.

A big disappointment is that Font Reserve doesn’t yet handle .dfont and .otf fonts – thus placing about 40 fonts that come with Mac OS X completely out of its control. Despite this limitation in Font Reserve, the System Font Handler offers to remove many of these from their font folders. This makes no sense to me; since you can’t hand these fonts over to Font Reserve, removing them would make them completely inaccessible. To make matters worse, the System Font Handler dialog is confusing; if you’re not careful, you could remove most of these fonts unintentionally. Also, even if Font Reserve can’t enable and disable these fonts, I don’t understand why it can’t list them (for example, in the "System Fonts" set that you can’t modify); this means you can’t use Font Reserve even to find out where such fonts are located, or to discover a duplication between a Helvetica .dfont font and a Helvetica TrueType font. Font Reserve also can’t handle Windows TrueType .ttf fonts; Mac OS X’s acceptance of these is a major benefit, and I use quite a few of them.

On the other hand, a great new feature of Font Reserve 3.0 is Classic Activator. To grasp what it does, you need to understand the default situation: Mac OS X can see Classic fonts but Classic can’t see Mac OS X fonts. Classic Activator, an invisible Classic application that Font Reserve starts automatically whenever Classic launches, essentially reverses this situation: it causes any fonts enabled by Font Reserve in Mac OS X to be enabled under Classic as well. Classic Activator thus eliminates headaches of duplication and worries about whether a Classic application will have access to needed fonts. You’ll gladly let System Font Handler remove most fonts from Classic’s Fonts folder and let Font Reserve manage them instead.

Another upshot of this is that you don’t need the Classic version of Font Reserve 3.0 when booting from Mac OS X, though it’s still necessary for people who regularly boot into Mac OS 9. Unfortunately, the Classic Font Reserve doesn’t automatically sense what operating system was used to start the Mac, so if you want to use it when booting from Mac OS 9 you’ll have to enable it manually, and remember to disable it before booting into Mac OS X again (or use Casady & Greene’s Conflict Catcher 9, which can disable certain extensions when booting in Classic, as opposed to Mac OS 9).

<http://conflictcatcher.com/>

Manual Labor — Font Reserve 3.0’s documentation needs work. The main manual has not been rewritten for Mac OS X at all. The QuickStart Guide has been, but it contains some errors: for example, it refers to the System Font Handler menu item as "Check System Font Folders," and it wrongly tells you to start the Font Reserve Browser right after installation (you must start Font Reserve Settings first). The applications themselves make similar mistakes: the installer talks as if it’s going to install a control panel and an extension even though there are no such things under Mac OS X, and a dialog in Font Reserve Browser refers to Font Reserve Settings as a "control panel" as well.

Rough edges in the interface also remain. The first thing I tried to do with Font Reserve brought up a meaningless error dialog, "ResError() == noErr". The Font Reserve Log file is also full of mysterious error messages about "font references at the top level". Visual glitches are not infrequent. On the whole, one has the sense that this release could have used more polishing – it seems likely that a small bug fix release may arrive shortly.

Upbeat Conclusion — Despite these largely cosmetic annoyances, Font Reserve 3.0 couldn’t have come too soon for me. Even though it can’t manage all my Mac OS X fonts, it organizes TrueType and PostScript fonts just as it used to; this, along with the Classic Activator, is probably worth the price of admission. If you’ve been longing to get more of a handle on the Mac OS X font mess, Font Reserve is worth a look; if you’re a user of version 2 who has upgraded to Mac OS X, you should certainly upgrade to Font Reserve 3.0 as well.

Font Reserve 3.0 for Mac OS X requires a Power Mac G3 or better with 256 MB of RAM. It costs $90; the upgrade is free for purchasers of version 2.6, otherwise $30. A free trial version – Font Reserve 3.0 Lite – supports only 100 fonts, allows only one database, and can’t print specimen books, but it isn’t time-limited and is thus probably sufficient for many users – a generous policy that will no doubt bring numerous additional users to the fold.

<http://www.fontreserve.com/products/trial_ mac.html>

It’s a rare day when a shareware programmer gets firm statistics on the extent of software piracy, but just recently, I got that chance.

You see, the company I work for – Ambrosia Software – writes and publishes shareware – software that encourages users to make lots of copies and share them with friends. It works like this: we write a game or utility and make it available for download and on low-cost CD, so you can install it and try it out for a while – kick the tires and drive it around the block a few times, so to speak. If you like it, you can buy the product; if not, just delete it or pass the CD on to someone else.

<http://www.ambrosiasw.com/>

We make money, and stay in business, by selling software that competes with commercial products for quality and entertainment value, while remaining priced so that it doesn’t stretch the pizza-and-beer budget of the average college student. There’s no bait-and-switch going on: you get a fair chance to try out the product and decide if your $25 could be better spent elsewhere. We think our software is competitive – $25 will cover a burger run and movie ticket for about three hours entertainment, but a good game can entertain you for days or weeks – and we won’t make you watch Jar Jar Binks.

A few years back, Ambrosia’s software was distributed on the honor system. You could download the software and use it forever, scot-free except for the friendly reminders that you had the software for 1,500 days and still hadn’t beaten level 6. This was obviously a big leap of faith on our part, but it built up an almost cult following among Mac users. What we lost in sales, we made up in good will. As a business model, the honor system wasn’t ideal, but it certainly was idealistic, and it helped put Ambrosia’s founder, Andrew Welch, through college and kept Ambrosia’s employees supplied with pizza and beer. (I think there’s a law of conservation at work there.)

This was all fine and good – except that eventually Andrew graduated and everyone else got sick of pizza and beer. Ambrosia grew from an interesting sideline into a full time place of employment. The company became an entity with its own purpose, its own office space, and its own gravitational pull. It also developed an insatiable appetite for cash, because as any MBA will tell you, the lifeblood of business is green.

This period of growth and rampant consumption was constrained only by the limited diet afforded by the generosity and honesty of others. Basically, money was tight. One way we encouraged users to pay for the game Escape Velocity was to introduce the character of Captain Hector, who would remind (and eventually harass) players who were still unregistered after an extended period of play. When we compared sales of Escape Velocity to those our previous products, it became apparent that either pizza and beer had become a lot more expensive or that some people needed an extra nudge – such as from Captain Hector – to do the right thing and pay up.

Locking the Front Door — Shortly after I joined the Ambrosia team, Andrew forwarded me an article that illustrated the benefits of crippling software. In short, the author of a shareware program found that people were five times more likely to register and unlock a crippled version of his software than they were to register software that came fully functional from the outset. It was the final straw in our camel-breaking, decision-making process. We would still make shareware, but we would no longer stand there waiting for handouts on the street – we’d charge admission.

<http://hackvan.com/pub/stig/articles/why-do- people-register-shareware.html>

Let me tell you, we heard about it. Many who had praised us for our idealism were now calling us sellouts. It didn’t matter that little changed for our paying customers – they still got their codes quickly, and had unlimited access to the game – it was the principle of the thing. Okay, it was a little inconvenient if you’d lost your code or wanted to install it on your new Power Mac 7500, but we could resolve that quickly in response to a phone call or an email.

I mean, we like being cool and fair, but even a cult following can get tiresome (cultists don’t shower, they track in mud, and they leave you to pick up the check). Besides, the mantra kept repeating in our heads: five times as many registrations, five times, five times. I don’t think it ever was quite that good for us, but we definitely saw an increase in sales that helped Ambrosia weather some tough times. (No, we never actually ran out of pizza, but there were times when we had to mop up spilled beer with borrowed rolls of toilet paper.) It was a hard decision, but it was a business decision, and it turned out to be the right one.

Time passed. Our staff continued to grow and evolve, and my wife and I begat our son Luke. Nothing brings home how untenable your professional and financial situation is like having a family. When it was just my wife and I, we could fool ourselves into thinking that we were just coed roommates living on a college budget – but no more. Pizza and beer had given way to diapers and life insurance.

Diapers and Life Insurance — So I’m working for this shareware company, and I want to make sure that my job is secure. You have to understand that even a 10 percent variance in Ambrosia’s registrations means that someone may need to start checking the employment classifieds. At the same time, it’s becoming more evident that people aren’t just not paying for our software – they’re actually going out of their way to share license codes with others over the Internet. Some ingenious folks have even reverse-engineered our software and figured out how to generate their own license codes.

We don’t live with our heads in the sand. We knew what was happening. The Internet was the great facilitator of homework assignments and world peace, but it had also become a way for people to get registration codes for any software they wanted. We felt action was required, but we remembered the trauma of our last change in policy when we required people to register the software instead of just asking nicely.

So over the course of numerous lunches (many of which didn’t include pizza or beer, but did involve some yummy sandwiches from Arby’s), we discussed various ways for improving the whole registration system from our standpoint without making the process onerous for our loyal customers. Simplicity was the keyword. The final piece of the technical puzzle fell into place one weekend as I drove through Canada, when I recalled a bit of algebra that would make our license code algorithm quite secure without violating any treaties or munitions bans.

When I finally contacted Andrew, I said to him one word: polynomials.

The blank look on his face continued for a long time as I explained how we could factor the serial numbers, secure our products, and even distribute codes that would expire and stop working when exposed to prolonged sunlight. With his grudging consent, we sketched out and implemented the first pass at the "new Ambrosia registration system."

The fundamental change we made was to build the current date into the license code itself. That timestamp is then used at just one point in the process: it forces the user to activate the product within 30 days, or the code expires and won’t activate anything, Now, and this is important, the timestamp has absolutely no effect on the operation of the software after the code has been entered. Once personalized for the user’s computer, it remains fully functional forever (unless someone wipes the system clean).

Snapz Pro X — The first product to use the new registration system was the latest version of our flagship utility, Snapz Pro X, which started shipping in June of 2001. Over the course of the summer, the system silently and steadfastly worked as intended. Most people didn’t care that the license codes were now 12 digits instead of 8, and registrations continued apace. It wasn’t until September that we received any negative feedback.

<http://www.snapzpro.com/>

You see, in September Apple upgraded Mac OS X to version 10.1, and many people were paranoid enough to reformat and perform a clean install. That meant the data file containing the software registration was lost, forcing most people to reenter their license codes. It also meant that anyone whose serial number was generated before August needed to contact us by phone or email to get an updated code. Of course, these people had paid already, so we renewed their codes quickly and free of charge.

It’s been our experience that people are often too busy or forgetful to store their license codes in a safe place, so it’s inevitable that every major system release is followed by a barrage of requests for missing codes. To handle the tremendous load of people who had misplaced their codes (as well as those who saved them only to find they had expired), we created an email address – <[email protected]> – dedicated to generating new codes. When Joe User entered the expired code, he was prompted to send us an email (it required only a click), and someone would respond to the request as soon as possible. Yet we were constrained by the laws of time, space, and the New York State Department of Labor, so our staff was available to answer requests only during regular business hours.

After several customer complaints, we decided to remedy this problem by automating the process of renewing an expired code. When an expired code is entered for Snapz Pro X, the user is encouraged to request a new license code from our automated server – right then and there! Renewing the code takes only two extra clicks, maybe an extra 30 seconds overall, but it puts the power back in the hands of the user. He can decide when to update his system, install software, and renew his license code at his leisure. Even at midnight just before a four-day weekend.

So you are probably curious about the benefits of expiring codes – why would anyone want this hassle? Let’s look at the three categories. For paying customers with an Internet connection, the extra work is minimal: an email sent to Ambrosia that’s answered within one business day. For those organized enough to save their original codes, there isn’t even a wait: they get the code on the spot. The only inconvenience comes to those people trying to enter a pirated code.

Which brings us back to the question, "How many people are using pirated codes?" The plain fact is that most people are honest unless given a chance to be dishonest. If they stumble across a working license code for software, or do a quick Internet search, then they can quickly enter the code and cover their self-loathing with the adrenaline rush of blasting aliens and squishing fish. Only the most hard-core computer user will try to reverse-engineer the software and crack the copy protection – and I’ll be honest, there’s isn’t much we could do to stop them. Crackers enjoy the challenge itself – the tougher the better – so if they want it badly enough, they’ll find a way.

Historically it’s been difficult to measure software piracy, but our experience is that the vast majority of users lack the time or inclination to modify software to bypass license checks. Here’s the rub: these users might actually buy the software if it weren’t so easy to find pirated codes. Thus, expiring codes are a good way to defeat (or at least hamper) this kind of casual piracy – the serial numbers stored in databases and posted to the Internet are viable only for a short while before they must be renewed.

Ironically, it’s these casual pirates who are helping me measure the impact of piracy on our sales.

You see, to renew a stolen code, Joe User must contact a computer in our office. There’s nothing nefarious about it – he sends us the user name and expired code and gets back a new license code or a suitable error message. We don’t encrypt the data, we don’t grab any personal information, and we don’t even open a connection without explicit permission. But when Joe User clicks that bright shiny Renew button, our server records the product, user name, and the Internet address he came from.

For the first two days after we posted the latest update to Snapz Pro X, our server was busy. Of the 194 different hosts that tried to renew a license code, 107 of them sent in pirated codes (click the URL below to view a screenshot of an actual server log file; the entries highlighted in red are attempts to authenticate pirated license codes). Incredibly, more than 50 percent of the people installing the update entered one or both of the pirated codes we’ve known about for months. Some of these people even tried several different variants on the names when the server refused them access ("maybe I misspelled it"), and one guy got so frustrated he pounded the Renew button over and over every four seconds ("WHY click IS click THIS click NOT click WORKING???") until our server blacklisted him for flooding.

<http://www.tidbits.com/resources/620/pirate_log _red.gif>

You don’t have to remind us that the sample isn’t statistically valid. Nevertheless we think it’s a reasonable approximation of reality – if not a little conservative. It certainly reinforces our perception that casual piracy is both significant and widespread.

Hopes for the Future — Maybe I didn’t look these people in the eye, but they know I’m watching them. They indicated a real interest in our software when they thought they could use it for free, and this gives me hope that some may yet decide that registering is easier and more satisfying than stealing our hard work. If not, then either they were forced to stop using the software or they’ll likely encounter me again, somewhere down the road. Next time, I’ll bring Captain Hector.

I also hope this article explains to our customers (and other computer users out there) the impact that piracy has on small software firms like ours. I hope they can appreciate our decisions regarding the registration system and agree that the extra 30 seconds and two clicks are a minor inconvenience. If everyone pays for the products they like and use, companies like Ambrosia can stay in business and continue making cool products for everyone to enjoy.

Finally, I hope that these changes give me a little more job security, so I can continue doing what I love with some of the coolest folks I’ve ever met. Because I plan on working here as long as I possibly can, making great software and saving enough money so my kids can eventually go to college, where they can enjoy their share of beer and pizza.

[This article is reprinted from the Ambrosia Times with permission. Matt Slot has worked for Ambrosia for nearly five years, but life isn’t just fun and games for the Bitwise Operator. When he’s not calculating polynomials and fighting off pirates, Matt enjoys reading a good book (Terry Pratchett), watching a little television (24), and playing with his two kids (Luke and Kaleigh).]