2 ms·

It's important to remember the context of your employment... "a short term dev contact." You may have great ideas for solving all their problems, but if you hav

It's important to remember the context of your employment... "a short term dev contact." You may have great ideas for solving all their problems, but if you have a short term contract, and then are gone, and you started them on a long journey to rearchitect their entire app, and then the existing employees have to support it. That's not a great situation. If you're hoping that this effort will get you a full time gig, is this a place you want to work long-term having seen what you've seen? More to your question, if you need to sell this to execs, you need to talk in terms of dollars. How much is this change going to cost? How much will it make or save them? What are the risks to the business if it isn't done? The more abstract or hypothetical the risk or financials, the less likely they are to buy what you're selling. Sorry I can't give any specific suggestions, as I'm having trouble conceptualizing what the product is. What is this key you need to protect? A product license key that they want to validate without an internet connection? Is that the goal?

bad_boomerang 1y ago
the context of my employment is actually just intentional noise to avoid doxxing myself. Lets assume that actually I am a full time employee with a very senior role for the sake of argument. Each particular change is minor but taken together they become problematic. Especially the idea that SOLID practices could be avoided under the fear that the product becomes "easier to crack". I mention keys because of suggestions that encryping things in a stand alone, fully offline product achieves anything, given those values will have to be unencrypted on the device that the attacker controls, in order for the values to be useable, thereby rendering it somewhat/entirely pointless. > More to your question, if you need to sell this to execs, you need to talk in terms of dollars. How much is this change going to cost? How much will it make or save them? What are the risks to the business if it isn't done? The more abstract or hypothetical the risk or financials, the less likely they are to buy what you're selling. This is a good argument and is something I want to touch upon. The issue is that the fear is much like how the RIAA and MPAA reacted to the advent of the internet. As we saw then, the person with the fear can invent their own numbers, given its all off-book so its not measurable. I can certainly focus on aspects of the dev cost but I fear it might be challenging to wrap it all up in a convincing fashion when put up against an unmeasurable fear.
- al_borland 1y ago
  It sounds like you’re in a bit of a cat and mouse game now with the attacker. Is there a way to quantify the lost revenue? Is this real or theoretical? Is the fear they have that solid practices would make things easier to crack well founded? If you make the changes you want to make, will it put an end to the cracks, or will you spend a lot of time/money on development costs and end up in the exact same place or worse? What are the risks if you do the client/server thing? Are you going to phone home? What are the risks there? Now if someone is offline they can’t use the software. You now have to maintain a license server until the end of time. If the company goes under, the clients will lose access to the software they paid for. Is that something the clients are OK with? Do your competitors have similar network requirements, or would that be a reason for clients to look elsewhere? You bring up the RIAA and MPAA. These industries had to change their entire business models to adapt to the piracy threats to their businesses. And they didn’t even solve the problem themselves, it took other companies to solve it for them and drag them along, because they were desperate. If that’s the kind of change you’re talking about, the execs have every right to be scared. They have something that works today, even if it’s not perfect, and a new model might not work. If the changes aren’t that extreme, I don’t know that I’d use that analogy. If the execs are desperate, the company is in trouble, and something needs to be done to save it, than maybe it is a good analogy, but the execs seem more scared of change than worried about cracks. Is that the right read? There is also the question of if these cracks actually have an impact on business. Most people I know who download a lot of movies would never pay money for them, even when they are free they don’t watch most of them they download. A download isn’t always a lost sale. Product keys tend to be a lot like door keys, they keep honest people honest. As long as you have enough honest customers, how much money should you spend fighting people who were never going to be customers, no matter the cost? Can some of these cracked versions also lead to future sales? Kids in school may be cracked copies of Adobe software, they learn on it, and then once they have jobs they are customers, because they already know and like the software from the experience on the cracked version. Probably less of an issue now with subscriptions vs how it was 20 years ago, but cracked software can act as trials and a means to lower the risk for future buyers, because they can try before they buy. I’m bouncing all over here, but another thing you might want to explore is fear setting [0]. Outline what the fear is, what’s the worst thing that can happen, and what you can do if those worse case scenarios happen. That could help reduce the unknown and bring logic back into a room that has been run by a fear of the unknown. [0] https://tim.blog/2017/05/15/fear-setting/ https://tim.blog/2017/05/15/fear-setting/

bad_boomerang 1y ago

the context of my employment is actually just intentional noise to avoid doxxing myself. Lets assume that actually I am a full time employee with a very senior role for the sake of argument. Each particular change is minor but taken together they become problematic. Especially the idea that SOLID practices could be avoided under the fear that the product becomes "easier to crack". I mention keys because of suggestions that encryping things in a stand alone, fully offline product achieves anything, given those values will have to be unencrypted on the device that the attacker controls, in order for the values to be useable, thereby rendering it somewhat/entirely pointless. > More to your question, if you need to sell this to execs, you need to talk in terms of dollars. How much is this change going to cost? How much will it make or save them? What are the risks to the business if it isn't done? The more abstract or hypothetical the risk or financials, the less likely they are to buy what you're selling. This is a good argument and is something I want to touch upon. The issue is that the fear is much like how the RIAA and MPAA reacted to the advent of the internet. As we saw then, the person with the fear can invent their own numbers, given its all off-book so its not measurable. I can certainly focus on aspects of the dev cost but I fear it might be challenging to wrap it all up in a convincing fashion when put up against an unmeasurable fear.

al_borland 1y ago
It sounds like you’re in a bit of a cat and mouse game now with the attacker. Is there a way to quantify the lost revenue? Is this real or theoretical? Is the fear they have that solid practices would make things easier to crack well founded? If you make the changes you want to make, will it put an end to the cracks, or will you spend a lot of time/money on development costs and end up in the exact same place or worse? What are the risks if you do the client/server thing? Are you going to phone home? What are the risks there? Now if someone is offline they can’t use the software. You now have to maintain a license server until the end of time. If the company goes under, the clients will lose access to the software they paid for. Is that something the clients are OK with? Do your competitors have similar network requirements, or would that be a reason for clients to look elsewhere? You bring up the RIAA and MPAA. These industries had to change their entire business models to adapt to the piracy threats to their businesses. And they didn’t even solve the problem themselves, it took other companies to solve it for them and drag them along, because they were desperate. If that’s the kind of change you’re talking about, the execs have every right to be scared. They have something that works today, even if it’s not perfect, and a new model might not work. If the changes aren’t that extreme, I don’t know that I’d use that analogy. If the execs are desperate, the company is in trouble, and something needs to be done to save it, than maybe it is a good analogy, but the execs seem more scared of change than worried about cracks. Is that the right read? There is also the question of if these cracks actually have an impact on business. Most people I know who download a lot of movies would never pay money for them, even when they are free they don’t watch most of them they download. A download isn’t always a lost sale. Product keys tend to be a lot like door keys, they keep honest people honest. As long as you have enough honest customers, how much money should you spend fighting people who were never going to be customers, no matter the cost? Can some of these cracked versions also lead to future sales? Kids in school may be cracked copies of Adobe software, they learn on it, and then once they have jobs they are customers, because they already know and like the software from the experience on the cracked version. Probably less of an issue now with subscriptions vs how it was 20 years ago, but cracked software can act as trials and a means to lower the risk for future buyers, because they can try before they buy. I’m bouncing all over here, but another thing you might want to explore is fear setting [0]. Outline what the fear is, what’s the worst thing that can happen, and what you can do if those worse case scenarios happen. That could help reduce the unknown and bring logic back into a room that has been run by a fear of the unknown. [0] https://tim.blog/2017/05/15/fear-setting/ https://tim.blog/2017/05/15/fear-setting/