Comment Re:This is the future of software (Score 1) 113
Yes but in game consoles, the instructions are copied from ROM and run by the CPU on the console. The idea is to never copy the code to the general purpose CPU. It remains in the chip with the CPU that runs it and there's no interface to the actual code. It's true you can emulate anything, but I think reverse-engineering this could be made difficult enough to be more expensive than it's worth.
Getting the chip right before going into production is something that happens all the time today. This would make distributing patches more difficult. You would have to deliver new hardware. The hardware will have to be much cheaper for this to work anyway.
Dongles weren't effective because the program was copied into memory like any other program and it only asked the dongle for a key at various points during execution. It was easy to change the program at these points to behave as if the dongle was there when it really wasn't. Even if lots of the code lived on the dongle, it still gets copied to the CPU to run. You would just change the program to copy the code from a file instead.
Think of this as a program that runs on a server on the network somewhere and you use a Web browser or some custom client software to use it. You can't get at the code that's running on the server. This is the same thing except you own the server and it's plugged in to your PC. You can't get at the code because the server doesn't serve it up, and grinding the chip open to try and get at it is very difficult.
To get around this system, you would need the skill, time and equipment to copy instructions off of the chip, figure out any other hardware on it and wrap it all in an emulation layer to run on a general purpose PC. Once anyone has done that, the program can be copied with no cost and that's the real hole in this idea.
I still think that there would be a lot of value in making software more like physical property so that, while you could go to the trouble of copying it, like xeroxing an entire book, it's less expensive just to buy it.
Getting the chip right before going into production is something that happens all the time today. This would make distributing patches more difficult. You would have to deliver new hardware. The hardware will have to be much cheaper for this to work anyway.
Dongles weren't effective because the program was copied into memory like any other program and it only asked the dongle for a key at various points during execution. It was easy to change the program at these points to behave as if the dongle was there when it really wasn't. Even if lots of the code lived on the dongle, it still gets copied to the CPU to run. You would just change the program to copy the code from a file instead.
Think of this as a program that runs on a server on the network somewhere and you use a Web browser or some custom client software to use it. You can't get at the code that's running on the server. This is the same thing except you own the server and it's plugged in to your PC. You can't get at the code because the server doesn't serve it up, and grinding the chip open to try and get at it is very difficult.
To get around this system, you would need the skill, time and equipment to copy instructions off of the chip, figure out any other hardware on it and wrap it all in an emulation layer to run on a general purpose PC. Once anyone has done that, the program can be copied with no cost and that's the real hole in this idea.
I still think that there would be a lot of value in making software more like physical property so that, while you could go to the trouble of copying it, like xeroxing an entire book, it's less expensive just to buy it.
