Many clever "tricks" have been invented to counter the code plagiarism. I'll
describe some of them which I've learned from the net. Depending on the
value of your script, one or the combination of these methods may be sufficient.
Simple approaches that do not require dedicated program
Insert a full page worth of empty lines so a "view source" window will
be blank initially. However, one can easily scroll down the window to see
the rest of the script.
Launch the application from a "welcome" page. Disable the menu bar so people
can not view the source of current window. However, one can always find
out the URL for the application and by-pass the welcome page. This trick will
not work in Communicator because of accessibility to "view-source" window through
pop-up menu.
Create a hidden frame (width = 1) and load your code into that frame. You'd
have to refer to the functions and variables using frame name. Again, one
can always find out the URL and by-pass the frame window.
Put the code in a server-side include file with "js" extension. Include
the code in the script using <SCRIPT SRC="test.js"> . . . </SCRIPT>.
Though "js" file can be downloaded from server by itself, thus expose the
code.
Write your code in such unorganized way that nobody else can read it. On
how not to do this, please refer a great article from Danny Goodman. The
down-side here is that you may not be able to read it either after a while.
Approaches involved code pre-processing
A simple program can remove all comments and pack the code as a long line.
It'd take a dedicated person of restore the format, but it can be done.
Use escape sequence for string literal. Convert them back on the fly when
executing the script. Combining with code packing, this can be quite effective.
Map the function, method and global / local variable names to some randomly
generate unique tags. Because the keys are not known even to the original
author, it is not possible to revert these randomly generated names to
their original, human readable names.
Page started by The Seeker Page created: 06 November 1999
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