Special Xojo Request - Advice

I sort of asked this question before - here https://forum.xojo.com/57588-special-compilation-request-to-xojo/p1#p467818

But I’d like to ask this. It’s been months since I reported this, and I put in a Feedback thing <https://xojo.com/issue/58654> That’s what Norman advised.

I know I’m no one special, and I’m probably the ONE PERSON in the world with this issue. And I’m patient, I know Xojo has better things to do. But should I just wait, and wait, and wait? This is serious for me - once I can’t copy-protect a Xojo binary because of this, all of a sudden I can’t do anything for my customers. I just have to waste my time hacking until I come up with a binary that actually wraps (if it ever does). And I can’t release a non-protected binary to anyone in the public.

I have the copy-protection company - PACE - willing to work with Xojo on a moments notice, but I can’t get Xojo’s attention apparently by going in the “font door” (Feedback). It just says “Reviewed” and I fear - because it’s just me - it’ll stay there forever.

Any ideas? This is a real serious issue for me.

Apologies for this daft question (based on no knowledge of how it does this…)

If it just needs ‘space’, might you be able to add a large (unused) string constant that could be identified as usable space for PACE?
How does it decide where to write its data?

Write to Geoff or find another solution. And sure you can release a non-copy protected software to the public. Let the app phone home or use a dongle if your software is so special.

Well, I made feedback case 59069 to ask for an option to pass command line options to linker.
That would help to pass such a parameter for padding to the linker.

Yes and No.

That’s kinda relative, I’m pretty certain for you, this is incredibly important and what Xojo have been/are working doesn’t help you solve this matter.

Err… No.[quote=474194:@Garth Hjelte]I have the copy-protection company - PACE - willing to work with Xojo on a moments notice, but I can’t get Xojo’s attention apparently by going in the “font door” (Feedback). It just says “Reviewed” and I fear - because it’s just me - it’ll stay there forever.[/quote]
Your first bet is to talk to someone high up in the company, you need to get their attention. The number of votes doesn’t mean that a case is likely to resolved.

Talk to Geoff or someone high up in the company, or look at alternative copy protection solutions. Pretty much nothing is foolproof, heck App Store apps are cracked within seconds nowadays, now that the crackers know what to look for.

[quote=474195:@Jeff Tullin]Apologies for this daft question (based on no knowledge of how it does this…)
If it just needs ‘space’, might you be able to add a large (unused) string constant that could be identified as usable space for PACE?
How does it decide where to write its data?[/quote]
It’s not daft to ask. I personally have only done some light hacking with the Mach-O executable format (mainly meta data scraping). It’s not difficult to actually inject blank space after the fact, but what is time consuming is to go through the file and find every single offset, and update it. I spent a couple of days experimenting with this and never found them all (even with documentation), which resulted in dead apps.

Where as Xojo actually create Mach-O fies, so their code is responsible for writing the bytecode and the offset. I would imagine that their compiler can easily leave some blank space for the header to be expanded.

If you want to move forwards, I would like @Beatrix Willius recommend you look at alternative protection solutions.

Have you tried solving this yourself by modifying the binary post compilation?
It would mean writing some code to interpret the mach-o header, make the relevant adjustments and write out a new binary.

FYI the URL in question doesnt work as its written - it points to example.com

https://forum.xojo.com/57588-special-compilation-request-to-xojo/p1#p46781

a tool like this one might be something that can help you achieve what you need

https://macholib.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

or the results of googling for https://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=mach-o+command+line+rewrite+mach-o+headers&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8

Looks like it was implemented!?

garth must hold several Pro+ licenses or something :slight_smile:

I certainly don’t deserve special treatment =) But hey, I go back to REALbasic 3. I’m really trying hard not to be whiny.