This is circumventing an effective copy protection measure, a federal crime under 17 U.S.C. section 1201. I see the developer is from Boston, so falls under U.S. jurisdiction and thus has committed a felony under U.S. federal law.
Defeating a 40-year-old copy protection dongle
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Re: Defeating a 40-year-old copy protection dongle
#112>The only evidence for the existence of this company is this record of them exhibiting their wares at SIGGRAPH conferences in the early 1990s, as well as several patents issued to them, relating to software protection. There is also their webpage for ordering PC RPG II. The company address is a residential house. https://web.archive.org/web/20010802153755/http://home.netco...
Apparently there is a Noel Vasquez, now in his late 80s, living at that address. Might be the guy to contact for further information, if he's still around.
Re: Defeating a 40-year-old copy protection dongle
#113Fun hack, sure, but why on earth isn't the focus on porting the accounting data to a new, currently supported accounting system?
Re: Defeating a 40-year-old copy protection dongle
#114Very cool to read an article about windows 95 still being used in production - a nice contrast to the infinite AI hype cycle over everything. Tech may move fast in flashy areas but not in the more "boring" parts of the industry.
Win95 is only 30 years old and runs natively on some modern hardware. Apparently there is important stuff still running in emulated PDP-11s, almost double the age.
Yes certain software for Canadian made nuclear power plants, comes to mind. Was a post on the VCF forums about a job listing that required PDP-11 knowledge.
Re: Defeating a 40-year-old copy protection dongle
#115Is defeating a 40-year-old copy protection mechanism still illegal under Section 1201 of the DMCA, or have they changed the law to make an exception for "very old" software?
Once it hits 70 years from the lifetime of the author (so probably another 80 or 90 years from now) and is in public domain, that might change things since there will no longer be copyright being protected.
In terms of copyright terms, this software is still pretty young, not even halfway to public domain. It's disrespectful to call it "very old".
Re: Defeating a 40-year-old copy protection dongle
#116Earlier quoted context omitted.
If a user gets ongoing value from software it makes sense for them to be willing to pay ongoing for that value. What users need is that the value they get from a product is more than the money they are trading for it. A one off license would be the result of a race to the bottom due to competition.
Because I ate food each day between 1 July 2013 – 31 July 2013, I didn't starve and die. I am receiving ongoing benefit from not being dead. Should I continue paying for all that food?
No, since that food no longer exists. There's nothing the food creator can do. They can't cause it to spoil after you ate it. The massive benefit of not dying allows the price ceiling of food to be very high. But within society there is a lot of competition for nutrients which prevents food from reaching such heights.
Re: Defeating a 40-year-old copy protection dongle
#117Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think it would be fair to keep paying for a car, house, bike, shoes, toilet, and fridge. If I'm still using such great products, why not reward the creators of them. But as a consumer I am also price conscious so if a competitor can offer an equivalent product for cheaper I will go with them.
There are arrangements where you continue to pay for cars and houses without owning them. They're called leases and rental agreements. They typically cost a lot less for the consumer than outright purchases and at the conclusion of the lease/rental term the consumer is free to return the car/house to its owner without compensation for depreciation or wear & tear (though car leases usually impose mileage restrictions…
Rental cars and houses do exist, but you could still have fully owned cars and houses whose doors lock without paying a subscription. It doesn't have to be the full thing either. Certain tiers could disable only air conditioning for example.
Re: Defeating a 40-year-old copy protection dongle
#118Of course it used to be simple in the earlier days. It got way better and fast with HASP and alike in the mid 90’s. I specifically remember software that kept a portion of its data in the dongle memory with good anti-debugging techniques too. But even the hardest protection would take a week to break at most.
Tell that to the crackers who worked for over a year to simulate a social network in order to finally crack the game Red Dead Redemption 2, which had a very custom game protection implemented by Rockstar. Also to this day there is no crack to Diablo 3, famous for being single player but with online verification. You can create very hard to crack protections quite easy if you employ self-modifying code techniques. Do you have any idea how hard is to debug code that overwrites itself in memory and that cannot be patched by modifying the existing code from disk? The reason why this is not more common is because the more iterations you do, the harder is to create those iterations, which means you add a lot of time to create the protection which means that you need to have a finished code, and code is always modified by production team, so managers see this overtime unnecessary.
Re: Defeating a 40-year-old copy protection dongle
#119As a hardware guy I would first start with opening up the dongle, but hey! Still very curious to see whats inside!
Re: Defeating a 40-year-old copy protection dongle
#120As a hardware guy I would first start with opening up the dongle, but hey! Still very curious to see whats inside!
I always thought the internals were encased in potting compound for these things to prevent exactly this scenario (certainly the ones I had for LightWave back in the day were)...