I am upset about this expiration not working.

[FBlanch]

I have looked through previous post and this has caused confusion for many. We spend weeks and months trying to figure it out only to realize it does not work. Like a sick joke. I make video tutorial cd's for Pro Audio recording applications. I wanted to be able to distribute these cd's freely so that potential clients could see my work and then buy if they choose after the cd expires. I have other programs that I can use to encrypt the cd but the end user would have to do a few extra steps intead of just simply inserting the cd in the drive and everything being automatic after that. This is not fair. Why not just remove the expiration option since it does not work so no one else wastes valuable time. Am I wrong for being upset?

FBlanch

[RobertB]

Re: I am upset about this expiration not working.

Dude...get over it...life is not fair...in fact, if you are looking for justice I pity you.

The solution provided in AMS is major bang for the buck. If you cannot or do like the products or service, then move on. Otherwise, grow up and play in the real world. These guys work hard, put out a good and competitively price product, and have good intentions.

Maybe it is time for you to shell out about $1500 for a comparable product.

IMO.

[FBlanch]

Re: I am upset about this expiration not working.

What the heck are you talking about? Who is looking for pity? I"m talking about an Exit door that doesn't open. A Camera that doesn't take pictures. Bottom line: if it doesn't work then don't put it there. And I don't want to hear from someone like you. I want to hear from the company. Either how it can work or why the **** it is there if it doesn't. I'm not trying to be rude but you are way out of line. I don't even think the owner would appreciate your comment. BMW makes beautiful cars and they work hard. But let them put a cd player in a car that doesn't play cd's and see how many people are upset.
If it didn't give an option to expire that would be another thing. But to put something there that does not work is wrong. If you think it is right then you don't run your own company because no one could ever posssibly be successful with your attitude. You offered no solution or valuable response to my situation. SO SILENCE PLEASE!!!!! I would only like to hear either 1) From the team who designed this thing or 2) Someone with a solution or that has experienced my frustration and can relate. AKHacker please DO NOT respond to my post. I have already wasted enough time trying to get the expiration to work. I don't need to waste more time on someone like you who obviously has no understanding of people who work 80 hour work weeks and don't have a minute to waste.

[Bruce]

Re: I am upset about this expiration not working.

Well you could always purchase AutoPlay INSIGHT or mellow out, stop yelling at the board and be patent. You will get no where fast as you can obviously see using us (the board) as a whipping post.
I’m using the expiration part of this program just fine. You can only choose the amount of days you want the CD active up to 999 days.

LOL I doubt you have spent “weeks and months” getting to the bottom of this! I haven’t seen your thread…

Well, hang in there 4.0 is on it’s way!

[Lorne]

Re: I am upset about this expiration not working.

What difficulty are you having with the expiration feature?

Is it that you want the CD to expire, and not just the AutoPlay menu? Unfortunately, AutoPlay 3.0 was not designed for that.

It might help to bear in mind what AutoPlay 3.0 was designed to do: produce AutoPlay front-end menus for your CD-ROMs, to make it easier for end-users to get at the contents.

An AutoPlay front-end menu is a program that launches automatically when a CD is inserted in a drive, assuming that feature hasn't been disabled in Windows. Causing this program to expire after X days, or even on a certain date, won't do anything to protect the rest of the data on the CD.

The expiration feature was designed primarily for users who were developing presentations and mini-applications using AutoPlay Menu Studio. They needed a way to encourage the user to get a new CD when the time-sensitive information on the current CD was no longer relevant. For these users, the menu itself was the product they wanted to protect.

We didn't make the expiration feature do any more than that for a very simple reason: protecting the rest of the data on a CD is very, very difficult--if not impossible.

As I understand it, there is no viable method of copy-protection that can prevent data from being accessed by a determined hacker. Even the most complicated protection scheme can be undone by someone with a copy of SoftICE and enough patience to unravel it. Anything that is encrypted needs to be decrypted before it can be used -- and if your computer is able to decrypt it, then a hacker can simply watch how it is done, one step at a time, to figure it out...or just build some hooks into the decrypting program itself to "borrow" that part of the program to do the decrypting for them.

All that can be done is to make access to data difficult enough that it isn't worth the effort. Which is why AutoPlay Media Studio 4.0 will give you the ability to work with password-protected Zip files, giving you a bit more ability to control user access to the files on the CD.

(There are countless companies that have poured millions of dollars into developing copy protection schemes, some of which ended up being foiled pretty easily. However, I'm told that Zip password protection is fairly difficult to *****.)

But even that won't be a perfect solution; in order to access the files, your menu will have to extract them from the password-protected Zip archive at some point, and a determined thief would be able to get around the protection at that point. But at least you'll be able to make it difficult enough to protect your data from the casual user. To keep the honest people honest, so to speak.

Of course, you could do that right now by including a command-line zip program like pkzip on your CD-ROM, and using it externally. Or by using any one of several dedicated copy-protection systems out there.

Would it be better if we gave our users a false feeling of security by implementing a "solution" claiming to perfectly protect the whole CD, when we know darn well that anyone with enough determination could circumvent it? I sure don't think so.

After all, we're talking about a product whose original intent was to make it easier to get at the contents of a CD...