I forgot to reply to this part, asking about other types of protection.Originally Posted by GPallan
When using CCBill or most other major processors, your passwords are
"encrypted" using an extremely old and weak type of encryption that can
be cracked in seconds. While it doesn't happen as frequently as brute force
attacks and password sharing, when a cracker downloads your whole password
file and posts ALL of your passwords on passwords sites it's a huge pain in
the ass. You have to issue a new password to each and every user. One
of the best ways to prevent that is to upgrade your CCBill script to use
strong encryption. It's a simple upgrade we can do for you for $20.
As far as content theft, put your URL on your content so when/if it's stolen it becomes
free advertising. Images can't really be protected from theft and redistribution on an
internet site. On an INTRAnet site it's possible using some software we wrote for a
major research university many years ago, but it can't be done in a platform independent
manner. Videos can be protected to some extent with DRM, but I don't suggest it.
DRM is not platform independent, it's Windows only. I don't think it's worth giving
up the 10% of your customers who wouldn't be able to play your videos. It also
offers essentially NO protection at all since it can be cracked by any eight year old
using a point and click program like http://www.dvd-tool.com/drm-removal.html .
Both Microsoft's DRM and Apple's were cracked very quickly, I believe one of them
was cracked before it was even officially released, so that tells you how effective that
approach is. Besides that fact that with DRM you have to pay money out of your pocket
every time someone watches one of your videos. If I were running a site I'd prefer to
keep the 10% or so of customers who can't watch DRM "protected" video conveniently
and just put my URL on the videos, then HOPE they get out on the peer to peer
networks to provide free advertising.
All that said, there are certainly some intelligent people who use DRM, and they
may have good reasons for doing so in their own business if they have extremely
unique content or somethign like that. Generally for a porn site, though, I'd say
just put your URL on there and spend the time thinking about marketing rather than
content theft.
After all that I actually have still more to say about the subject, if you can believe that.
In my opinion, while it's good to have some of your images and videos floating around
with your URL on them, ideally you would NOT have someone go in and just download
huge sections of your site and post it somewhere, a practice called "ripping".
Strongbox provides two features that provide some protection against such ripping.
(On the Strongbox site you'll see it called "slurping", the term we used before
"ripping" was invented".) For further protection against ripping you can use our
only other product, Throttlebox, which is designed just for that purpose. If your
site is fairly small at this time the protections built into Strongbox are probably enough,
though.
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