Yeah, Software protection was very naive in the beginning. Fun fact: I owned a windows 3.11 for workgroup UPGRADE disc collection, it was clearly explained and also enforced from the setup installer. So, no previous installed win 3.0 == upgrade installer will fail. The fix: just create an empty Textfile named win.com at any place - the installer simple scans the WHOLE disk just for this existing filename. Next fun fact: in reality, the Upgrade contained the full installation, no only a delta. Men, software was so simple these days....
Defeating a 40-year-old copy protection dongle
71–80 of 302 posts
Re: Defeating a 40-year-old copy protection dongle
#72I designed a security dongle a long time ago ... Used properly, it did rotations and XORs like a CRC. You could definitely make it hard to defeat but it was still ultimately deterministic.
Re: Defeating a 40-year-old copy protection dongle
#73Many a crack back in the day was even more simple still, we'd just find and alter the right JE or JNE into a JMP and we're off to the races. As the author found, the tough part is just finding and interpreting where and how the protection was implemented. If throwing the exe in a hex editor gave you access to String Data References (not always the case, but more common than not) then you'd just fail the check you wer…
I remember I had some demo software that could be enabled with a code. I was just curious and at the code prompt, I entered the debugger. I dumped the process space and there was a nul-terminated string of letters and numbers. I restarted the process and entered them at the prompt and voila, it was enabled.
(I did go on to pay for the software)
Re: Defeating a 40-year-old copy protection dongle
#74[flagged]
Re: Defeating a 40-year-old copy protection dongle
#75The fact that the software and hardware is evidently still in use at some companies gives me pause about whether releasing it in a cracked form publicly after having published it on a personal website would be a good idea.
Software companies love to milk enterprises for all their worth, because they're the entities who will pay the most amount of money if it means that the software they use can still work - and a big part of how they do this is via vendor lock-in. We can see in this article that this company was still using Windows 98 - they're clearly locked-in!
All of which is to say that this intellectual property might actually still be owned by a company who'll be able to sue.
If you haven't already checked whether the patent and other intellectual property is still owned by any company, OP, I would strongly suggest doing so first.
Re: Defeating a 40-year-old copy protection dongle
#76I was hired in the early 90's by a collection of franchises for a home care company. The privately owned head office self-developed and distributed required monthly updates to the only software franchises were permitted to run their business. The monthly updates (floppies) reset the license for another month at each location. After years of problems, poor support, and in a couple cases offices getting shut down because head office just "didn't like them anymore", they banded together to sue the owners (one of which developed the software). I did IT work for a couple of the offices and was already familiar with maintaining the software / systems. They hired me to bypass the licensing code which was a lot of fun to figure out. In the end I wrote a DOS based license generator each office had that could update their software by just getting a code over the phone for the upcoming month (or any date for 365 days). A few years later once the lawsuit settled and the company broke apart we issued a patch for the software to remove the license check completely. I should fire up DOSBox sometime so I can play with that old software again.
Re: Defeating a 40-year-old copy protection dongle
#77Yeah, Software protection was very naive in the beginning. Fun fact: I owned a windows 3.11 for workgroup UPGRADE disc collection, it was clearly explained and also enforced from the setup installer. So, no previous installed win 3.0 == upgrade installer will fail. The fix: just create an empty Textfile named win.com at any place - the installer simple scans the WHOLE disk just for this existing filename. Next fun fa…
I have a childhood memory of my dad buying a shrink-wrapped copy of the Windows 3.1 Upgrade that was supposed to allow any installation of "3.0 or earlier" to become Win 3.1. it turned out when we actually tried it it only accepted 3.x though. [1]
I think he ended up pirating a 3.x install from a friend and running the upgrade on to of that; felt pretty morally clear given what the box had advertised.
Re: Defeating a 40-year-old copy protection dongle
#78I wrote RPG II code in the 80s and helped the company I was working part-time for transition to another one of these S/36 emulation environments on the PC in the 90s. The software we used was made by the very generically named California Software Products.
It worked well enough and allowed the company to run until the founder retired and folded the business.
Re: Defeating a 40-year-old copy protection dongle
#79Why wasn't (isn't) this more widely used? It was clearly more effective than a cdkey. I know there is cost associated with the hardware, but surely the costumer can cough 15 more dollars. The only reason I can think of is wanting as wide adoption before max revenue as possible. But then, this has never been too popular, not even for games!
One problem is that they often couldn't be daisy chained, the connector on the back was only useful for an actual printer. So if everybody started doing it you would have to swap them constantly which is a headache. So they're mostly used for software where it's going to be the only thing running on the box. I find it interesting that they didn't make it into the USB era where you could easily have something that doe…
I could have sworn, back in my day, on WinNT4 we successfully chained a red and white pair from Autodesk. One for AutoCad, and either Mechanical Desktop or 3ds Max.
Re: Defeating a 40-year-old copy protection dongle
#80Why wasn't (isn't) this more widely used? It was clearly more effective than a cdkey. I know there is cost associated with the hardware, but surely the costumer can cough 15 more dollars. The only reason I can think of is wanting as wide adoption before max revenue as possible. But then, this has never been too popular, not even for games!
Having to put a physical device on your parallel port at the back of the computer is kind of annoying, especially if every software you use has one. More common for games was to use the media itself for copy protection, using a variety of tricks to make copy more difficult. Other techniques involve printing some keys you have to enter using colors that don't render well in photocopies, or have you look at words a cer…
Partly it was an anti-Wobbler thing. Someone in America or somewhere thought it was real clever to make the game ask you little questions, like “What’s the first word on line 23 on page 19 of the manual?" and then reset the machine if you didn’t answer them right, so they’d obviously never heard of Wobbler’s dad’s office’s photocopier.
-- Only You Can Save Mankind, Terry Pratchett, 1992