The Sheer Joy of 3.10.2
Comments
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I am also guessing for those with super long NA install/scan times - your JSON folder is going to be jammed with hundreds of files - each taking a pile of time to be created, parsed and used for some purpose.
My installed Products Folder contains 628 json entries, all NKS compatible as far as I can tell.
If you feel looking at my NTK Daemon logs would be in any way helpful, just say and I'll PM them to you. 👍️
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It is THIS kind of "can do" attitude that makes this community so amazing and inspiring to be a part of. Thank you, VP!
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Rock on!
VP
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Nice work by @Vocalpoint !
For Mac users, this is the relevant directory: /Users/Shared/Native Instruments/installed_products
And I can confirm that the exact 9 products I see scanned which are not installed or authorised through Native Access have a json file in this directory.
I moved them to a temporary directory and opened Native Access. They were recreated in the installed_products directory.
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You guys made me curious to find out what kind of impact the NTK Daemon really has on a PC system's performance. I'm questioning a long time already why this process needs to continue running in the background at all, even if no NI applications are active, e.g. NA3 has been quit already and there is no need for NI anymore to observe any user activities. In addition, I have opted out from "NI data tracking" a long time ago already, so there should'nt be much going on. At least so I thought first. But here's a graph from my portmaster firewall, proving me wrong:
As you can clearly see, at first there was not much going on after starting up my PC. NTK Daemon was quite idle. Around the "7 mins ago" spot (refer to the graph) I was entering NA3, scrolled around a little bit and left again, as there were no updates available. At that time the NTK daemon had reached its 100% peak of necessary connections to the NI servers. But as you can also see, the number of active connections didn't drop immediately to the initial low level again; instead it stayed at around 25% of the mentioned connection peak while it was still scanning.
I'd say that this behavior is totally unnecessary and could be easily improved by NI. After all, things like those only make people believe in conspiracy theories.
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Great contribution and well done ! 🙂
⭐️Thank you very much for sharing your findings ! ⭐️
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"I'd say that this behavior is totally unnecessary and could be easily improved by NI. After all, things like those only make people believe in conspiracy theories."
While any amount of extra network traffic could be improved - we do need to step back a second once in a while and remember what this NTKDaemon.exe service is really doing - not only is it (clearly after this deep dive) a product audit process to takes stock of what we have (NKS-wise) and use it for (hopefully) useful purposes in our machine environments - this thing is also an anti piracy mechanism and a core licensing component to ensure the software is not being stolen or hacked.
NI won't be divulging any of those inner workings of this thing to us - but at least we know a bit about these super long scan times for some users.
VP
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Thanks for that comprehensive information. I even found two different log files already located inside the NTK subdirectory: daemon.log and daemon.2.log (both around 10MB). And the latest one seems to be growing constantly. There are even entries inside such logs which have been written every second for about 7 hours, for example "No context found for DeploymentID: xxx" etc.
It's really interesting which kind of data are collected by NI and which other products are scanned, even though these installed products are not NI's business. There are even entries included, claiming that a bunch of plugins (or whole bundles) are "installed" but - according to NI's opinion "unowned", because related information couldn't be retrieved by them. ******? Sometimes there are also entries, saying that products have been installed by "likely using a different user account" and so on.
I'm owning each single instrument or plugin that I'm installing. What's is going on here? Is NI trying to accuse users of doing something wrong? That's insane!
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"it's really interesting which kind of data are collected by NI and which other products are scanned, even though these installed products are not NI's business"
The only "business" (logic) I could come up with for these third party plugins that appear in log - are that they are all NKS-compliant. No plugins here on my machine appear in that log that do not meet this criteria.
And I wouldn't read too much into what this log indicates about products that are "unowned" etc. That is most likely this services way of saying it cannot determine actual licensing for these third party items - and why would it be able to anyway?
The actual question I would like answered is NOT IF a plugin is owned/licensed - but why does NTKDaemon care if an NKS compatible plugin is licensed? Again - an NI mystery for sure.
I still see these third party entries as non-threatening since they are VERY specific to NKS compatibility. Which I need to work if I am using NKS hardware and expect my plugins to play nice.
VP
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Nevertheless, it's worrying; and I still believe that processes could be optimized. If the same single line is written to a log file every second for more than 7 hours, I'm really questioning the competence of the guy who has coded that kind of service. This is the most ridiculous thing I have ever seen.
Therefore, I will take additional measures to protect my system even more in the future. Maybe the daemon needs to be started manually whenever NA3 is going to be launched only, otherwise it's no wonder if users report a remarkable loss in their system's performances, long waiting times or even crashes.
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The trouble with most anti piracy measures is that it really inconveniences the legit user, whereas the pirate usually still has a hacked version that ends up being much quicker to load and taking up less system resources.
It’s been like this for decades. I remember buying CD based games a couple of decades ago that would sometimes take up to 2 mins to load, and then you needed the CD in all the time to play, meanwhile a site appeared that while obviously designed to pirate the games, if a legitimate owner ran the patch, game started almost instantly and you could remove the CD straight away.
A two second Google and I found hacked versions of both Kontakt 7 and Guitar rig 7. Which is basically what I’m saying, the pirate will be using those versions with no native access, fast load times etc, while we pay tons and have to put up with all the problems caused by anti piracy software which has zero effect on people obtaining hacked copies
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"A two second Google and I found hacked versions of both Kontakt 7 and Guitar rig 7. Which is basically what I’m saying, the pirate will be using those versions with no native access, fast load times etc, while we pay tons and have to put up with all the problems caused by anti piracy software which has zero effect on people obtaining hacked copies"
True dat. Is what it is - unfortunately.
VP
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What the NTKDaemon service is meant for has been already explained in the past:
"The gist of it is that the functionality was decoupled from the interface, and two separate entities operate the system: one is the new dark-themed Native Access (NA2) interface you see today, the other being the NTK Daemon, responsible for activating, downloading, installing, and managing your products. You can think of it as NA2 being the button and the Daemon the wiring and the cogwheels. This allows us to work in parallel without blocking each other, allowing for swift UI iterations, and installation improvements without blocking all other work from going through."
This excerpt is from the December 2022 Dev Talks: Why We Transformed Native Access.
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One of the reasons I think my start-up times are so atrocious is this licencing questioning, something NI have no justifiable reason to be pursuing, especially with regard to third parties. I think what happens is these licencing queries result in looping unresolved behaviour. It seems to have major difficulties with Blue Cat and UAD.
Regardless of the ethics of NI surreptitiously possibly setting themselves up as software police, the software appears to get it wrong, wrong and wrong. If I was a cynical person, I might think that this is setting up a system for NI finally trying to do an Adobe in the future in spite of all the preceding fiascos..................
Whatever it is, they could do with coming clean about what they think they are up to.
Any of you guys who appear to be far more adept at this stuff than me want to look at my NTK Daemon logs, feel free to ask.
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@Hayo_NI anything to say about all of this?
Is it possible for one time to have users knowing what the softwares you are installing in their computers really doing?
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