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I have a website where I put music, but I do not want anyone downloading it, or it gets harder and just listening online, like YouTube.
Unfortunately, no. It is a bit like trying to prevent someone from recording an on-air broadcast. When you send video data over the internet to someone's player, they can simply store the information being sent to the player unless you obfuscate it and make it so that the player will only work under certain circumstances and will not share the data. This, by definition, is DRM.
What DRM attempts to do is control the reading of the data entirely, so that it can not be copied. This has varying degrees of success and rarely, if ever, works particularly well. It may keep honest people honest, but if you are sending someone data in a way that they can access it, measures to try to stop them from copying it are... difficult. The most advanced systems use special display drivers and encrypt the data right up to the point it is being displayed on the screen (HDCP), that way other software on the computer can't directly pull the information off the frame buffer being prepared for the screen.
There may be some ways you can mildly obfuscate the access to your video, but ultimately, if you send it in the clear, it is trivial for a knowledgeable viewer to store the datastream. If you use DRM, it is substantially harder, but still likely to be able to be worked around by a dedicated attacker.
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I've been tasked to make a web app that users can drag and drop images to a container, depending on the size of the image, it needs to be able to snap in to place until the container is full.
I'm only a beginner programmer, I'm not too sure how to even begin (I've been "googling" for the last couple of days). I'm only going to host the app on a local server.
Can someone point me in the right direction?
Would Python be the best bet here?
Is a Web App even a good approach to this? I'm only going with a web app, so users can access through localhost.
There's no data stored (yet). Just saving as pdf and printing.
I'm not sure what other features will be added in the future, but would be good to have future proofing.
Thank you in advance!
Dispite of my comment I'll give you some directions...
I'll upset a bunch of people, but I don't think python and web are a good match...
You should study a client-side framework like react, that has NPM modules to easily drag and drop, and to organize children in containers in smart ways.
The PDF part is tricky, theres a thing call ghostscript that can "printscreen" a html rendered page and make pdfs, or some tool that do the same using a headless browser.
Can be done, but won't be trivial...
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I was just thinking of possible ways to go about temporary login systems. I was thinking having a bunch of your standard images with a jumbled up word and users type in the word. I would have a MySQL table where all the photos have a unique id, link and answer-key. that way the webpage just has to choose a random number the GET photo where id = random number. then compare what the user types in to the answer key of the photo.
I'm not currently trying to create this system, it seems very simple and I was just trying to think if it is a secure system that would work.
so my question really is, would there security risks with this, is it robust enough to keep out bots, would my site be destroyed 10 seconds after implementing it.
What you're describing sounds exactly like a CAPTCHA system. These are used widely to prevent bots from issuing automated requests against an interface. The problem is that it's hard to make images that a bot can't just interpret anyway.
Outsmarted: Captcha security not much of a gotcha is an article about some Stanford researchers who developed an image-recognition tool (which is not publicly available) to test captcha implementations:
Decaptcha was able to decode 66 percent of the Captchas used by Visa's Authorize.net payment site, 70 percent of Blizzard Entertainment's Captchas -- the company's games include World of Warcraft and Diablo -- and 25 percent of Wikipedia's. About one-fifth of Digg.com's Captchas and almost that many of CNN.com's were decodable.
The researchers recommended Google's reCAPTCHA as a much more effective system. You can add a reCAPTCHA widget to your own website. This would be safer and easier than trying to develop your own and find it to be too weak.
Short answer: No, it's not secure. If someone really wants to hack your system he can build his own database of image-word.
The key is to invest in security less than it will cost you if your system will be compromise, so I won't invest in a security system too much (it sounds like you don't really have a sensitive information to hide).
BUT, you have an easy & free solution. You can use reCaptcha, not only it's much more secured, you'll help digitize some useful information.
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I am new to IOS development.
I am going to make a Bilingual Dictionary App for IOS. I have two options in front of me for choosing database. SQLlite and MySQL.
If I choose SQLLite then I believe I will have to pack the database with the app. Every user who will use this app the database will be downloaded to his device.
is it a good approach ?
or I should use MySQL ? that stays on the server and app will connect back and forth to get data from it.
Please guide which database should I use for Bilingual Dictionary Mobile app ?
Or If there is anything else I am missing ?
Thanks in advance !!
There are advantages and disadvantages to each, depending on the functionality and user experience you prefer. Unless you plan to update the content frequently, you wouldn't expect it to change constantly, so there isn't an essential need to provide dynamic content. However, hosting the content online can save a lot of space, which for some mobile users may be limited.
However, to me the most important factor to consider is that as a bilingual dictionary, you may have a substantial market of people who are travelling. People who are travelling often don't have data service, and thus must rely on wifi if they want to access this dictionary. As someone who travels with my cellphone, having a dictionary which does not require a data connection is a major functional advantage, and as a designer I would want to provide this functionality, even if just as an option. This may change if you expect that the greater part of your market is not going to use it while travelling.
Agree with Mitch Goshorn's answer. I don't know if you're worrying about the "security" of your database or you just want to save space on device. But I suggest the local one (SQLite). In case that you don't want user to steel your database by hijacking the application folder, you may want to think about encryption. Sorry if this is not considered to be an answer cause I don't have enough reputation to comment.
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This is not something I want to do myself, but it's a question/problem I can't get out of my head.
If you distribute open source-program/classes/libraries, how can you make sure the user has purchased a license? Would it not be very easy for programmers to just remove the license-part of the product and distribute it or use a pirate-version?
Take Invision Power Board for instance. It is written in PHP (i.e completely open and editable) and you have to buy a license to be able to use it. How can they make this limit? Do they authenticate the forum towards their servers? If they do, would it not be easy to simply remove this function?
Another example that I have even more problem understanding is HighCharts, a JS library to draw graphs. They offer a free version with their name on each graph. If you purchase the product, the label is gone. How do they do this?
I know this question is a bit wide and open, but I am just asking for a way to prevent people from simply editing out the license/blockade? What is the essence in this?
There are no license purchases for true "open source" libraries or programs, because the essence of open source is that the code is free and you can build/deploy it yourself at will.
What you're talking about is commercial software that might use a codebase that is easily visible/editable. It's not marketed as "open source," but the source code is easily accessible and potentially easily modified.
There are various mechanisms for obfuscating or hiding the content of the code that some products would choose to use, which make modifying the code more difficult. For example, there are various ways of pre-compiling PHP code rather than distributing the raw files (see this question for examples).
However, the biggest thing that you lose out on with most software of this sort is support. If you're a serious user of a complex piece of software, especially a business user, you would typically want to know that you have a commercial support plan in place for any critical software. The kind of user that would crack/pirate such software (that is, individuals or small companies) aren't likely to be as significant to the vendor.
On the internet there's a further obvious avenue: if a significant public site were using Invision Power Board, they would soon notice and could demand suitable license (or take legal action).
Ultimately, this kind of abuse is very difficult to prevent if someone is determined enough: you are very much at the whim of your users.
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I am developing an open source desktop twitter client. I would like to take advantage on the new xAuth authentication method, however my app is open source which means that if I put the keys directly into the source file, it may be a vulnerability (am I correct? The twitter support guy told me).
On the other hand, putting the key directly into a binary also doesn't make sense. I am writing my application in python, so if I just supply the pyc files, it is one more seconds to get the keys, thanks to the excellent reflection capatibilities of Python. If I create a small .so file with the keys, it is also trivial to obtain the key by looking at the raw binary (keys has fixed length and character set).
What is your opinion? Is it really a secutiry hole to expose the API keys?
Security hole? In broad terms, yes. Realistically though, these aren't nuclear launch codes we're talking about.
About the worst thing that could happen is that someone could take and use your app's keys to do something against Twitter's TOS that will end up getting the keys banned. No user data would be vulnerable since you're not distributing the user tokens (that would be much worse from a security standpoint). Since anyone can register an app in 2 seconds at no cost, the only reason to do that kind of impersonation would be specifically to besmirch the reputation of you or your app.
One thing you could do is leave them out of the source code but make it clear that user's compiling from source need to obtain their own keys and put them in the appropriate place, but leave them in the binary version that you distribute. Not 100% secure, but makes it that little bit harder that will deter a certain number of n'er-do-wells.