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  . 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…

peace and love,

A.

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:

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 ]]> http://tabbles.net/blog/our-joomla-setup-how-a-web-dummy-did-setup-a-website-from-scratch/feed/ 8 http://tabbles.net/blog/tabbles-got-cracked-this-time-its-a-real-patch/ http://tabbles.net/blog/tabbles-got-cracked-this-time-its-a-real-patch/#comments Thu, 10 Dec 2009 00:16:00 +0000 Andrea http://tabbles.net/blog_wp_/?p=40 Hello crackers and pirate worldwide,

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,

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