121–130 of 269 posts
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There’s also a valid key pre-brood war that was something like “1234567890123”
Brood war didn't have its own keys. Both 1234567890123 and 3333333333333 worked for StarCraft.
It 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…
cm3hy-26vyw-6jryc-x66gx-jvy2d reporting for duty. Probably did 50-100 OS reinstalls a week so it is burned into memory.
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When I was a kid it was an actual thing to know how to lift postage stamps off of envelopes with rubbing alcohol so they could be reused to mail pirate floppy disks to your friends. Try explaining that to a kid today and they'll think you had a stroke.
Uh, here since forever post office put rubber stamp mark on stamps to prevent that, I'm surprised there is country that doesn't
Interesting! I once lost my original StarCraft CD Key. In a desperate attempt to simply install and play the game I tried converting “StarCraft” to numbers using A1Z26 cipher. Honesty didn’t know it at the time what to call what I was doing. I was just a kid! But, guess what? It worked! It only worked for local play. BattleNet did not see it as a valid key. I like to think some SWE somewhere hid that in there on purp…
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That's why one sets up disk encryption :3
good idea on computers with 100 mhz, an encryption algorithm would've probably not slowed down anything at all, especially not because there was no encryption extension.
I think there was just less focus on security back in those days. We used the same password everywhere, left thumb drives in taxis, used telnet instead of SSH and regular http.
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That's why one sets up disk encryption :3
good idea on computers with 100 mhz, an encryption algorithm would've probably not slowed down anything at all, especially not because there was no encryption extension.
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>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.
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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
Correct. It was only for networking.
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> It's weird reading about my life as if it's history. Everyone was doing it. Here in Latvia that's still somewhat the case, at least according to statistics like these: https://eng.lsm.lv/article/society/society/latvia-leading-in... I've personally seen people who choose to pirate everything from movies, to OSes and IDEs, and have no problem with doing that whatsoever. That said, I can kind of understand it, due to…
I used to copy like crazy but now that I have a good job I pay for most of my software. Mainly because I like to keep my computer clean from malware. If I ever need to run something pirated because it's ridiculously expensive (like Adobe stuff or IDA pro) I run it in a VM or an isolated machine. It's less out of an ethical sense though. Video I still pirate by the terabyte. Most of that comes from large media concern…