Fun journey! It would be fascinating to see what's inside the dongle. I wonder if it's programmable or just a simple circuit.
Defeating a 40-year-old copy protection dongle
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Re: Defeating a 40-year-old copy protection dongle
#22Very cool to read an article about windows 95 still being used in production - a nice contrast to the infinite AI hype cycle over everything. Tech may move fast in flashy areas but not in the more "boring" parts of the industry.
I knew of a Windows 95 host running virtualized in a corp environment until at least 2014 or so. It was surprisingly sturdy, I only had to remote into it once or twice when the old software it was running hung up on something. It was old medical software and we apparently had a couple clients still interfaced to it.
Re: Defeating a 40-year-old copy protection dongle
#23Very cool to read an article about windows 95 still being used in production - a nice contrast to the infinite AI hype cycle over everything. Tech may move fast in flashy areas but not in the more "boring" parts of the industry.
Win95 is only 30 years old and runs natively on some modern hardware.
Apparently there is important stuff still running in emulated PDP-11s, almost double the age.
Re: Defeating a 40-year-old copy protection dongle
#24Earlier quoted context omitted.
Audience matters. Something intended to stop legitimate business consumers in a non tech industry requires substantially less sophistication than something built to withstand professional reverse engineers.
Locks are there to keep honest people honest. To expand on the saying, they're not there to be insurmountable. Just to be hard enough to make it easier to do things the right way.
And often they’re there so no one can plausibly say they didn’t know what they were doing or stumbled into it accidentally. You can’t “accidentally” go through a door with a padlock on it.
I’d guess it’s something similar with this dongle. You can’t “accidentally” run the software without the dongle.
Re: Defeating a 40-year-old copy protection dongle
#25This takes me back. There exist emulators for these dongles as well, you run the a dumper with the dongle attached and load the program and it makes a dump file which you then use in the emulator.
I had to do this for a company so they could continue to use their old specialised Win98 software on modern computers using Dosbox and an emulator.
Re: Defeating a 40-year-old copy protection dongle
#26Why wasn't (isn't) this more widely used? It was clearly more effective than a cdkey. I know there is cost associated with the hardware, but surely the costumer can cough 15 more dollars. The only reason I can think of is wanting as wide adoption before max revenue as possible. But then, this has never been too popular, not even for games!
One problem is that they often couldn't be daisy chained, the connector on the back was only useful for an actual printer. So if everybody started doing it you would have to swap them constantly which is a headache. So they're mostly used for software where it's going to be the only thing running on the box. I find it interesting that they didn't make it into the USB era where you could easily have something that doe…
They did carry over into the USB era!
I specifically remember my stepdads copy of Cubase (music production software) requiring a USB dongle to open.
Re: Defeating a 40-year-old copy protection dongle
#27I write civil engineering software [0] and am familiar with this kind of dongle. Yes, even today there are users who want this kind of dongle instead of, say, cloud-based validation. They feel secure only if they have something tangible in hand.
Since we sold (and still sell) perpetual licenses, it becomes a problem when a dongle breaks and replacement parts are no longer available. Not all users want to upgrade. Also, you may hate cloud licensing, but it is precisely cloud licensing that makes subscriptions possible and, therefore, recurring revenue—which, from a business point of view, is especially important in a field where regulations do not change very fast, because users have little incentive to upgrade.
Also, despite investing a lot of effort into programming the dongle, we can still usually find cracked versions floating online, even on legitimate platforms like Shopee or Lazada. You might think cracking dongles is fun and copy protection is evil, but without protection, our livelihood is affected. It’s not as if we have the legal resources to pursue pirates.
[0]: https://mes100.com
Re: Defeating a 40-year-old copy protection dongle
#28> I must say, this copy protection mechanism seems a bit… simplistic? A hardware dongle that just passes back a constant number? Defeatable with a four-byte patch?
Nowadays we don't bother with copyright protection other than a license key, because we know enterprises generally will pay their bills if you put up any indication at all that a bill is required to be paid.
This was basically the 80s version of that.
Re: Defeating a 40-year-old copy protection dongle
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Re: Defeating a 40-year-old copy protection dongle
#30I write civil engineering software [0] and am familiar with this kind of dongle. Yes, even today there are users who want this kind of dongle instead of, say, cloud-based validation. They feel secure only if they have something tangible in hand. Since we sold (and still sell) perpetual licenses, it becomes a problem when a dongle breaks and replacement parts are no longer available. Not all users want to upgrade. Als…
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