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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]

#71

Post by wkat4242 »

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…

Yeah elite on pc had such a copy protection mechanism.

But they picked any word in the book, even simple ones like "the". So just entering that 20x or so would get you in.

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

#72

Post by mschuster91 »

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.

What stops people from just exchanging the public key that is used for verification?

(Not that it matters in a world where kmspico and dazloader exist, but still)

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

#73

Post by mschuster91 »

lloeki wrote: post #49
hyperman1 wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yeah but as with Windows, in a decent environment you'd still need credentials for access to networked resources.

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

#74

Post by wkat4242 »

lloeki wrote: post #49
hyperman1 wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's why one sets up disk encryption :3

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

#75

Post by recursive »

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…

I wish you still could. I resent being required to create a user account to use my own computer.

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

#76

Post by dividuum »

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.

Couldn't that be disabled? I vaguely remember bypassing the login using the little help icon, then opening the help and/or (not sure) printer dialog and finally using the file open dialog to run explorer.exe :-)

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

#77

Post by PapaSpaceDelta »

RedShift1 wrote: post #14
forinti wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One mechanism which was sometimes used for more expensive software was a dongle connected to the parallel port.

This still exists today, only now with USB dongles.

I’ve heard stories about high end recording studios, with shrink wrapped boxes of expensive audio software, that used cracked versions on their workstations because they don’t want to deal with the inevitable iLok hassles…

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

#79

Post by gvx »

metadat wrote: post #39
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…

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 fla…

I killed so many instances of svchost.exe back in the day! Never ran into anything bad that a reboot wouldn't fix. I remember figuring out by trial-and-error which instances were safe to kill by looking at their memory usage.

There was something exciting about stripping Windows XP to its bare essentials, and also it seemed necessary at the time, if you wanted to run it smoothly on an ageing laptop that was basically obsolete when it was new. Especially if you wanted to run such RAM and CPU hogs like The Sims 2! (Not to mention the 40 GiB disk space that just filled up so fast with save games and expansion packs.)

I wonder if Windows 10 still lets you use an alternative to explorer.exe for its desktop shell? I used to write my own little launchers and spotlight-esque programs.

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

#80

Post by tastysandwich »

I recently wanted to use a program for a short amount of time for personal use, but the trial period was only 7 days.

I used strace to find that it kept the timestamp of its first run in a text file, and would read that on startup. Deleting that completely reset the trial period.

I was pretty amazed - I know most people aren't computer savvy to bypass trial periods, but I figured there'd be third-party libraries a developer could use to effortlessly guard against this sort of thing?

(If I ever need it again I will buy it. I just literally needed it a couple of times for something personal and will likely never need it again)

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