[107712] in Cypherpunks
Re: Intel sets encryption plan
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Sunder)
Thu Jan 21 17:23:49 1999
Date: Thu, 21 Jan 1999 15:24:14 -0500
From: Sunder <sunder@brainlink.com>
To: David Honig <honig@sprynet.com>
CC: "William H. Geiger III" <whgiii@openpgp.net>,
Live & Loud <sandro@pop.hsbcbamerindus.com.br>, cypherpunks@toad.com
Reply-To: Sunder <sunder@brainlink.com>
They're actually in an EEPROM and they can be written over through the use of
the OpenBootProm. There are FAQ's online that tell you what to do if your
NVRAM ever dies due to a battery failure, and how to re-enter your old serial
number in a new NVRAM chip. The NVRAM also holds your workstation's MAC
address. There's nothing to prevent you from using a different MAC or a
different serial number. (Hell, you could probably use some ifconfig option
to set a new MAC anyway.) This is vastly different from Intel's scheme which
is uneditable.
Floating licenses are also popular because when you get a license you're
likely to use it in a network environment and wouldn't necessarily want to be
limited to use of software X on only one workstation, and you wouldn't want to
buy one copy per workstation since you won't be using it 100% of the time
(unless it's server software). So that way you buy as many licenses as you
think you'll have concurrent users. The licese manager is network aware and
keeps track of how many copies are in use at any given point.
David Honig wrote:
> Sun workstations have had motherboard serial no.s in ROMs forever, and
> software has been locked to machines with them for a long time. But this
> makes
> upgrading your machine a pain, another reason floating licenses are popular.
>
>
