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

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

#41

Post by KronisLV »

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…

> It's weird reading about my life as if it's history. Everyone was doing it.

Here in Latvia that's still somewhat the case, at least according to statistics like these: https://eng.lsm.lv/article/society/society/latvia-leading-in...

I've personally seen people who choose to pirate everything from movies, to OSes and IDEs, and have no problem with doing that whatsoever. That said, I can kind of understand it, due to many not exactly having lots of money to throw around.

Personally, I live a bit more ethically, but it kind of sucks: I'm not sure what I'd do without JetBrains offering student licenses, followed by a graduation discount and recurring discounts. I've also not bought a AAA game on release in years, it's always sometime later on sale etc. The same goes for server hosting, most PaaS solutions are too expensive and vendors like AWS and GCP are outside of my price point.

But hey, OSes like Linux and software like LibreOffice are a godsend. As are free IDEs and text editors as well, sometimes.

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

#42

Post by hyperman1 »

LocalH wrote: post #38
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.

I always thought the password was for the network shares only. You could perfectly log in without a username and password, except networking partially fails. The login dialog only appeared after installing win9x networking components.

A windows password would have been silly, pressing F8 at boot would drop you in msdos

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

#43

Post by JeanMarcS »

amiga386 wrote: post #22
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…

That didn't stop people creating hard-to-crack copy-protected software. Since disk drives existed, games makers created floppy disks that industrial disk duplicators that standard computers could read, but couldn't write, and ensured their games had code to check for that. It generally wasn't feasible to replicate these special tracks with a normal floppy drive, so instead people had to reverse engineer the game and…

I remember a text adventure game on Amstrad CPC ("Le passager du temps" in french, roughly translating as "Time passenger") which I had a pirated copy.

You could play the adventure until you found the time travel machine (could take 1 to 3 hours depending).

You start the machine and then it went on infinite loop text : "tired of piracy tired of piracy tired of piracy..." !

Highly frustrating, but you couldn't help to admire the developper.

If I remember correctly, it was something about the way that a floppy track was formated, with the wrong number of sectors, which was readable by the disk drive, but it couldn't write it using normal copy mode.

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

#44

Post by popcalc »

bunabhucan wrote: post #19
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…

Prior to W95/NT4 windows didn't even have a license key, scary warning text was the upper limit of enforcement. In some companies part of the IT departments job was to find unlicensed software and delete or pay for it.

Letting people pirate your software early on is a valid business strategy. Enterprise users pay, students/hobbyists find a simple crack. Once those students enter the workforce they decide the market.

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

#45

Post by zaps »

vidanay wrote: post #21
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 your biggest fear was that an outgoing employee would drop a dime and report you to the BSA (not the Boy Scouts of America).

Don’t copy that floppy

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

#47

Post by [deleted] »

KronisLV wrote: post #41
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…

> It's weird reading about my life as if it's history. Everyone was doing it. Here in Latvia that's still somewhat the case, at least according to statistics like these: https://eng.lsm.lv/article/society/society/latvia-leading-in... I've personally seen people who choose to pirate everything from movies, to OSes and IDEs, and have no problem with doing that whatsoever. That said, I can kind of understand it, due to…

[deleted]

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

#48

Post by voidfunc »

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…

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.

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

#49

Post by lloeki »

hyperman1 wrote: post #42
LocalH wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I always thought the password was for the network shares only. You could perfectly log in without a username and password, except networking partially fails. The login dialog only appeared after installing win9x networking components. A windows password would have been silly, pressing F8 at boot would drop you in msdos

> A windows password would have been silly, pressing F8 at boot would drop you in msdos

As it is to this day with many many Linux installs (unless some disk encryption is set up): edit the kernel command in GRUB and add init=/bin/bash. boom, you're root without any password.

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

#50

Post by metadat »

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.

Given the length of Windows serial keys is not that long, why couldn't one extract the check function and run an iteration attack to generate valid keys?

Edit: @ale42: makes sense, thanks for putting this one to rest. 36^25 is approximately 8 x 10^38 which is a really, really big number.

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