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The cleverest floppy disc protection ever? Western Security Ltd

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Re: The cleverest floppy disc protection ever? Western Security Ltd

#41

Post by duskwuff »

rightbyte wrote: post #13
carapace wrote: post #5

Who recalls the provenance of this old legend about the fellow who challenged his pal to decode a certain floppy? It was a bog-standard DOS boot disk (IIRC) that he could put in his machine and boot normally. But his pal put it in his computer and... nothing doing, no boot. Analysis of the floppy availed not. The challenge went unmet. What did our hero do to make the floppy? .esrever ni nups evird eht os ytiralop eti…

Would that work for CDs too?

It'd take some doing. You wouldn't be able to burn a CD-R backwards without some extra steps; a "blank" CD-R contains some data in the pregroove to identify it as a recordable disc and specify some parameters to the burner. A reverse-rotating drive wouldn't be able to read that data, since it'd be backwards. :)

Re: The cleverest floppy disc protection ever? Western Security Ltd

#42

Post by tremon »

panzagl wrote: post #23
berkut wrote: post #18

Slightly off-topic, but since when were floppies referred to as "disc", as opposed to "disk"? I thought it was from Diskette? Is it a language / region thing? Optical discs were "disc", but at least growing up in the UK in the 80s/90s with DOS/Windows, I'm pretty certain I remember them always being "disk" for floppies? Am I misremembering?

From the US 80-90's (c64/Amiga/DOS), I remember it as "disk". I always thought "disc" was European in origin.

We also used hard disk/floppy disk here in Europe (NL). My recollection is as the GP says, "disc" was only consistently used for optical discs (CD, DVD, BR).

It may still be that "disc" is European in origin -- the original CD came from Philips (NL) and Sony (JP) -- but for computer components, I've never seen it spelled "disc".

Re: The cleverest floppy disc protection ever? Western Security Ltd

#43

Post by dragonwriter »

karmakaze wrote: post #27
berkut wrote: post #18

Slightly off-topic, but since when were floppies referred to as "disc", as opposed to "disk"? I thought it was from Diskette? Is it a language / region thing? Optical discs were "disc", but at least growing up in the UK in the 80s/90s with DOS/Windows, I'm pretty certain I remember them always being "disk" for floppies? Am I misremembering?

I remember it the same way. But then if floppies are diskettes, what's the non-'ette' disk referring to? DASD Direct-access storage device[0] Disk Pack[1] perhaps? Answer seems to be the 8" floppy disk[2] which only IBM called "Diskette-1" and 5-1/4" ones called mini-diskettes, floppy diskettes, etc. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct-access_storage_device [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disk_pack [2] https:/…

> But then if floppies are diskettes, what's the non-'ette' disk referring to

Fixed disks (which were also quite large at the time.) Floppies were removable disks, like cassettes; disk + cassette = diskettes, also disk + dimunitive -ette = diskette.

Re: The cleverest floppy disc protection ever? Western Security Ltd

#44

Post by Dylan16807 »

carapace wrote: post #5

Who recalls the provenance of this old legend about the fellow who challenged his pal to decode a certain floppy? It was a bog-standard DOS boot disk (IIRC) that he could put in his machine and boot normally. But his pal put it in his computer and... nothing doing, no boot. Analysis of the floppy availed not. The challenge went unmet. What did our hero do to make the floppy? .esrever ni nups evird eht os ytiralop eti…

> Analysis of the floppy availed not.

It's not a very good puzzle if the only clue is "I dunno he looked at it real squinty and it didn't help."

Apparently any alternate formatting would have tripped up the friend.

Re: The cleverest floppy disc protection ever? Western Security Ltd

#45

Post by FpUser »

jedberg wrote: post #20

My favorite copy protection was on some games I had (I want to say they were Microprose games? But I could be wrong) where they would cut the hole in the disk just slightly bigger, and then take advantage of the fact that in DOS you could talk directly to the hardware to convince the read head to go just a little too far. Then it could read the magic 41st track to load the game, but no disk copy program could copy it…

Nah. I remember those days. Programs that could read/write/discover more tracks than the standard amount were widely available.

Re: The cleverest floppy disc protection ever? Western Security Ltd

#46

Post by kgwgk »

dragonwriter wrote: post #43
karmakaze wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember it the same way. But then if floppies are diskettes, what's the non-'ette' disk referring to? DASD Direct-access storage device[0] Disk Pack[1] perhaps? Answer seems to be the 8" floppy disk[2] which only IBM called "Diskette-1" and 5-1/4" ones called mini-diskettes, floppy diskettes, etc. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct-access_storage_device [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disk_pack [2] https:/…

> But then if floppies are diskettes, what's the non-'ette' disk referring to Fixed disks (which were also quite large at the time.) Floppies were removable disks, like cassettes; disk + cassette = diskettes, also disk + dimunitive -ette = diskette.

Note that removable hard disks and hard disk cartridges were also a thing.

Re: The cleverest floppy disc protection ever? Western Security Ltd

#47

Post by Groxx »

berkut wrote: post #18

Slightly off-topic, but since when were floppies referred to as "disc", as opposed to "disk"? I thought it was from Diskette? Is it a language / region thing? Optical discs were "disc", but at least growing up in the UK in the 80s/90s with DOS/Windows, I'm pretty certain I remember them always being "disk" for floppies? Am I misremembering?

I've kinda wondered if the "c" spelling comes from "discus", i.e. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discus_throw

I have absolutely no evidence for or against this though.

Re: The cleverest floppy disc protection ever? Western Security Ltd

#48

Post by dwb »

berkut wrote: post #18

Slightly off-topic, but since when were floppies referred to as "disc", as opposed to "disk"? I thought it was from Diskette? Is it a language / region thing? Optical discs were "disc", but at least growing up in the UK in the 80s/90s with DOS/Windows, I'm pretty certain I remember them always being "disk" for floppies? Am I misremembering?

I read somewhere a long time ago (I forget where) that it was (or tended to be) "disc" where the format came from the audio world, and "disk" otherwise. So, "Compact Disc", but "hard disk". No idea if this is rubbish or not but maybe it jogs someone's memory.

Re: The cleverest floppy disc protection ever? Western Security Ltd

#49

Post by Dylan16807 »

garmaine wrote: post #12

Wouldn’t this be trivial to defeat once you know how it works though? Make a bit-for-bit copy, then overwrite track 9 with the new obfuscated lengths.

The same goes for any copy protection. If you understand how it works, you can change the code to bypass it.

So it's "trivial" after you do the hard part. The clever thing is that it forces you to do the hard part without special hardware.

Re: The cleverest floppy disc protection ever? Western Security Ltd

#50

Post by MagnumOpus »

garmaine wrote: post #12

Wouldn’t this be trivial to defeat once you know how it works though? Make a bit-for-bit copy, then overwrite track 9 with the new obfuscated lengths.

Once you know how it works, you would just overwrite the checks for track 9 with NOPs (or a fancy picture of your cracking team’s logo)...
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