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Was there anyway to make this work unless every CD was burned with a different key used to do the encryption?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I guess they could have done a public/private key pair in 1996, but doing that over a phone call was going to be painful. A simple password read over the phone and verified by the software was the best solution at the time. Mind, this was also intended for a world where internet connectivity was not to be expected. The majority of PC owners were not online.
Which is true, so the distribution of the software cracker would have been fairly limited I would have thought.
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The title that made me go out and buy a CD-ROM drive was "Wing Commander III", released during the holidays of 1994, a year and a half before Quake 1. This was peak "Silliwood", when games started to use FMV cut-scenes starring bankable actors like Mark Hamill. Games were still being released for the SNES at this point, so imagine the contrast!
In the age before wikipedia or ubiquitous internet access, it was also pretty amazing to have access to a multimedia enhanced encyclopedia. Storing large amounts of data was still a tricky thing. It would take a few years for CD-R's to arrive, and there would be a plethora of competing technologies like Zip drives. Looking back, it seems like computer technology was moving especially fast in the 90's.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Which is true, so the distribution of the software cracker would have been fairly limited I would have thought.
Sneakernet was common also. Say you have a class of 30 kids, and one of them has access to Usenet to grab qcrack.zip. He'll put it on a floppy disk and share ;)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I guess they could have done a public/private key pair in 1996, but doing that over a phone call was going to be painful. A simple password read over the phone and verified by the software was the best solution at the time. Mind, this was also intended for a world where internet connectivity was not to be expected. The majority of PC owners were not online.
Which is true, so the distribution of the software cracker would have been fairly limited I would have thought.
It’s worth getting the Quake shareware disc for the NIN soundtrack. Official track names are now available following the vinyl release a few years ago. This is the only CD release of the soundtrack. Just don’t forget to skip track 1.
The data track never sounds very good. A little too industrial for my tastes.
The "incredibly expensive Intel Pentium" image link 404s.
While not being familiar with the Windows side of things, I did frequent the a.b.m.a newsgroup being a broke student. It was always impressive to me to see how quickly someone would post a binary before the crack was posted. I remember one app I was very interested in posting on Friday, and the crack available when I checked back on Monday. Even apps that needed a physical dongle for the ADB port were cracked and not just the apps that needed a key typed in to unlock. Later, the apps that would clone a USB dongle came along, and one software company that used USB dongles actually advised using this tool when we started running their software on Blade servers that did not support adding 24 USB devices.
Was there anyway to make this work unless every CD was burned with a different key used to do the encryption?
Maybe have n versions of the CD (maybe 16, or 32), so there are n decryption keys. When the buyer recites the code over the phone, the program run by the salesperson can identify which key is used based on the number. The hacker groups would be a little frustrated trying to find all of the different CDs.