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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]

#191

Post by temac »

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…

Software is still widely "cracked" and tons of people still want to not break the law. In some case telemetry is removed. Otherwise you run it in a VM without network access. This has little to do with autologin and lack of efficient memory protection: if you are root: you can still read everything in most cases. The only exception is if some kind of "trusted" enclave is used, but I don't think this is very common.

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

#192

Post by kevin_thibedeau »

TaylorAlexander wrote: post #141
KronisLV wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Yeah I just run Linux and I’ve not needed to pirate or pay for software in years. Doesn’t work for everyone but as a robotics engineer it all works out for me. It took me some time to switch from windows ten years ago but I’ve never looked back.

I too am Linux only 99% of the time. I keep some Windows VMs around for tools I rarely need to run. Some are 10+ year old legitimate commercial software with online activation that now accuses me of piracy. Even when you try to do the right thing you get screwed.

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

#194

Post by b3lvedere »

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…

Microsoft tried a lot of weird things preventing piracy or refunds.

I remember the Windows cd cases were protected by this seal. If you opened the cd case to install Windows the seal broke and that was kinda your agreement you were not eligble for any refund. However, it was very possible to click open the hinges of the plastic jewel case, use the cd and put it back on its case, so the seal did not break.

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

#195

Post by scambier »

aaronax wrote: post #96
ale42 wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are 25 characters, each of which has 36 possible values. So 36^25 possibilities, and log2(36^25) = 129.2. There are basically 129 bits of entropy in there, so good luck bruteforcing it. This makes me think of a shareware app (I think an icon editor) for Windows 3.1 back in 1994 or so... I could find a valid registration key by entering random numbers by hand in around 2 minutes. And I wasn't lucky as I tried an…

Not used characters: 015AEILNOSUZ So less possible combinations.

I get why some chars aren't used, but why the N and U?

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

#196

Post by kevin_thibedeau »

seanp2k2 wrote: post #163
treeman79 wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Linus from Tech Tips still pirates windows. He even has a whole video on why. https://youtu.be/M3bezYerYxQ

MassGrave exists these days but almost all laptops come with a Win10/11 license anyway now, probably enough legal grey area to CYA for personal use but I wouldn’t risk it for anything for-profit, even a startup.

Until recently he's run his corporate infrastructure on Windows servers. Not quite the same league as reinstalling on hardware with an existing license.

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

#197

Post by wkat4242 »

mtrower wrote: post #153
wkat4242 wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My 166Mhz Pentium MMX laptop was encrypted too, with the full disk encryption feature of network associates' PGP Desktop. It could handle it fine even without AES-NI. Slower computers also had slower disk access so the burden wasn't big. 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.

Wat. My 166 slows down just from the filesystem itself. I explicitly run jfs, as it is particularly light on cpu. (I believe ext2 is also an option, but you lose journaling). Not calling you a liar, just very surprised to hear such a report.

Those were very different times though. All software was much lighter. The filesystems of the time were fine on it (and I believe NTFS already had journalling even in those days).

I'm not sure what kind of '166' you have. But you're probably running at least a modern webbrowser as IE 4 is no longer suitable in this day & age. Most sites didn't even use https. You also probably use modern-day crypto. Because it's modern adversaries you want to protect yourself again. By using it to do modern things you're taking it a bit out of context.

I was running Windows 2000 on it, with regular NTFS. I did some webbrowsing and Visual Basic for Applications and ASP development. All this fared just fine with full disk encryption (PGP Desktop's "Whole Disk Encryption").

My older work laptop with Windows NT 4 workstation was also fully encrypted. Also with third-party software of course.

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

#198

Post by TaylorAlexander »

kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #192
TaylorAlexander wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah I just run Linux and I’ve not needed to pirate or pay for software in years. Doesn’t work for everyone but as a robotics engineer it all works out for me. It took me some time to switch from windows ten years ago but I’ve never looked back.

I too am Linux only 99% of the time. I keep some Windows VMs around for tools I rarely need to run. Some are 10+ year old legitimate commercial software with online activation that now accuses me of piracy. Even when you try to do the right thing you get screwed.

Yep I’ve got a crusty old Windows 7 VM, though I’ve not needed to use it for my work in many years. Certainly handy to have now and then. It is remarkable however how much I’m able to do with Wine these days! When something says it’s windows only I go straight to the EXE and run it and most of the time it works! Always makes me happy.

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

#200

Post by GeneralMaximus »

phire wrote: post #187
ajsnigrutin wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 c…

You can still do this with Windows 11!

I had to do this recently because of an old, well-known, but relatively rare bug with Windows installs. I created an 8GB partition at the start of the target hard disk, booted from it, and installed the OS into the rest of the disk. When the OS was up and running, I cleaned out the install partition.

Now I have an empty 8GB partition on my computer, which is a bit irritating. But I try not to think about it too much.

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