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again on piracy: a very smart method to create retro-compatible serials and read them

January 25, 2010 by Andrea D'Intino · 3 Comments 

HELLO WORLD

While looking for a solution to this keygen thingy, I started a thread on Joels on Software. One guy named Rui came out with a really smart concept, so smart and simple that we didn’t think of it first (here) and I tell my ideas about the benefits of such approach here.  Then conversation goes on, I get moved and can’t help showing our love to our community: here. Of course I had to explain the concept using some capitalistic arguments, but I hope that the “love” comes out of my post :mrgreen: :D :oops: :mrgreen: :twisted:. Well, before going further, please have a look at our previous posts on piracy here and here – just want to make sure that we absolutely don’t have bad feelings (nor we are frightened!) by pirates in any way :-)

The previous situation:

Our previous serials looked like this: 1-23T02-123456-7-890. Everything apart from the “T02″ was generated based on purchase reference number. The issue with that Tabbles was reading the whole serial at once, and since we used no trick/obfuscation at all, we knew that it would have been a trivial job for any hacker to reverse-engineer the code and write a keygen…

Our current approach:

Our current serial looks like this: 1-T02-123456-1-111122233334444555566667777888899990000. The main difference is that now Tabbles is reading only a part of it (that is: 1-T02-123456-1-1111) and the logic to read the rest of the serial is not in the code (it was commented out at compiling). Therefore Tabbles will accept a serial number looking like 1-T02-123456-1-111122233334444555566667777888899990000 but will only take into account the first part (1-T02-123456-1-1111) and ignore the following part (22233334444555566667777888899990000).

So here is the trick: assuming that a keygen can only be written by reverse engineering the functions that read the serial inside the app, the first keygen that will developed will only be able to generate the first part of the serial (1-T02-123456-1-1111) and it may as well append some randomly generated numbers afterwards – the current version of Tabbles would work just fine with it. Then, the next day we’d reply by releasing a new version of Tabbles that reads also another little chunk of the serial (say the “2222″) making the previous keygen useless with the current version… :mrgreen:


peace and love,

A.

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Our joomla setup: how a web-dummy did setup a website from scratch

January 11, 2010 by Andrea D'Intino · 8 Comments 

HELLO WORLD,
have been thinking of posting this for a while… the purpose of this post is try and share what I learnt in roughly 8 months moving from 0-level-web-newbie to wannabe-webmaster :-)


Why Joomla?

As I started looking for a CMS I had (for obvious reason) PHP + MySQL + Open Source in mind. Maurizio (my partner in crime) has been working with ASP .NET, and my brother developed his own CMS in PHP (which btw kicks ass…it powers huuuuge sites including one selling plane tickets). Since the website was supposed to be my baby from day 1, then I just thought I needed to find something I could handle 100% by myself (and I can’t code at all…).

The dilemma was initially between Joomla and Drupal. Later on I also discover (or re-discovered) that you can do pretty much everything with Wordpress as well. After spending a few days googling (in february 2009) I made myself an opinion based on rumors, late me summarize:

Joomla
Drupal
  • lots of extensions and skins available
  • no-multisite support
  • used for small sites and e-ecommerces
  • the Administration panel takes a while to figure out
  • developer-friendly and larger development community
  • multisite support
  • (a bit) less extensions available
  • skinning reportedly more difficult
  • no default wysiwyg editor (!)
  • used mainly in large sites

There are several well-done comparison on the web (e.g.: 1,2), what comes out is that both Joomla and Drupal (and Wordpress) can serve your purposes equally well if you have something small in mind and maybe  in that case Joomla is a bit less expensive/time consuming to set-up.
I went for Joomla and still I’m pretty happy about it since whenever I needed some new functionalities, in most cases I did just browse the

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Tabbles got cracked! This time it’s a real patch :-)

December 10, 2009 by Andrea D'Intino · Leave a Comment 

Hello crackers and pirate worldwide,

Tabbles got cracked again - a real crack this time (a dll was patched). I guess it’s pretty uncommon to see a software developer blogging about his software begin cracked, but in reality the thing its quite cool. We’re still at the very beginning of our journey in enterpreneurship, no one knows us and probably some 1000 people have seen Tabbles…seeing that someone out there cares and takes the time to crack it is quite cool…and feels rewarding.

Plus, there are a bunch of case studies out there showing that the more the software gets cracked, the more cash flows in and even that easily crackable softwares win over hard-to-crack competitors.

While I’m writing this I’m happily looking at google analytics and I can see a traffic spike… to us it looks pretty much like free advertisement so we can’t complain at all!

Therefore thanks to uncleua (the cracker) and to the people who posted the release! Looking for the cracked version itself? Google “tabbles crack 1.3.8“… or you could also check this post and if you can lend us a hand we’d be happy to pass you a free license. Uh, don’t forget that Tabbles is free for bloggers! 

P.S.: a friend posted this to Slashdot! Coolness :-)

Peace,

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Tabbles = free for bloggers – and Crowdsourcing

November 24, 2009 by Andrea D'Intino · 10 Comments 

HELLO WORLD

Crowdsourcing

Today my bro posted this link on facebook: 8 ways to kill an idea.

Now, the link itself is funny, being being the curious monkey I am, I couldn’t help from digging into the site…which led me to find the M.Sc. thesis of the blogger and there I found this word I’ve been looking for a long time. This is the definition of crowdsourcing on wikipedia and the article sounds a bit “capitalistic”…

- How do we apply the principle of crowdsourcing?
In our tiny software house we’re bringing users on this forum page.

- Does it work? YES
We had our software localized in 4 languages by our community plus we have a small crew of beta-testers checking and writing on our forum everyday.

- Is it all about the “profit”? maybe…
Well, it’s always about the profit… depends what kind of “profit” one is looking for. At this stage, we’re not yet profitable, but nonetheless we deeply love what we’re doing. When you love something, one of the most rewarding thing is sharing what you love – and this is a very strong motivator. So, in this sense, we get a large  ”profit” from crowdsourcing: we’re building a community, we LOVE THEM and hopefully they love us too.  Probably one day we’ll make some money too, but until then, we’re still getting a lot out of our crowdsourcing.


- the more you give the more you get back?
Once again this let me think of the Balsamiq blog… connecting the dots is so straight-forward this time.

Free for bloggers, do-gooders and charity (link)

Yes, no hidden trick here! :-)
If you belong to any of those categories, just drop us a line!

best,
Andrea

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micro weekly update 09 -> 15 November

November 17, 2009 by Andrea D'Intino · Leave a Comment 

HELLO WORLD.

Guys, probably this week for the first time, we started seeing some real interest in Tabbles, coming from different fronts. It feels good.

Development (1.2.1 is very close) -> look at this
- Recursive untabbling added
- Improved auto-categorization (just “sticky” for the moment)
- “Bleached” file window and graphical tweaks 
- Tracked (and hopefully fixed) 2 very buggy bugs causing to database corruption. We’re probably preventing future bugs too.
- Layed out the basic functionalities of the shared tabbles (we’ll blog something about this later). Basically soon we’ll have something similar to a server-less shared tagging app.  Sounds like sci-fi but apparently it isn’t.

Marketing

– Updating stuff here and there
- Getting ready to a real press launch (yes!). We’re making a list of magazines… wanna see it?
- The wiki is alive!
- Our Combine feature is officially Patent Pending 8-)
- I finally added an OPML with all our feeds.

P.S. another great idea from the balsamiq blog: whoever has a webcam and is willing to tell about how Tabbles is making your life easier, just shoot the video and we’ll add it to our youtube playlist :-D

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