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111-1111111 is a valid Windows 95 key (2021) [video]

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Re: 111-1111111 is a valid Windows 95 key (2021) [video]

#131

Post by l33t233372 »

userbinator wrote: post #109
YPPH wrote: post #15

Earlier 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…

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.

Where?

Re: 111-1111111 is a valid Windows 95 key (2021) [video]

#132

Post by Causality1 »

twawaaay wrote: post #8

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…

Being able to just do anything you want was so incredible, though. For example, the Google Assistant DING is one of the most ear-splittingly obnoxious sounds I've ever heard and there's not a damn thing I can do about it besides stop using Google Assistant. When I had similar problems in the 90s I could just go find the audio file in question and quiet or replace it with whatever I wanted.

Re: 111-1111111 is a valid Windows 95 key (2021) [video]

#133

Post by kdtsh »

SpaceL10n wrote: post #30
twawaaay wrote: post #8

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…

It's weird reading about my life as if it's history. Everyone was doing it. I remember my teachers, friends, and family all giving me pirated software at some point. I remember my friends and I getting excited when someone got a ripped copy of some game and we couldn't wait to burn new CD-ROMs to share. If one of us got our hands on the copy of some game, we all got copies. It was kind of like a free-for-all in the w…

The revelation for me was when a school friend of mine in the early 2000s told me about a site called crack.cd which had serials or keygens for practically any software I wanted. It was a whole new world, I loved it. Only had to nuke my computer once after a keygen turned out to be a virus! (The other occasion on which I lost everything was when I was installing Ubuntu 5.10 ‘Breezy Badger’ for dual booting with Windows on the family computer and accidentally wiped the entire disk instead of just the old Linux partition - that was a bit more awkward because it had all our family photos on it ever since digital cameras started coming out, but luckily I found a CD backup of them all and also tried my hand at downloading and using a cracked file restoration program. Definitely took some time to rebuild trust and explain that I know what I did wrong and wouldn’t do something like that again.)

I had lots of learning experiences with this kind of stuff that I’m very glad I could have in my little years of first being online, when it wasn’t tied to anything really important, it was all just for fun. Everything would be different for me today if I didn’t have the opportunity to play with non-zero but relatively little risk.

Re: 111-1111111 is a valid Windows 95 key (2021) [video]

#134

Post by wkat4242 »

arsome wrote: post #130
wkat4242 wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

If you're pirating IDA Pro, you're probably the type of person who can figure out which cracks are real and which aren't pretty quick.

True yes but a lot of cracks are real and still include malware. And it can even be introduced remotely. A malware downloader is a few lines of code hidden among millions.

Also analyzing malware tends to make one more paranoid. This is definitely a thing too.

And the most powerful features of it like hexrays require cloud cooperation so they don't work :(

I really wish it was affordable for individuals because I would pay for it if I could.

Re: 111-1111111 is a valid Windows 95 key (2021) [video]

#135

Post by jcpham2 »

selcuka wrote: post #103
stevekemp wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Also an astalavista.box.sk user (typo)

Re: 111-1111111 is a valid Windows 95 key (2021) [video]

#136

Post by bouncycastle »

twawaaay wrote: post #8

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…

We also had p2p file sharing before the internet or any networking existed. Files were shared physically, literally from peer to peer. You would meet with your friends and exchange floppies or CDs, take them home, copy and return back. No IP addresses, no VPNs, nobody could take us down. True decentralization.

Re: 111-1111111 is a valid Windows 95 key (2021) [video]

#137

Post by ofalkaed »

This gives me some serious nostalgia for those simple and naive days. Around 95' is when I accomplished my one and only successful attempt at cracking. Some company had their software downloads in password protected StuffIt archives, anyone could download the software but you had to buy it to get the password so you could decompress the archive. I really wanted to use that software and I searched everywhere on the net and on BBSs for that program or the password with no luck, so I set out to crack the archive. I made two archives, one with password protection and one without and then opened them in ResEdit, turns out the only difference between them was that the protected file had a second resource other than the data, delete that extra resource and it became a normal unprotected StuffIt archive.

I shared my findings to the community and within days it was all over the web and on every BBS, people where pretending they were the ones who made the hack, it was everywhere. Within weeks StufIt released a free update to fix this and I felt quite powerful at the effect I had caused. Years later I realized that my crack was banal and probably common knowledge to anyone but an ignorant teenager, most were just smart enough to not share it and ruin a good thing. So I inadvertently made the digital world a safer place.

Edit: thinking on it more, I doubt I was even the first person to share this information, I was just the first person stupid enough to share it on an easy to find warez/cracking site that everyone had access too. I also seem to recall that Stuffit explicitly said that this password protection was not a safe or reliable way to protect your data, if you wanted that you had to upgrade to the paid version. I probably had no real effect on anything and the new password protection StuffIt rolled out was probably already in the works when I showed up.

Re: 111-1111111 is a valid Windows 95 key (2021) [video]

#138

Post by randlet »

ajxs wrote: post #105
twawaaay wrote: post #8

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…

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 mark…

> Getright

That's a name I haven't heard in a long time! It's still available! https://getright.com/

Re: 111-1111111 is a valid Windows 95 key (2021) [video]

#139

Post by shanghaikid »

twawaaay wrote: post #8

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…

In old days, software is not that soft. Floppy disk, CD, DVD are gone now.
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