Poorly designed licensing systems simply send an “OK” or “Not OK” message when fake-activating instead of doing it properly by cryptographically signing the hardware “fingerprint”. This “OK”/“Not OK” behavior is incorrect and depends on how well the licensing can hide the response from the end-user. In other words this is snake oil. If your licensing system fake-activates by hiding an “OK” response then this fake-activation will be copied onto the hundreds or thousands of cloned hard drives. Thus, the company gets thousands of free copies of your software.
Fitting with our philosophy of LimeLM (simplicity for you and your customers) we take an entirely different direction. TurboActivate dynamically chooses the best hardware-ID based on the actual computer hardware. We have researched which are the best components to "lock" the computer to and we don't make you worry about what works and what doesn't.
TA_IsActivated() checks if the user is activated without contacting any servers (no internet connection needed ever). It does this by verifying the cryptographically signed "computer fingerprint".
TA_IsGenuine() contacts the LimeLM servers to see if the user is still activated (checks for revoked product keys, etc.) and whether features have changed. This function requires an active internet connection to succeed (or else you get a TA_E_INET return code).
TA_IsGenuineEx() is a mix of the best parts of TA_IsActivated() and TA_IsGenuine(). In TA_IsGenuineEx() you can specify how often to check with the LimeLM servers and all other times it verifies the activation locally.