fmTrace 1.87
fmTrace no longer sends your Mac's serial number. Activation and licence checks now use a digest of it, and the check-in moved out of the URL.
A privacy release. Nothing about recording or the viewer changes; what changes is what the plug-in tells us about your machine.
Changed
Your Mac’s serial number no longer leaves your machine. Activation and licence checks used to send the raw
IOPlatformSerialNumber, and we stored it. They now send a SHA-256 digest of it — the hardware ID — and that is what the licensing database is keyed on. Existing records were migrated to the same form, so nothing was left holding a serial.To be precise about what this does and does not buy you: we no longer hold your serial, and a copy of our database is no longer a list of Apple serial numbers. It is not a claim that the value could never be worked back — serials come from a small, structured space. Privacy spells this out.
The licence check-in moved out of the URL. It used to be
GET /v1/license/<your serial>, which put the identifier in the access log of every hop between your Mac and our database. It is now aPOSTwith the identifier in the request body, where it is not logged along the way.The About tab reports the hardware ID. Copy support info now gives you the same 64-character string our records are keyed on, so a support request identifies your machine without anyone quoting a serial number over email.
Notes for existing installations
Your licence keeps working. Licences issued before this build are bound to the raw serial, and this build still accepts them. There is nothing to re-activate and no key to re-enter.
If you are extending or renewing a trial, update to 1.87 first. A licence issued by the current server is bound to the hardware ID, and a plug-in older than 1.87 will not accept it.
Fixed
- Support commands that look a machine up now accept either the hardware ID or a raw serial. Before the fix, a block entered as a serial was recorded but never took effect.
This is the current release.