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I shall be helping to facilitate a course that uses licensed software. The software is somewhat expensive and allows only a limited number of concurrent installations, so what I'll do is to install one instance on an encrypted Virtual Disk with Ubuntu (or some other flavor of linux) installed. Just to lessen the chance of any unnecessary pirating from occurring, I intend to schedule (using cron) a self-destruct script to run immediately after the last day of the course. (Or at the latest, during the first instance of boot up after the last day.)
As much as I love freeware and open-source projects (and crowd sourcing in general), I also have a healthy respect for commercial software and the time and effort that the developers have put into coming up with a good product - I don't want to end up inadvertently contributing to the piracy of their blood, sweat, and tears.
Would appreciate any idea on how to implement this self destruct script on a Linux machine.
2I am not sure why this was downvoted. It is a legitimate question with legitimate value. – BinaryMisfit – 2009-09-14T08:49:45.867
Nice question. Thanks for looking out for software developers. +1 – D'Arvit – 2009-09-14T09:43:54.130
I'm not sure this is going to really further your goals. If they plan to steal the software, they are probably going to grab a copy of the VM during the course. They they'll be able to screw with it at their leisure. They can always boot the VM off of a live-cd in order to examine the thing to figure out what you did. – Michael Kohne – 2009-09-14T13:28:36.620
Thanks to everybody who gave an answer, I'm grateful for the input. :) – techtechmo – 2009-09-15T00:53:33.133