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> Q: I've never heard of software "expiring." How is that possible? What a beautiful world that was
Pretty sure I remember Sun compilers, Veritas Volume Manager, and several other pieces of software having license keys that expired in the 1990's. Several of them used something called FlexLM.
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20010424155417/http://www.woodma...
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I look back over the last 22 years, and we had very different attitudes towards privacy back then. It's sad to think that almost 2 generations are now growing up without knowing what privacy was, or how much actual freedom there was in being a free range kid with the only obligation being home for supper. We overestimate the change over the course of a year, but seriously underestimate it over a couple of decades.
22 years ago the vast majority of communications were either unencrypted or, if you had a fancy mobile phone, encrypted using weak, ITAR-compliant ciphers. Encryption on the Internet was for e-commerce sites with the budgets for the extra hardware, certification, and compliance needed for SSL, and the protocol was also kneecaped by ITAR outside of the US. Hell, even early DRM systems were laughably easy to break beca…
Back in 1999, we didn't have streaming TV services to any real degree. What ads you saw on the bulk of media was not visible to the intermediaries. The internet hadn't descended into the click-addition as engagement, as we hadn't created neural networks tuned towards rewards that result in damage to real world humans. Faked photos and videos required real effort and resources to create, and print media was still a viable funding method for investigative journalism.
The base of technology is neutral -- machines that do math for us are not good or bad on their own. The goals that advertisers and their enablers so heavily fund are goals that can and should be regulated when they cause actual harm to humans. Going "viral" can be a good thing, but when it destroys lives, the platforms that make that happen should bear some level of responsibility and liability for that. That's what feels to me to be the biggest loss of today's internet. It took real dollars to run a smear campaign on someone 20-30 years ago...
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In many ways, all of the predictions made at the time in replies to articles like this have come true. Everyone is spying on us constantly; legitimate end-users are absolutely peeved off / made to suffer SaaS and activation crap, and the pirates do just continue exactly as before (albeit with a nice, NSA-provided open-source RE environment to play in...)
>albeit with a nice, NSA-provided open-source RE environment to play in. Absolute game changer for reverse engineering. It was like leveling up three levels instantly.
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22 years ago the vast majority of communications were either unencrypted or, if you had a fancy mobile phone, encrypted using weak, ITAR-compliant ciphers. Encryption on the Internet was for e-commerce sites with the budgets for the extra hardware, certification, and compliance needed for SSL, and the protocol was also kneecaped by ITAR outside of the US. Hell, even early DRM systems were laughably easy to break beca…
> 2. Private wiretapping would land you in jail, and required covert access to someone's house, making it riskier to pull off Or people could just access the pole outside the house, or the cab on the street.
> Q: I've never heard of software "expiring." How is that possible? What a beautiful world that was
Pretty sure I remember Sun compilers, Veritas Volume Manager, and several other pieces of software having license keys that expired in the 1990's. Several of them used something called FlexLM.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
In many ways, all of the predictions made at the time in replies to articles like this have come true. Everyone is spying on us constantly; legitimate end-users are absolutely peeved off / made to suffer SaaS and activation crap, and the pirates do just continue exactly as before (albeit with a nice, NSA-provided open-source RE environment to play in...)
>albeit with a nice, NSA-provided open-source RE environment to play in. Absolute game changer for reverse engineering. It was like leveling up three levels instantly.
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>albeit with a nice, NSA-provided open-source RE environment to play in. Absolute game changer for reverse engineering. It was like leveling up three levels instantly.
What R E environment is that?
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Flexlm is alive and kicking. All of thr EDA software I use daily is protected by it. Its so archaic I can only assume its been broken seven ways from Sunday, but its still there. Id be interested to know if anyone here knows why it's the de facto standard for on premises software licencing.
The reason it became de-facto was it had bindings to C/C++/Java (what most commercial software was written in from the 90s onwards) and worked on all main platforms (including most Unixes). There wasn't much else which provided that in the 90s, early 2000s. RLM is a slightly more modern alternative to FlexLM which some software has moved to over the past 10 years from FlexLM.
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Every single iPhone and iPad transmits its hardware serial number to Apple when you launch the App Store app, or on first boot after restore for "activation".
I don’t know why you’ve gone on a tangent and randomly mentioned Apple? Anyway, speaking of unique identifiers in mobile devices, mobile phones have had IMEIs for ages - pre-dates Apple by a long time.
> Intel has revealed that each Pentium III chip will carry a unique serial number that can be read by the computer's software. Intel claims that the serial number will facilitate e-commerce, promote "digital content protection," prevent counterfeiting of Intel processors, and help to track stolen ones. We know users have questions about this controversial feature, so we assembled this FAQ. Q: Why are privacy experts concerned? A: Privacy experts are concerned because the CPU's electronic serial number could be used for purposes that may not be in users' best interests.
> Q: I've never heard of software "expiring." How is that possible? What a beautiful world that was
Pretty sure I remember Sun compilers, Veritas Volume Manager, and several other pieces of software having license keys that expired in the 1990's. Several of them used something called FlexLM.