Bug­Id minor update to licensing system

Download the official release .zip here

Unique system ids & licensing server

To check whether you have a valid license to use Bug­Id, it contacts the licensing server and asks it to validate your license. At the same time, it provides the server with a "unique system id" to allow it to track on how many different machines the license is being used. This id is based on a few values that are unique to your machine and user account. A secure hash is calculated based on those values to permanently obfuscate them and this hash is send to the server. This guarantees that the id will be unique for your machine while not providing the server with any information about your machine.

The way the previous release constructed this id turned out not to be as unique as I assumed. This release adds more values that help make the hash more unique, while simultaneously shortening the hash sent to the server. This should prevent collisions in the unique id going forward.

If you have recently received a license file from the server, you will want to switch to the new version before using Bug­Id again to prevent license check failures. If you do not, Bug­Id may register your system with the old id first. After switching to the new version when Bug­Id checks your license again, the server may report that you are running Bug­Id on more systems than your license allows.

Older Python versions

Reports have been coming in that the new version of Bug­Id crashes on older Python version. These older versions do not support the ssl features needed to securely contact the license server and may contain security issues that you will want to avoid. To notify you about this, Bug­Id will now report an error if you attempt to run it using a version of Python before 2.7.14.