[240]License check

Hello Luedi,

many products from different vendors do silent license check over the network.
I think that respecting user privacy
is (or should be) explicitly stated in the license agreement, or in whatever
document you accept before installing / running
ReSharper. After all, this issue is not related to the license check - a
program may communicate via Internet in other
scenarios, e.g. when submitting error reports, and the user may never know
exactly what data get transferred.

Regards,
Dmitry Shaporenkov
JetBrains, Inc
http://www.jetbrains.com
"Develop with pleasure!"

Hello,

i have noticed that R# does a silent license check. As the R# license
is a per user license and it is explicitly allowed to install R# on
different machines i installed my copy on my laptop and my desktop.
Normally i work either on my laptop or on my desktop. Yesterday i had
both machines together in the same network because i wanted to copy
some large data files. As R# 240 was out i installed it on both
machines and run then start Visual Studio on both machines. After a
while R# displays a messagebox "There is another copy of R# installed
in the network with the same license key" and ask me to enter another
license key or disable R#.

It's the good right of Jetbrains to protect their, really excellent,
work and this check is a legal way for me to ensure that a license
isn't shared among different users. But the unexpected behavior of R#
has shaken my confidence in Jetbrains a little bit. As long as the
check is only done in the internal Network it is ok, but how will i
know that Jetbrains doesn't transfer the check result (or other
information) to itself?

In my opinion Jetbrains should have point out this behavior clearly in
the release notes.

Regards
Klaus

Hello Dimitry,

many products from different vendors do silent license check over the
network. I think that respecting user privacy is (or should be)
explicitly stated in the license agreement, or in whatever document you
accept before installing / running
ReSharper. After all, this issue is not related to the license check - a
program may communicate via Internet in other
scenarios, e.g. when submitting error reports, and the user may never
know exactly what data get transferred.

I agree with you and as i mentioned in my posting in general i have no problems
with the check. I only would like to point out that it should explicitly be stated
somewhere.

Regards
Klaus

many products from different vendors do silent license check over the
network.

...which doesn't really say that this is a good practice :-/

just my 0.02$...

Hello Philipp,

may be, but I can't see any alternatives from the technical viewpoint. After
all, it is not reasonable to ask
users whether they want to enable this check :)


Regards,
Dmitry Shaporenkov
JetBrains, Inc
http://www.jetbrains.com
"Develop with pleasure!"

>> many products from different vendors do silent license check over the
>> network.
>>

...which doesn't really say that this is a good practice :-/

just my 0.02$...

Hi Dmitry

After all, it is not reasonable to ask
users whether they want to enable this check :)

Well, I would certainly think of you guys as very nice people :D

Let's hope this does kill the use of Resharper in virtual development environments, either. I for one have my license key entered into several virtual machines at work and home that I use for development, as well as my main PC. Of course, in reality, I can only ever use one instance of Resharper at any given time, but may have several instances of Visual Studio open...

So far I haven't seen any licensing warnings for my usage scenario, but if I do this will certainly be a deal breaker for me.

Thanks Resharper folks for you reasonable consideration!

-Paul

Hi,
I just got curious how this was propagated and it seems that you are using mcast 230.230.230.230/8976-8979 to mcast licenses of which is quite good (lightweight etc...).

Two comments:

• I wonder why you guys using four mcast ports not just one (filtering policy or??)

• It seems that you mcast out my license in plain text key and registered user. I'm a consultant and I often sit on "customer" sites. Thus my license will be mcasted into those networks. It would be wery simple for me to write an app that joins your mcast address/ports and grab licenses wherever I got... I think a better idea would be to have it atleast encrypted with a "static" key that might harden the problem a little (I admin, very little) bit. Prefferable a pre computed hash "like a pseudo license" could be a better idea? (signed by your server when entering the license on installation)...

Cheers,
Mario

Hello Mario,

concerning this your remark - providing a high level of protection definitely
wasn't our goal.
We only intended to rule out the most basic license violation scenarios.
Anyway, thanks for your
suggestion.

Regards,
Dmitry Shaporenkov
JetBrains, Inc
http://www.jetbrains.com
"Develop with pleasure!"

• It seems that you mcast out my license in plain text key and

registered user. I'm a consultant and I often sit on "customer" sites.
Thus my license will be mcasted into those networks. It would be wery
simple for me to write an app that joins your mcast address/ports and
grab licenses wherever I got... I think a better idea would be to have
it atleast encrypted with a "static" key that might harden the problem
a little (I admin, very little) bit. Prefferable a pre computed hash
"like a pseudo license" could be a better idea? (signed by your server
when entering the license on installation)...

Paul wrote:

Let's hope this does kill the use of Resharper in virtual development environments, either. I for one have my license key entered into several virtual machines at work and home that I use for development, as well as my main PC. Of course, in reality, I can only ever use one instance of Resharper at any given time, but may have several instances of Visual Studio open...

Well, I don't want to get into trouble with the R# people, but a
Personal Firewall already solves this issue. I blocked the checks on my
development machines before I even knew it was R#.

Cheers,
Philipp

Hi,

I do understand your oppinion. I'd just want to express a light worry regarding mcasting MY license around my customers network. It would be nice if atleast it was encrypted with a static key or soo...


Many Regards,
Mario

Hello Mario,

I agree with you. Could you please post a request for this problem to our
tracker?


Regards,
Dmitry Shaporenkov
JetBrains, Inc
http://www.jetbrains.com
"Develop with pleasure!"

Hi,

I do understand your oppinion. I'd just want to express a light worry
regarding mcasting MY license around my customers network. It would be
nice if atleast it was encrypted with a static key or soo...

Many Regards,
Mario

Done.

Dmitry,

I'm also going to post a issue to the Tracker for working in the type of environment I described above, just to be sure it is covered under your licensing scheme.

Thanks,
-Paul