Software activation is a method to enforce the “one license per PC” policy in mAirList. This is the default method for all mAirList licenses. Optionally, you can obtain SG-Lock or FTDI dongles and use them as a hardware lock instead of software activation.

During startup, mAirList collects information about your computer, e.g. the CPU type, harddisk models and Windows licensing data.

This information is transformed into an encrypted hash code, which we call the Hardware ID. Due to the encryption, no cleartext hardware information be derived from the Hardware ID. Any change in the relevant part of harware configuration will lead to an entirely different Hardware ID.

The algorithm that calculates the Hardware ID has changed multiple times since it was first introduced in mAirList. The current algorithm (as of February 2017) is called XSHWID.