5 ms·

Normalizing this would start a game of cat & mouse, no?

by acuozzo 11mo ago

thewebguyd 11mo ago
That, and a lot of false positives. People that run an AD domain for their home lab, people that use apple configurator to create profiles for their own devices (can enable some settings/features that are otherwise gated behind using an MDM profile - like shared iPads), etc. On the flip side, you are also missing all of the solopreneurs using your software for commercial use but obviously aren't spinning up a whole endpoint IT infrastructure to manage their own single device. Or contractors doing BYOD without MDM enrollment. Or small businesses/startups that are mostly BYOD, or don't do any kind of endpoint/device management... So who are you going to catch, really?
- radicaldreamer 11mo ago
  A lot of people use MDM for managing their kids devices (pinning DNS for filtering etc.)
  - SoftTalker 11mo ago
    First time I've seen "a lot of people" used to mean "practically nobody." Just joking, but seriously, I've never heard of anyone doing this, and I think maybe 1 in 100 people would even know that it's possible.
    - radicaldreamer 11mo ago
      I mean, “many” people use SaaS apps which utilize MDM on end user devices, but many parents I know who are in tech roll their own to filter the net for their kids devices and (to a much lesser extent) monitor them proactively.
    - jeroenhd 11mo ago
      I can't say much about the macOS market, but I do know that MDM-style APIs are practically the only way to write a third party control app for mobile devices. With the way Apple is moving macOS more and more towards their control, this may happen on the desktop in the future as well. Schools also tend to use MDMs, but often in combination with Chromebooks which don't typically run third party software anyway.
      - thewebguyd 11mo ago
        > I can't say much about the macOS market, For certain types of apps from the mac app store vs installed directly (mostly VPNs), they also have to use the MDM APIs and install profiles on the device to function. So if a home user, for example, uses Tailscale and installed it via the mac app store, they'd flag as being MDM managed if the software used the code in the article. Fonts on iPad work the same way, the font apps install an MDM profile to install the fonts on the device because Apple gates this behind that for some stupid reason. Like you said, I suspect doing things through configuration/MDM profiles is going to become more and more common on desktop like it has on mobile.
- groby_b 11mo ago
  > People that run an AD domain for their home lab, people that use apple configurator to create profiles for their own devices (can enable some settings/features that are otherwise gated behind using an MDM profile - like shared iPads), etc. That's a tiny minority of your user base. You'll live. They'll live. > So who are you going to catch, really? Enterprises that are big enough to manage their fleet, but small enough to not enforce rules. Which is a good chunk of money.
  - layer8 11mo ago
    The minority are typically also enthusiasts who serve as a multiplier. Alienating them isn’t the best strategy.
    - bootlooped 11mo ago
      Below the code snippets the post states this is not a silver bullet, but only a starting point.
      - layer8 11mo ago
        The code snippets are the easy part here. Too easy to blindly deploy, because it might work for 95% of the cases. You know how these things go: KPM increased, move on to the next thing.
    - groby_b 11mo ago
      If you aim for large-scale Enterprise sales (which you should if you take this step), no, the folks running home labs are not usually the ones making decisions.
__jonas 11mo ago
How so? You think big corps would pressure corporate device management providers into making their services stealthier in order to avoid paying appropriate license fees for software that does this detection? I'd always assume the worst of corporations but I think it's a little far fetched, probably doesn't affect their bottom line to just pay for the software.
ryandrake 11mo ago
Yea, this seems to be sort of analogous to companies who check whether you have a rooted device in order to take some kind of action (usually preventing the software from running). If that's a shitty thing to do, then this is, too. Software should not be in the business of trying to (badly) guess whether the user is the right sort of user, based on inexact signals from the operating system. As others pointed out, the false positives will be annoyed, and the true positives will sidestep your efforts.
p1necone 11mo ago
(Anecdotally) I don't think most big corps using commercial software without a license are doing it intentionally/maliciously at an organizational level. Most of the time it's just individual employees downloading supposedly "free" software without reading the license and not realizing it isn't free for commercial use.
- thewebguyd 11mo ago
  > Most of the time it's just individual employees downloading supposedly "free" software without reading the license and realizing it's not free for commercial use. And chances are, that company's IT department would love to know when that's happening so they can put a stop to it. I work in ops, that's called "shadow IT" and it's a huge problem. It's really prevalent now because most SaaS is marketed toward individuals/small teams rather than marketing toward the business itself, so you get people within an org spinning up trials and free versions, putting company data into it with zero oversight, and often IT doesn't know about it until the quarterly budget review when they find out from accounting that it's been blown on software purchased outside of the IT org, now it's "critical" to operations and we're forced to onboard/support it. Obviously these code snippets won't work for SaaS, but a notification pop-up along the lines of "We see you're on a company device. Please contact your IT administrator to proceed with your free trial" would be great, but would kill a big sales avenue.
  - TZubiri 11mo ago
    It sounds great from a sales and marketing perspective. Instead of convincing the guys with the wallets to shell something out. Just convince the devs to npm install solution, and then send an invoice. Win/win
    - immibis 11mo ago
      Ah, the Oracle and Broadcom model - Java, Virtualbox, VMware, etc. Woe betide thee who doesn't notice the difference between Oracle Java and OpenJDK.
immibis 11mo ago
You can already easily pirate the software by running it on your personal device for free, and the software would never know you were also working for a corporation that was supposed to buy a license.
IshKebab 11mo ago
I don't think so - most organisations and employees don't actively try to violate licenses, but if the path of least resistance is "eh" then individual employees definitely aren't going to bother. I bet there are thousands of people using the free version of MSVC commercially for example. Depending on what action you take with this, I'd say it has a pretty good chance of tipping people into emailing IT to get a license.
whalesalad 11mo ago
I don't think you will ever see this normalized, because it's a really dumb idea. You certainly can observe a correlation between a "corporate customer" and MDM/GPO and use that as a heuristic. But it's like relying on the color of the sky to determine temperature: "Is it grey? Well then it's obviously cold." It's a leaky abstraction.

Normalizing this would start a game of cat & mouse, no?

by acuozzo 11mo ago

Normalizing this would start a game of cat & mouse, no?

That, and a lot of false positives. People that run an AD domain for their home lab, people that use apple configurator to create profiles for their own devices (can enable some settings/features that are otherwise gated behind using an MDM profile - like shared iPads), etc. On the flip side, you are also missing all of the solopreneurs using your software for commercial use but obviously aren't spinning up a whole endpoint IT infrastructure to manage their own single device. Or contractors doing BYOD without MDM enrollment. Or small businesses/startups that are mostly BYOD, or don't do any kind of endpoint/device management... So who are you going to catch, really?

radicaldreamer 11mo ago
A lot of people use MDM for managing their kids devices (pinning DNS for filtering etc.)
- SoftTalker 11mo ago
  First time I've seen "a lot of people" used to mean "practically nobody." Just joking, but seriously, I've never heard of anyone doing this, and I think maybe 1 in 100 people would even know that it's possible.
  - radicaldreamer 11mo ago
    I mean, “many” people use SaaS apps which utilize MDM on end user devices, but many parents I know who are in tech roll their own to filter the net for their kids devices and (to a much lesser extent) monitor them proactively.
  - jeroenhd 11mo ago
    I can't say much about the macOS market, but I do know that MDM-style APIs are practically the only way to write a third party control app for mobile devices. With the way Apple is moving macOS more and more towards their control, this may happen on the desktop in the future as well. Schools also tend to use MDMs, but often in combination with Chromebooks which don't typically run third party software anyway.
    - thewebguyd 11mo ago
      > I can't say much about the macOS market, For certain types of apps from the mac app store vs installed directly (mostly VPNs), they also have to use the MDM APIs and install profiles on the device to function. So if a home user, for example, uses Tailscale and installed it via the mac app store, they'd flag as being MDM managed if the software used the code in the article. Fonts on iPad work the same way, the font apps install an MDM profile to install the fonts on the device because Apple gates this behind that for some stupid reason. Like you said, I suspect doing things through configuration/MDM profiles is going to become more and more common on desktop like it has on mobile.
groby_b 11mo ago
> People that run an AD domain for their home lab, people that use apple configurator to create profiles for their own devices (can enable some settings/features that are otherwise gated behind using an MDM profile - like shared iPads), etc. That's a tiny minority of your user base. You'll live. They'll live. > So who are you going to catch, really? Enterprises that are big enough to manage their fleet, but small enough to not enforce rules. Which is a good chunk of money.
- layer8 11mo ago
  The minority are typically also enthusiasts who serve as a multiplier. Alienating them isn’t the best strategy.
  - bootlooped 11mo ago
    Below the code snippets the post states this is not a silver bullet, but only a starting point.
    - layer8 11mo ago
      The code snippets are the easy part here. Too easy to blindly deploy, because it might work for 95% of the cases. You know how these things go: KPM increased, move on to the next thing.
  - groby_b 11mo ago
    If you aim for large-scale Enterprise sales (which you should if you take this step), no, the folks running home labs are not usually the ones making decisions.

__jonas 11mo ago

How so? You think big corps would pressure corporate device management providers into making their services stealthier in order to avoid paying appropriate license fees for software that does this detection? I'd always assume the worst of corporations but I think it's a little far fetched, probably doesn't affect their bottom line to just pay for the software.

ryandrake 11mo ago

Yea, this seems to be sort of analogous to companies who check whether you have a rooted device in order to take some kind of action (usually preventing the software from running). If that's a shitty thing to do, then this is, too. Software should not be in the business of trying to (badly) guess whether the user is the right sort of user, based on inexact signals from the operating system. As others pointed out, the false positives will be annoyed, and the true positives will sidestep your efforts.

p1necone 11mo ago

(Anecdotally) I don't think most big corps using commercial software without a license are doing it intentionally/maliciously at an organizational level. Most of the time it's just individual employees downloading supposedly "free" software without reading the license and not realizing it isn't free for commercial use.

thewebguyd 11mo ago
> Most of the time it's just individual employees downloading supposedly "free" software without reading the license and realizing it's not free for commercial use. And chances are, that company's IT department would love to know when that's happening so they can put a stop to it. I work in ops, that's called "shadow IT" and it's a huge problem. It's really prevalent now because most SaaS is marketed toward individuals/small teams rather than marketing toward the business itself, so you get people within an org spinning up trials and free versions, putting company data into it with zero oversight, and often IT doesn't know about it until the quarterly budget review when they find out from accounting that it's been blown on software purchased outside of the IT org, now it's "critical" to operations and we're forced to onboard/support it. Obviously these code snippets won't work for SaaS, but a notification pop-up along the lines of "We see you're on a company device. Please contact your IT administrator to proceed with your free trial" would be great, but would kill a big sales avenue.
- TZubiri 11mo ago
  It sounds great from a sales and marketing perspective. Instead of convincing the guys with the wallets to shell something out. Just convince the devs to npm install solution, and then send an invoice. Win/win
  - immibis 11mo ago
    Ah, the Oracle and Broadcom model - Java, Virtualbox, VMware, etc. Woe betide thee who doesn't notice the difference between Oracle Java and OpenJDK.

immibis 11mo ago

You can already easily pirate the software by running it on your personal device for free, and the software would never know you were also working for a corporation that was supposed to buy a license.

IshKebab 11mo ago

I don't think so - most organisations and employees don't actively try to violate licenses, but if the path of least resistance is "eh" then individual employees definitely aren't going to bother. I bet there are thousands of people using the free version of MSVC commercially for example. Depending on what action you take with this, I'd say it has a pretty good chance of tipping people into emailing IT to get a license.

whalesalad 11mo ago

I don't think you will ever see this normalized, because it's a really dumb idea. You certainly can observe a correlation between a "corporate customer" and MDM/GPO and use that as a heuristic. But it's like relying on the color of the sky to determine temperature: "Is it grey? Well then it's obviously cold." It's a leaky abstraction.