- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.ml
- technology@piefed.social
- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.ml
- technology@piefed.social
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I thought it was something like this:
https://oldgames.sk/codewheel/indiana-jones-4This is why all copy protection should be Dial-a-Pirate-based.
I think it was AutoCAD that had the most diabolical dongle of all. Some ancient version of the software would seemingly work without the dongle, leading cheap offices buying less licences than installs and plenty of architects installing them on their home computers. Everything seems to work fine, except every save a tiny fraction of a decimal far far away is off. Way too small for anyone to notice. Until they have been working for weeks and months on a project. And then and only then do they realize that all the lines have been slowly drifting apart.
Lol people believe anything. I would need an actual source before reacting to this story in anyway.
I sincerely hope that that the people who made emotional replies to your story are bots…
Welp, I heard the story back in the mid nineties from someone that worked in an architect office. One save or a few without a dongle makes basically no difference but systematic license abuse will make you have to spend man hours to redraw the entire thing before delivering it to the customer. Considering how absolutely hysterical some corporate anti piracy measures were at the time I would not say it is not unbelievable, this being very early internet era and all.
I recall some other corporate oriented software that would after some time only print blank pages without explanation if it detected a crack, there were a few console games that would corrupt your entire memory card with all your saves from everything, and music software and VSTs that would spread a cracked warez version to “the scene” that would have a trojan do other nasty things to your computer as a pre-emptive revenge.
But you do you and have all the smarts. Who knows, I’m probably AI too.
“Some tiny fraction of a decimal far far away is off”.
“All of the lines are slowly drifting apart”
It sounds incredibly vague and not real.
That is me putting it in embellished words of amusement instead of saying that the software ran numbers through the dongle if it was present so that the logic on the dongle would correct it but if it was not present it would allow the run and save except the altered numbers would have a unnoticeably tiny miscalculation that would accumulate over the numerous edits and saves during the project duration.
Because I assumed that people would put it together themselves. Which apparently most people did. But some people still need everything spelled out for them. Ironically those that credit themselves more intelligent than everybody else.
That’s atrocious. That would mean that even if you had the dongle, a bad connection would just wreck your project without telling you. Nice, Autodesk, how very pro-consumer of you.
Pure evil, and pure genius.
Must have been fun trying to explain that to tech support
I’d imagine they got a lot of furious calls that turned into embarassment fast.
Oh I hated these warts.
All the effort that goes into protecting content and almost none works for a longer period of time.
But it always affects the rightful user (if it gets in the way). Looking at you HDCP, you are the reason for the few seconds delay before the HDMI connection is made.
This takes me back. I worked for a software company a long time ago that used these types of physical dongles and they would serve two purposes. One to prevent the software from running, and also to store data in one or more registers with more detailed license entitlements beyond just will it run. Like how many client connections are allowed, license expiry, etc. There was a switch to USB based dongles at some point and then software licenses often tied to physical attributes of the server that the software was running on.
Physical dongles remained popular with customers for longer than you would expect mostly in my often air gapped previous industry where the ability to rapidly deploy new hardware in the case of a failed server, transferring a dongle based license was a simple matter of plugging the existing dongle into the new server and you were up and running again. Many soft licenses required internet connectivity or required you to revoke the license from the old server and reassign on the new computer taking into account the new hardware identifiers for locking the license down to the specific server.
I can still hear them rattling about in my top work drawer as I opened and closed them.
This accounting firm was actually using a Windows 98 computer (yep, in 2026)
Could have used FreeDOS.
Btw, i have seen a large-ish (for local ratios) furniture vendor doing receipts in a text-mode software back in 2023. Each clerk used it selling furniture.
That would most likely have been a AS/400 iSeries setup. Still in use by some large companies.
Wait until you find out about healthcare. Or banking.
Security by obscurity would have made a lot more sense before global communications allowed people to share the results of poking around like this.
Even after the Internet was invented probably 99% or more of users would have no clue about digging into the systems.
I’ve mentioned this before, but on one of my early contracts I found an ‘encryption’ function with a keyspace of 32… values. I don’t mean 32-bit. The key was prepended as the first byte to the stream, and the decryption function could accept the full 8-bit range.
Fortunately that was replaced by real encryption some time before I left. But I’m pretty sure nobody actually cracked it before then, because I think nobody thought to try it.
I owned one of the nice Microsoft cable free Keyboards in the early 00s.
That is, until I threw it to the garbage, after some tinkerer had a look at the RF protocol and discovered that the entire encryption just consisted of XORing each keystroke with a fixed 8 bit value…That somehow doesn’t surprise me
Security by obscurity would have made a lot more sense before global communications allowed people to share the results of poking around like this.
Bulletin boards existed. Hacker parties existed. You made contacts and kept in touch. You mailed discs to each other.
We communicated before the internet.
That’s true, and I should have been less absolute in my language. However all of those activities were niche and actively scary sounding to the ‘normies’ (and to a lesser extent still are)
I actually did find “warez” on BBSs before I had Internet access. But I really think even finding BBS numbers in the back of a magazine and trying them out put me outside most computer users of the time.
Pretty fascinating! I would’ve expected the dongle to be doing something more complex but, as the author says, it’s possible that these developers underused it.
Many did. One common thing is to store some important data on a dongle.
I remember a game called DJ Max Trilogy that stores your entire save data on it, so even if you bypass the dongle check to get the game to boot, you’d have to rewrite the entire save/load system too.
I’ve seen USB variants for modern software that served the same purpose.
Ah, those…
