It's also the valid key for Office 97
111-1111111 is a valid Windows 95 key (2021) [video]
101–110 of 269 posts
Re: 111-1111111 is a valid Windows 95 key (2021) [video]
#102Earlier quoted context omitted.
And in the Windows 9x days, even if the user did have a password, you could bypass that with the novel method of... pressing Escape.
I always thought the password was for the network shares only. You could perfectly log in without a username and password, except networking partially fails. The login dialog only appeared after installing win9x networking components. A windows password would have been silly, pressing F8 at boot would drop you in msdos
Ah, this reminds me of one time being an amazing average-competence hero.
Labmate: “my Linux install is borked, now my files are all gone” :(
Me: “Fortunately here in 201X (for low values of X) full disk encryption is rare! Let me introduce… another use for the install drive!”
Re: 111-1111111 is a valid Windows 95 key (2021) [video]
#103It may sound strange to people who were born later. But in 90s these mechanisms were in infancy. It was normal for computers to auto-login and have no password at all, processes could each read entire memory on the machine. Software was cracked the moment it came out and it was assumed people bought any software because they feared legal action rather than because they had no other way to get their hands on it -- lat…
Very true, there are a lot of sites out there back in the day that a lot of oldtimers would remember. My personal favourite was astalavista, named in relation to the legit search-site altavista I guess. Actually I take that back, my favourite site was +fravia's reverse engineering pages. Mostly because the legitimate crack-sites were safe, but there was always a risk of downloading something with a virus, or a trojan…
> My personal favourite was astalavista, named in relation to the legit search-site altavista I guess.
The domain box.sk [1] hosted other interesting sites as well.
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20000229151347/http://www.box.sk...
Re: 111-1111111 is a valid Windows 95 key (2021) [video]
#104Re: 111-1111111 is a valid Windows 95 key (2021) [video]
#105It may sound strange to people who were born later. But in 90s these mechanisms were in infancy. It was normal for computers to auto-login and have no password at all, processes could each read entire memory on the machine. Software was cracked the moment it came out and it was assumed people bought any software because they feared legal action rather than because they had no other way to get their hands on it -- lat…
When I was young we had a family friend who regularly flew to Hong Kong for work. Whenever we wanted software that was expensive he would kindly pick it up for us there on one of his business trips. He must have known all the right places to look, because he never let us down! I still have a pirated copy of Macromedia Studio MX in a cupboard somewhere. The idea of installing pirate software you bought at an open market in Hong Kong seems absolutely insane in today's world, but 2002 was a very different time! For anyone wondering, we had dial-up internet back then, so even if I'd known the right places to look for pirated software, there was no way we could reasonably download it! I was using Getright download manager to download things over the course of weeks!
Re: 111-1111111 is a valid Windows 95 key (2021) [video]
#106Earlier quoted context omitted.
>was normal for computers to auto-login and have no password This persisted for longer than it should have on Windows! I remember on Windows XP Home Edition, you could just press Ctrl Alt Delete to drop to the classic winlogon.exe screen and then log in as "Administrator" with no password! By that time, though, Microsoft had implemented product activation. To my knowledge, no one ever cracked the telephone activation…
The activation process relies on public key cryptography. The private keys, held by Microsoft, are amongst their most well-protected assets. Much more so than their source code, for instance, which is developed with the expectation that it will be leaked in part or in whole.
For everything up to ~XP era MS software, the private key was cracked years ago. Beginning around Vista they started using a longer key, which AFAIK hasn't been (publicly) cracked yet.
Search for "MSKey README" if you want to read more... but as one interesting datapoint, the computational complexity of finding the private key was 2^31.
Re: 111-1111111 is a valid Windows 95 key (2021) [video]
#107Just a side question.. Did the floppy disk version also call it a CD key?
Re: 111-1111111 is a valid Windows 95 key (2021) [video]
#108Earlier quoted context omitted.
My brother bought CorelDRAW for Win95 and only kept the CD, forgetting how important the paper with the key was. On a reinstall he than entered 11223344556677889900 and it worked. I used that method multiple times as a teen on software from different manufacturers. It worked quite often. Though sometimes you had to play with the numbers at the end. (sometimes 000 other times 011 etc.)
wtf. he entered that number just out of nowhere and it worked? what a wizard!
The way this worked was there's a very large amount of keys accepted by the installer and a very tiny fraction of them are actually issued / valid for online play.
There wasn't that much value in having the installer keys be that narrow; if you have a legal cd it'll have the key printed right on the case (and there's no way to stop sharing). If it's a burned cd either the person who ripped it can just include the key or they can edit the installer itself to accept any key.
Re: 111-1111111 is a valid Windows 95 key (2021) [video]
#109It may sound strange to people who were born later. But in 90s these mechanisms were in infancy. It was normal for computers to auto-login and have no password at all, processes could each read entire memory on the machine. Software was cracked the moment it came out and it was assumed people bought any software because they feared legal action rather than because they had no other way to get their hands on it -- lat…
>was normal for computers to auto-login and have no password This persisted for longer than it should have on Windows! I remember on Windows XP Home Edition, you could just press Ctrl Alt Delete to drop to the classic winlogon.exe screen and then log in as "Administrator" with no password! By that time, though, Microsoft had implemented product activation. To my knowledge, no one ever cracked the telephone activation…
At the very least, no tools were ever made widely available, and don't seem to be even to this day.
That's because discussions around them have been heavily censored by Big Tech in general; but that algorithm has been cracked, purely out of curiosity, in the late 2010s.
Re: 111-1111111 is a valid Windows 95 key (2021) [video]
#110Earlier quoted context omitted.
Prior to W95/NT4 windows didn't even have a license key, scary warning text was the upper limit of enforcement. In some companies part of the IT departments job was to find unlicensed software and delete or pay for it.
Letting people pirate your software early on is a valid business strategy. Enterprise users pay, students/hobbyists find a simple crack. Once those students enter the workforce they decide the market.
That apparently worked well for Adobe products too.