Copy protection?
fragmede: Depending on how much 'cost is no object', hardware dongle's (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dongle) are very much still used for copy protection on larger, professional software packages. http://www.safenet-inc.com/ and http://www.marx.com/ are two that I know of.Another method I've seen is to lock the software down to a particular hardware instance. In this method, the customer has to run a program on the computer that the program will be installed to, which grabs all sorts of unique things, like MAC address of any network devices, hard drive serial numbers, etc. The customer then sends the resulting info file back and a unique unlock key is generated.But at the root of it, the protection is still done in software, which is very much still crackable to a skilled enough attacker. But for software you cannot download from the internet without a company provided password, skilled attackers are harder to come by. Compare that to something like winzip which was used as a teaching tool for how to write cracks.