231–240 of 269 posts
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In old days, software is not that soft. Floppy disk, CD, DVD are gone now.
fun fact: in Japanese, software is literally just called "soft", regardless of the medium. and hardware is "hard". no joke.
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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:…
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…
I really really miss the 90s computing environment. I was young but it was a total wild west and the internet was beautiful and totally open. For a curious kid without a lot of friends it was amazing.
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 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 was normal for computers to auto-login and have no password at all, processes could each read entire memory on the machine. To be fair, this is specifically to do with personal computers of the time; MS-DOS, Windows 3x, and Windows 9x were all single user operating systems: They simply had no concept of multiple users at all. The concept was bolted on later as an afterthought, but it was really janky and paled in…
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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…
As a kid my main source of new games was to hire it from the video store overnight, install it and then download a no-cd crack. I dont recall ever running into issues finding one.
I 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…
Should the user be able to control their machine, and delete data that the app has written? Should they be able to ‘look like a new user’?
Or should companies/apps have the ability to keep persistent data on the user’s machine, and/or link them to a previously collected set of data about that user?
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Hell I don't trust most legit software with my data. I still remember people being in awe of how I made Teams work on my Linux notebook (the previous guy couldn't make it right for some reason) by just running it in Chromium. The more sandboxed these 'apps' can be the better.
I myself run it in Edge, specifically because I believe Microsoft is less capable of exfiltrating and collecting my data effectively that Google. That and the "official" "Linux" app is basically unsupported.
That client was basically an electron app.
How lazy is it to drop support for it? Especially as they’re pretending to be nice now, not hate Linux anymore, rolling it into windows etc.
MS will always be the greedy MS. Embrace extend extinguish.
Fwiw, teams runs well enough in chromium. I don’t use chromium for anything else so chromium has basically become my MS teams “Linux” “client” since they dropped support for it.
I’d run it in its own Firefox container but it would seem like MS purposefully cripples teams in Firefox as I can’t get background blurring or live captioning/translation to work there.
Just like google that requires you to use chrome AND be logged in to unlock background blurring… same evil, but story for another time.
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It was so common that "something cd key" was a common search term. And people would put that in the wrong input box/window such that they would end up typing that in chat rooms. In some of those, people would reply with the same "something cd key" followed with "to you too", as if it were some form of greetings. Later on, people would show up saying "something random cd key" as an actual form of greeting, not a mista…
I remember serials.ws with its frame based we site... had all the keys you'd need. Also there was a windows program that was basically a database of keys and serials.
There was also that site with all the trainers and cracks for every game ever, with a little landing page that would dynamically show online and offline mirrors before it was cool. I forget its name but as a 10–14 years old I loved it.