Fab 9 And The Internet

[Axel Slingerland]

Is it mandatory for Fab 9 to be connected to the Internet? If it is, might I ask why? My Internet is shared with all of my roommates and I don't always have that great of a connection. Sometimes I am the only one on it, other times it's like a crowded freeway.

[glenns]

Fab needs the internet connection to connect to their server to get decryption data and make sure your a customer with good account.This happens very fast and doesn't tie up the internet connection i would say a few seconds per disk.

[Axel Slingerland]

That's kind of lame if you ask me. Version 8.x.x.x keeps my license information on my computer. Why doesn't 9.x.x.x do that? What will happen if dvdfab.com disappears? My lifetime license that I paid a lot of money for will be useless. I don't think that's right at all. If I had known that was going to be the deal a few months down the road from the day I bought 8.x.x.x, which was what I wanted in the first place, I would have bought a different program. DVDfab for the most part is a good program. But the "package" is turning out to not be as good of a deal as I originally thought it was.

[Wilson.Wang]

DVDFab9 has the offline mode after register DVDFab(need to connect Internet once again every 30 days). But Internet connection is needed when opening the new protected disc.

Wilson

[Axel Slingerland]

I still say that's lame. I know you think your company will be around forever, but what if it isn't? What if the Internet goes away? What if I can't afford to have the Internet when I get old? There are a lot of reasons not to make a program require the Internet to work. Because of this one requirement you've lost my business. I won't be buying any more licenses for DVDfab. I don't think it's right to sell a lifetime license that may become useless someday.

[StirlingMac]

Offline Mode

Mr Wang

Please can you tell us how to use the OFFLINE mode - or is this the 30 day free trial.
I do not have not purchased any of the Bluray options so do not need to connect to DVDfab for decryption updates.
Having to verify your registration every 30 days is fine - but how do I select this option.

[Axel Slingerland]

I don't have Blu-ray either. And I still would like to know why after version 9.x.x.x was started, that it is now required to access the Internet. Version 8.x.x.x did not require this. Why was this changed?

[GregiBoy]

To check your registration because of too many pirate sites trying to sell DVDFab.

[Axel Slingerland]

If that is the reason, I think they need to find a better way to secure their software because I don't believe that method will work. The key reason being something I have said for many years:

"There is no such thing as a 100% secure website."

Hackers and thieves are everywhere on the Internet, and some of them are really really good. If they want to hack your website, they can and they will. If that were to happen here, then all of our license keys, email addresses, and personal information would be at risk of being stolen.

I had a discussion about website security with my banker one day when he tried to convince me that the bank's website was "100% Secure". And since then whenever this subject comes up I ask people the same questions I asked him:

"Who do you think has the most secure websites in the world?"

His answer was "The US Government." And that is the most logical choice, don't you think? After all, the Internet is what used to be ARPANet, the US Department of Defense computer network. It makes sense that the government, with all of it's vast resources, would be able to prevent hackers from hacking government websites. But thus far that has not happened. Several of the major federal websites have been hacked many times. The White House, the Central Intelligence Agency, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Department Of Justice, the Department of the Interior, the Internal Revenue Service, etc., have all been repeatedly hacked. There have been many reports about this since the Internet was made publicly available in the early 1990's, carried by all the major news services. And that leads up to the next logical question that I asked him...

"If the US Government can't stop hackers with all of their technical expertise, manpower, and resources, what makes you think that you can?"

What could he say? The fact is that all those websites are far more secure than his bank ever thought of being, and he could not dispute the reality of the situation. So I told him "There is no such thing as a 100% Secure website." After thinking about it for a moment or two he had to agree...

So having considered all this that I had not thought of until now, I am even less happy about this situation with DVDfab than I was before. It's not just about my not liking the fact that I have to be online to use Fab 9 anymore. Now my expensive license key and email address can potentially be stolen by hackers, and my privacy is at risk. I am seriously starting to regret the decision to buy this program.

I implore you, Fengtao. Please fix this! Not just for myself, but for every one of your paying customers. If you are half as good of a programmer as I think you are, I know you can come up with a better way.

[90312]

You've expressed your opinion quite completely. Thread closed.

[signals]

Axel
I am not sure where you have been for the past year as this issue has been discussed to death here, but I can assure you we will not spend the coming year doing it again.

The system is necessary to protect the integrity of the license system DVDFab uses and without it, the revenues needed to provide constant decryption updates and new features would not exist. As a customer who has paid for 3 licenses, I can tell you that I do not want anything to happen that would lessen the value of what I purchased and I want licenses to be aggressively protected. If the product doesn't generate the revenue that it should, my licenses and those of every paid customer are devalued if updates are less frequent and prices would have to go up to cover the losses, so there would be fewer new purchasers. A downward spiral that is having my lifetime licenses for lunch.

To accomodate users with poor or unreliable internet connections, the developers added the 'offline mode' which allows full use automatically as long as the user logs in once per month. I think this is the only "fix" you are likely to see on a system that is not really broken. They may find a better system at some point, but until they do this is it.

I tell you and others that want to drag this through the forum again that I will personally delete every thread or post that raises the topic and suspend users that do so repeatedly. You can send an email up the food chain if you still wish to complain.