7 Protection Against Software Pirates.

Resumé:
The program package is protected by its uniqueness, its complexity, and several measures that make pirating economically unattractive.

There is no absolute protection. Vendors of compiled programs make it a condition in their terms of use that their software may not be reverse engineered. This does not stop pirates from doing just that. JavaScript is a high level programming language interpreted by the browser.

Findfast is based on principles developed in the Sixties by Hans von Muldau, a German engineer who wrote a program that searched files the size of the largest hard disks of that time could store, using an 8-bit PC with a 64 kB CPU, faster than mainframes running conventional programs. Muldau was unable to explain his concept of "information compression" to his peers in the scientific community. The scientific community did not want to know.

This concept is the basis of Findfast. The concept's complexity is the first line of defence against software pirating. As top flight experts failed to understand the principles in spite of Muldau's endeavours to explain, it is unlikely that someone who tries to steal intellectual property without the author's assistance will succeed.

Downloading the entire website is necessary but difficult because the server requires authentication to permit bulk downloading. Passwords can be cracked. It would take an experienced JavaScript programmer several months to understand what 95% of the functions do. This does not mean that the pirate could adapt the program package to some other database; he must understand how some functions without obvious purpose are cause occasional crashes if not adapted to the database.

Some functions even the most intelligent pirate will not understand because they are written solely for the purpose of making life difficult for him. Have a look!

If anyone has written a program in whatever language that can do what Findfast does, it would be too expensive to use it for one website only. It would be offered in the Internet to prospective licensees. No such program was mentioned in any website found. To find them all major search engines were tried with keyword combinations such as
"on-site search engine"
own "search engine"
"search tool?" directories
database search tool
"viewer friendly search"

A great variety of on-site full-text search tools was found, ranging from shareware, free tools financed with pop-ups up to programs offered at 4-digit US$ licence prices.
http://www.searchtools.com/tools/tools.html publishes a comprehensive list of search tools.

Google, Yahoo!, MSN Search, Lycos, Hotbot, alltheweb, AOL UK find one website for "viewer friendly search". No wonder: This is the website where Findfast is implemented. WebCrawler also finds this site plus 3 irrelevant ones.

SmartView by Yahoo! is the only program found that is a step in the direction of Findfast, still in the experimental phase and meant for other purposes.

It seems that in the minds of website designers the search tool is a necessary evil, not worth thinking about it because all competitors use the same clumsy full-text search engines. Or maybe it is believed that full-text search is the only possible method of content management.

8 Findfast is implemented at one website that serves as a reference.
   It is the directory of accommodations in Ireland, mentioned here on
   several pages.

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