Hi,
I'm wondering if there is a way to watermark a nsis installer at the time of download (i.e. through a php script).
More abstractly: We're trying to react at time of installation to how the user got our product to gauge the effectiveness of advertisement campaigns. So this isn't about piracy tracking or something, it doesn't have to be overly secure.
The naive idea would be to have the installer reserve a couple of bytes at a defined offset in the exe. At the time of download the php script would write some identifier at the specified offset which the installer could then access and map back to the advertiser.
The simple alternative would be to put the identifier into the file name but the risk that the user renames the file is high.
I'd appreciate any answers, even if it is "not possible".
Watermarking installer
4 posts
Are you a developer who uses NSIS to distribute your application? Are you a Winamp plug-in developer who wants to use NSIS to distribute your plug-in? Have suggestions for other people like you? This is the place.
Thank you, this works perfectly!
Didn't expect it to be this straight-forward. 🙂
Didn't expect it to be this straight-forward. 🙂
Originally Posted by Tannin View PostThank you, this works perfectly!
Didn't expect it to be this straight-forward. 🙂
Be aware that this is NOT a watermark. It's just some meta-data appended to the installer binary!Originally Posted by dave113 View Postthat is exactly what I need. Thank you!
See here for some basic info on what a "digital watermark" is and how it's different from meta-data:
There exists some approaches on how software watermarking could be realized, such as:
...yet I'm not aware of any approach being widely used in practice 😕
At the same time, audio, video and image watermarks are quite established these days, so maybe you should consider watermarking some of the payload (e.g audio, video or image files) that ships with your installer/application rather than the installer binary itself.