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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

#61

Post by hbbio »

m463 wrote: post #58

Back in the 1980's I think there were a lot of interesting schemes. The solution was to just get an updated version of copy2pc or copywrite and they would have a fix. But I remember a few schemes that were interesting workarounds. One was the hole in the disk, one was a laser-burned dot on the disk. I recall with the hole in the disk - the software would try to read and if it succeeded it was a copy. The second one w…

It's also quite funny that Quaid (who made copywrite) was sued by a protection vendor... but won!

"We hold that: (1) Quaid did not infringe Vault's exclusive right to reproduce its program in copies under § 106(1); (2) Quaid's advertisement and sale of RAMKEY does not constitute contributory infringement; (3) RAMKEY does not constitute a derivative work of Vault's program under § 106(2); and (4) the provision in Vault's license agreement, which prohibits the decompilation or disassembly of its program, is unenforceable."

in https://cyber.harvard.edu/ilaw/Contract/vault.htm

Edit: there is a Wikipedia page for that https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vault_Corp._v._Quaid_Software_.... (there is a dot at the end of the URL but HN parser does not treat it correctly)

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

#62

Post by acomjean »

Its all very clever. Till it doesn't work. A long time ago, we got EA's "seven cities of gold" from my parents for apple.

My brothers and I were all excited but it would start to load then the drive would make a strange sound and it didn't work. We exchanged at the local software store, the next one did the same thing.. We tried on a friends apple //c and it worked there. Our //e drives must have been slightly out of spec. It was bitter disappointment. But a valuable lesson.

They're now imaging floppies into new formats so the copy protected disk can still run in emulation:

Things like the "Woz" format https://applesaucefdc.com/woz/reference1/

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

#63

Post by outworlder »

csl wrote: post #14

Very clever and great article! But it sounds pretty easy to write a cracker for it: Just rewrite the machine code to jump over the check. Or did I miss anything? Edit: Guess it depends on the details and amount of "obfuscation" that he mentions.

> Just rewrite the machine code to jump over the check

Sure. It's even easier today: not only we have specialized software for cracking things, but we can even dump the memory contents and inspect them, patch up while the program is paused, and then rewind and try again from the same location. If we mess up, we can quite easily restart, just run the program again from our fast NVME drives(it will probably come straight from the OS cache). Heck, in some cases we can "fuzz" the program and let the computer try to figure out the winning combination! We can do this in parallel with our multiple cores.

Now think about the context back in the day. For the most part, people were trying to crack the copy protection using the same machine that ran the software. In the case of the BBC Micro, you could have anywhere from 16 to 128KB, depending on the model. In that era, it was often the case that you couldn't even run a debugger, because it wouldn't fit alongside the program you were debugging. And even if you could, their capabilities were nowhere close to what we have today and - depending on the hardware - some breakpoints you couldn't even reach (inside code that disabled interruptions - which was often the case for software that accesses disks).

It could be incredibly hard to find exactly what "jump" you had to change. If you messed up, this could mean a machine lockup. Now you have to reboot and load your stuff again from slow floppy media.

It was difficult.

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

#64

Post by notacoward »

I remember a similar "easy to write, easy to read, hard to recreate" approach being touted for credit-card security a while ago. The idea was to embed bits of glitter in a clear epoxy matrix, and collect a "fingerprint" of the result when read from different angles. It would be nearly impossible to recreate the glitter pattern. I really liked the idea, but apparently they never solved the alignment problem well enough to make the "easy to read" part a reality.

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

#65

Post by valbaca »

dwb wrote: post #48
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.

The way I was taught was that "disk" is when you don't touch it directly (disk drive, floppy disk) and "disc" is when you can (compact disc, frisbee disc).

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

#66

Post by Symbiote »

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?

It is/was the usual British usage. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spelling_of_disc

The OED includes these references:

1947 Math. Tables & Other Aids Computation 2 229 The program of the Symposium was as follows:..4. ‘Magnetic and phosphor coated disks’ by Dr. B. L. Moore.

1952 Electr. Engin. (U.S.) Aug. 745/2 When the heads are in position, the disk is rotated past them while information, in the form of coded magnetic pulses, is recorded or read out.

1964 T. W. McRae Impact Computers on Accounting i. 8 48 disks were stored one above the other.

1972 Computer Jrnl. 15 290/1 Engineering information files set up on disc by Hawker Siddeley Aviation Ltd..form the data base for a fully integrated production control system.

1982 What's New in Computing Nov. 12/4 Back up for the discs is provided on a tape streamer, tape cartridge or floppy.

1990 G. Gilder Life after Television (1992) iii. 63 A computer with a hard-disk memory, together with a compact disc read-only memory.

The last one has K for magnetic disks and C for optical discs.

See https://www.oed.com/view/Entry/53642

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

#67

Post by karmakaze »

kgwgk wrote: post #40
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:/…

So you think diskette was derived from disk, where disk refers to “8-inch floppy disk introduced by IBM under the name of diskette”? https://www.ibm.com/ibm/history/exhibits/vintage/vintage_450... I’d say IBM called floppy disks diskettes by opposition to hard disks, which were huge at that time: https://www.computerhistory.org/storageengine/winchester-pio...

No IBM person would say hard disk, it was always DASD. I suspect that the 'hard' prefix gained usage after the introduction of floppies.

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

#68

Post by [deleted] »

hbbio wrote: post #61
m463 wrote: post #58

Back in the 1980's I think there were a lot of interesting schemes. The solution was to just get an updated version of copy2pc or copywrite and they would have a fix. But I remember a few schemes that were interesting workarounds. One was the hole in the disk, one was a laser-burned dot on the disk. I recall with the hole in the disk - the software would try to read and if it succeeded it was a copy. The second one w…

It's also quite funny that Quaid (who made copywrite) was sued by a protection vendor... but won! "We hold that: (1) Quaid did not infringe Vault's exclusive right to reproduce its program in copies under § 106(1); (2) Quaid's advertisement and sale of RAMKEY does not constitute contributory infringement; (3) RAMKEY does not constitute a derivative work of Vault's program under § 106(2); and (4) the provision in Vaul…

[deleted]

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

#69

Post by tomc1985 »

Is "disc" British English?

I have always understood "disk" to mean a floppy disk or hard disk (as short for diskette), and "disc" to refer to circular discs like CDs. (Yes, disks have discs inside them but they are squareish to hold)

Seeing people refer to floppy disks as discs really bugs me for some reason.

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

#70

Post by 14 »

This reminded me of back in the day with Xbox 360 and the cat and mouse we played with MS. MS started making their games I believe 4.8gb in size and all the pirates could only buy DVDs which were smaller as nothing bigger was actually available. The first thing pirates did was truncate the games and removed some padding so they could fit all the security features the disc required to play and remain stealth. Then MS found a way to detect truncated discs and many people were banned. Then one of the 360 main hackers came out with a genius idea to take the discs we could buy and modify the firmware to a certain brand and model of DVD burner to allow the burner to burn right to the outer edge of the DVD. This was possible because all dvds are actually slightly larger then their listed size but standard DVD burners could not burn to the extreme edge. Some burns didn’t write perfect and sometimes you had to burn it a few times before it was stealth. They also had a program to see if the stealth worked and the disc passed or failed. I never did receive a ban and eventually moved to another mod on my 360 that didn’t require discs at all. What a flashback reading this article.
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