111-1111111 is a valid Windows 95 key (2021) [video] • Hacker News Board

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

#31

Post by johannes1234321 » Sun, Feb 26, 2023, 4:44 PM UTC

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 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

With windows specifically a factor is that it is/was almost impossible to get a computer (PC/Desktop) without Windows license. Compared to that the number of potentially illegal copies was neglectable. And even for Office it was probably better that people use a copy from dubious source than a competitor so they don't find out that alternatives are good enough.

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

#32

Post by vidanay » Sun, Feb 26, 2023, 4:47 PM UTC

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…

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/

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

#33

Post by toss1 » Sun, Feb 26, 2023, 4:52 PM UTC

seydor wrote: post #13

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…

> late 90s and early 2000s you could download pretty much anything you wanted, immediately, for no cost. This is still true today btw, but the broader user base includes a lot more people willing to pay

What may prevent more of it today is that "cracked" software has been found to be a handy delivery mechanism for malware so, especially after the spread of cryptocurrency and ransomware utilizing it for payment, there is a reasonable fear of your download coming with an extremely costly payload.

So, oddly enough, the transnational criminal gangs are helping the corporations in a way they never could do for themselves.

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

#34

Post by nayuki » Sun, Feb 26, 2023, 4:54 PM UTC

danrl wrote: post #9

vocram wrote: post #6

I wish more YouTube videos were like this: no intro, outro, ads, annoying music, please like and sub, captivating voice.

there are tons of these videos on all kinds of topics. Unfortunately, without a captivating thumbnail view counts are extremely low and click through rate is laughable. Yet some creators refuse to A/B test crafted thumbnails that have often nothing to do with the video but drive views. Similarly, I keep my videos short and concise as I see viewer time as at least as valuable as mine and so do plenty of other creators…

A mew video, you say? stacksmashing has one ;-) : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U8fWTDUdWGA "Exploring the Mew Glitch"

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

#35

Post by noAnswer » Sun, Feb 26, 2023, 4:56 PM UTC

vxxzy wrote: post #3

Interesting! I once lost my original StarCraft CD Key. In a desperate attempt to simply install and play the game I tried converting “StarCraft” to numbers using A1Z26 cipher. Honesty didn’t know it at the time what to call what I was doing. I was just a kid! But, guess what? It worked! It only worked for local play. BattleNet did not see it as a valid key. I like to think some SWE somewhere hid that in there on purp…

My brother bought CorelDRAW for Win95 and only kept the CD, forgetting how important the paper with the key was. On a reinstall he than entered 11223344556677889900 and it worked. I used that method multiple times as a teen on software from different manufacturers. It worked quite often. Though sometimes you had to play with the numbers at the end. (sometimes 000 other times 011 etc.)

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

#36

Post by LocalH » Sun, Feb 26, 2023, 4:57 PM UTC

winsid wrote: post #27

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…

The activation process relies on public key cryptography. The private keys, held by Microsoft, are amongst their most well-protected assets. Much more so than their source code, for instance, which is developed with the expectation that it will be leaked in part or in whole.

Imagine the shitshow that would happen if those keys leaked lmao. They've got to have a ton of them, across all their services.

It'd be cool to be able to build "legitimate" LIVE packages that would be usable on unmodified 360s lol

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

#37

Post by LocalH » Sun, Feb 26, 2023, 5:00 PM UTC

vidanay wrote: post #32

SpaceL10n wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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/

The related C64 cracking scene also begat the demo scene. The flashy crack intros with sprites, scrollers, and raster bars became the flashy demo intros, and from there they learned about a wonderful thing called "design".

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

#38

Post by LocalH » Sun, Feb 26, 2023, 5:01 PM UTC

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…

And in the Windows 9x days, even if the user did have a password, you could bypass that with the novel method of... pressing Escape.

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

#39

Post by metadat » Sun, Feb 26, 2023, 5:04 PM UTC

YPPH wrote: post #15

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…

>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…

Devils0wn Windows XP Final serial key, yeah baby! Seared into my mind forever after entering it so much:

FCKGW-RHQQ2-YXKRT-8TG6W-2B7Q8

I used to reinstall windows anytime anything got weird, which was often because I was always messing with disabling combinations of system services in attempts to reduce OS memory consumption. Wtf is svchost.exe doing? I don't want it! Wireless Zero Config? I don't have Wi-Fi, too flaky and slow (remember, it's 2003). Distributed Link Tracker? Sounds cool, but what distributed links am I tracking? I don't think this is part of Napster or KaZaa.. DCOM Sockets.. , and so on, until the eventual: Oops, the network is messed up. What was this originally set to? Haha. Oh well, time to refresh and start anew..

Sigh. Those were good times. Eventually I got more memory and gave it all up and devolved all the way to allowing Win10 to indulge in it's wasteful memory ways and report it's telemetry about me or whatever the fuck else creepy shit it wants to do. It also helps that now we tend to have a bit more than 512MB total RAM.

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

#40

Post by stevekemp » Sun, Feb 26, 2023, 5:22 PM UTC

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…

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 instead. So it was more rewarding to read up on the reversing techniques and do the job myself.

Happy days using Numega's soft-ice (kernel mode debugger) to remove the protection it shipped with.

When I switched to Linux one of the first "problems" was that there were few commercial binaries which required a license key, so there were fewer reasons to actual get into reverse engineering / decompiling & patching linux binaries.