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111-1111111 is a valid Windows 95 key (2021) [video]
181–190 of 269 posts
Re: 111-1111111 is a valid Windows 95 key (2021) [video]
#182It's interesting that Youtube is also recommending this to me today. I wonder what caused this coincidence. Anyone else seeing this on their Youtube feed?
I suppose YouTube saw the spike in the video's popularity, caused by this HN post, and started recommending it to people who might be interested in it.
Re: 111-1111111 is a valid Windows 95 key (2021) [video]
#183It 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…
Remember Windows 95/98 and the shared-by-default $C network mount that was read/write to anyone? Had a lot of fun with that one in the dorms.
This is how NESTicle source code was stolen https://patpend.net/articles/zd/article2.html
> How did he steal the source code? Sardu was running Windows 95 at the time. He made the mistake of leaving drive sharing on
Re: 111-1111111 is a valid Windows 95 key (2021) [video]
#184It 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…
This. As a teenager those days, I never bought software and always cracked them. I grew up learning to use Photoshop, Visual Studio, 3ds max etc. cracked.
Now I'm an adult who learned some of those tools profesionally, and paying for them (or services around some of them) legally.
If I didn't use them cracked in my teenage years, perhaps I would have never become a paying user in the first place.
Re: 111-1111111 is a valid Windows 95 key (2021) [video]
#185Earlier quoted context omitted.
I remember the days of cracked software on Apple II systems. The crackers would add custom splash screens advertising themselves. http://artscene.textfiles.com/intros/APPLEII/
Keygen music is another similar relic. They are chiptunes included in cracked software. Their names were often just whatever software they were cracking. I like Adobe Create Suite 4 here https://youtube.com/watch?v=FVX6t-ivMfE&feature=share
I sometimes just opened keygens after I was done cracking, just to listen to it more.
Re: 111-1111111 is a valid Windows 95 key (2021) [video]
#186Earlier quoted context omitted.
Given the length of Windows serial keys is not that long, why couldn't one extract the check function and run an iteration attack to generate valid keys? Edit: @ale42: makes sense, thanks for putting this one to rest. 36^25 is approximately 8 x 10^38 which is a really, really big number.
Not if their cryptography is done properly. Cryptosystems are designed to maintain their security even if the complete algorithm is known to the adversary. You'll commonly see this phrased as "don't rely on security through obscurity".
> don't rely on security through obscurity
Which doesn't mean you shouldn't also use obscurity. NIST recommends it [1], and the industry widely uses it. In practice "don't rely on obscurity" usually means "have enough security besides obscurity to give you a grace period to switch out the obscurity". That's for whole systems, you might get away with people knowing you use standardized primitives like AES.
[1]: https://csrc.nist.gov/news/2021/revised-guidance-for-develop...
Re: 111-1111111 is a valid Windows 95 key (2021) [video]
#187It 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…
> software did not have ability to phone home This is the main reason for the simplicity of key checks. If you copied someone elses windows installation (cd burners were very expensive, but a floppy version existed), you'd also copy the serial number, and just use that. Even if the serial verification algorithm was complicated, noone would really have to crack it at all, because they'd just use the original serial fo…
> (cd burners were very expensive, but a floppy version existed)
You just borrowed the install CD. The only time you needed it was for the install and (sometimes) installing drivers after installing new hardware.
You could actually copy one of the folders from the windows CD onto your HDD and use that instead of the install CD for device drivers. From memory, you could actually complete a full install from a folder copied onto the HDD.
Re: 111-1111111 is a valid Windows 95 key (2021) [video]
#188It 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…
Your post really brought back memories of softice and w32dasm. Incidentally one of the websites from that era (gamecopyworld) is still alive! Mind blown.
Re: 111-1111111 is a valid Windows 95 key (2021) [video]
#189Reading all these comments about people mailing floppies and cd's, it's glad I was also part of that scene too - in trading fansubbed anime titles, and trading for more copies to complete strangers. Had a geocities page, and even did transcoding with tmpgenc - back when k-lite codec packs were popular, pre VLC days.
Just can't believe with the right keywords, you can still see these old posts on the internet - 2002/2003 was truly different and I bet pre-2000 even wild.
Re: 111-1111111 is a valid Windows 95 key (2021) [video]
#190I recently wanted to use a program for a short amount of time for personal use, but the trial period was only 7 days. I used strace to find that it kept the timestamp of its first run in a text file, and would read that on startup. Deleting that completely reset the trial period. I was pretty amazed - I know most people aren't computer savvy to bypass trial periods, but I figured there'd be third-party libraries a de…
Ableton live used to give out 90 trials with a new “live” account. I used it for about half a year with various different emails. They stopped this from working on live 11 and I decided that the software wasn’t for me :)