321 Studios remotely disables software without a trial

"321 first heard of this Illinois man's alleged activities in court papers related to Paramount Pictures Corporation and Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation v. 321 Studios, a lawsuit filed in the Southern District Court of New York on November 14, 2003. The company took action the same day by remotely de-activating the man's copy of DVDXCOPY XPRESS." Nice ...your guilty until proven innocent...that's 321 Studios being the judge and the jury. I'll be sure to look for your lovely products at my local fry's.

I wonder if a firewall would prevent remote deactivation (i.e. the software doesn't need to reach home to work). I wonder why anyone is using 3-2-1 Studio's software in the first place considering how crippled it is (I don't want to sit through 8-second warnings on my own video backups) when free stuff isn't crippled.

Yet another very strong argument why you should never go online without an active firewall..

So we all use GKnot or DVDShrink and that solves the problem.

Perhaps an open source code program is the best way to prevent this kind of madness. ReJig anyone?

DVDShrink is great, never used GKnot

How can you remotely disable software? That just doesn't work. Or does DVDXCOPY ask permission from the 321 server every time you start the damn thing? Welcome TCPA, today.

After reading about this post on doom9, I've installed an active firewall on my home machine, but I've still got one concern: Even if I disable an application like dvdXcopy (strictly an example -- I use the tools described in the doom9 guides for my backups) from establishing a direct connection outside, could these types of applications use an enabled application to send information out anyways? For example, if an application wants to communicate out, but can't do it directly, it could use an open browser session to post information to an external website, which would by-passing any restrictions on the application itself. I'm not even sure if this is possible, but if it is, then disabling the application from going out directly is a moot point. Scary stuff. I'm just not sure if there really is any sure way of blocking this type of notification. sys49152

@sys49152: Your concern is justified. However, there aren't so many common "enabled programs" to be used by phone-home applicaions. Realistically there is only one: Internet Explorer (plus Windows Explorer, Windows Media Player etc., which incorperates the same libraries as Internet Explorer). So if you completely dump IE and deactivate it in your personal firewall (or set it to "ask me everyt time" or so), you're pretty much on the safe side.

Norton Firewall allows you some pretty good customization. You can tell it not to allow an application to use the Internet by using another application. So, suppose you have set up the firewall to not allow application A to use the Internet. And then application A tries to use application B to access the Internet, application B can be Internet Explorer or any other hidden app. Norton firewall will detect it and ask you if you want app A to use app B to access the Internet and then you can say NO. And that's independent of the fact that you may have already set up app B to be able to access the Internet (when not being used by another app). Also, suppose app A has the bad habit of trying to connect to some Internet address X to validate your app (and, in validating, your app would be cancelled). But suppose also that you need app A to access Internet address Y, that's not related to validation but to a feature of app A. In Norton, you can set up app A to not be able to access the Internet but you can establish a rule telling the firewall that if A wants to connect to Y, it should be allowed. It's a very good way of controlling which application in your computer accesses which Internet address outside your computer.