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The cleverest floppy disc protection ever? Western Security Ltd

scarybeastsecurity.blogspot.com

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Re: The cleverest floppy disc protection ever? Western Security Ltd

#131

Post by Springcleaning »

We had to build our own copy protection after dongles were hacked and too fussy. Weak bits were copyable using the CopyIIPC option board.

So what we resorted to is using a needle scratching the inner most tracks of the floppy on random locations. Writing those tracks with a pattern and record where the pattern was broken. While executing the program it did write that track and read that track, the locations where the pattern was broken (two tracks, begin and end) was the key that was used to decrypt some parts of the further into the program.

To my knowledge it was never hacked and every disk was unique, we kept the keys for each customer (was part of the serial) so if it was hacked we could trace it to the leaker.

Re: The cleverest floppy disc protection ever? Western Security Ltd

#132

Post by treesknees »

IIAOPSW wrote: post #109

Way back when monetized flash games were a thing, there was a problem of ad piracy (people who would decompile your game and then upload and monetize it as their own). The conventional wisdom at the time was that piracy could only be delayed, not prevented. The reasoning was that a piracy check has to read the sites URL at some point and the hacker can just search for the only command in all of actionscript which doe…

This reminds me of the write-up I saw about the Spyro games for Playstation. It has a similar result where a copied game would progressively become harder and impossible to beat. They had the same reasoning, most people pirating/patching the game won't play it all the way through before releasing their results.

https://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/131439/keeping_the_pi...

Re: The cleverest floppy disc protection ever? Western Security Ltd

#133

Post by karmakaze »

kgwgk wrote: post #110
karmakaze wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No IBM person would say hard disk, it was always DASD. I suspect that the 'hard' prefix gained usage after the introduction of floppies.

I don't say they were called hard disks. They were called disks (DASD is the whole device, not just the storage disk). And of course they were hard! And then they introduced little disks (a 8-inch floppy was small and light compared to existing disks) and called them diskettes.

Yeah, it's probably relative, I've rarely used disks larger than the 8" floppies so would never call them diskettes, the 5 1/4" were commonly called that in my circles. In IBM circles of the time they'd have a different default scale.

Like I remember being surprised the first time I heard someone refer to AA batteries as the big kind.

Re: The cleverest floppy disc protection ever? Western Security Ltd

#135

Post by kgwgk »

karmakaze wrote: post #133
kgwgk wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't say they were called hard disks. They were called disks (DASD is the whole device, not just the storage disk). And of course they were hard! And then they introduced little disks (a 8-inch floppy was small and light compared to existing disks) and called them diskettes.

Yeah, it's probably relative, I've rarely used disks larger than the 8" floppies so would never call them diskettes, the 5 1/4" were commonly called that in my circles. In IBM circles of the time they'd have a different default scale. Like I remember being surprised the first time I heard someone refer to AA batteries as the big kind.

But you didn't come up with the name Diskette, IBM did when they created the floppy disk :-)

That's highly relevant if the question is "what's the non-'ette' disk referring to".

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