I remember installing Windows 95 some time in the late 90s only to realize I didn't have a license key handy. Out of frustration I entered all 1s in. I have never been more surprised at something working unexpectedly like that.
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]
#92Re: 111-1111111 is a valid Windows 95 key (2021) [video]
#93It 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…
Very true, there are a lot of sites out there back in the day that a lot of oldtimers would remember. My personal favourite was astalavista, named in relation to the legit search-site altavista I guess. Actually I take that back, my favourite site was +fravia's reverse engineering pages. Mostly because the legitimate crack-sites were safe, but there was always a risk of downloading something with a virus, or a trojan…
> astalavista
Phew that takes me back. And it's huge list of cracks and other things is what got me started looking into reverse engineering and security analysis haha
Re: 111-1111111 is a valid Windows 95 key (2021) [video]
#94Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
I used to copy like crazy but now that I have a good job I pay for most of my software. Mainly because I like to keep my computer clean from malware. If I ever need to run something pirated because it's ridiculously expensive (like Adobe stuff or IDA pro) I run it in a VM or an isolated machine. It's less out of an ethical sense though. Video I still pirate by the terabyte. Most of that comes from large media concern…
Yeah the world has changed. Sure, limewire had tons of trustmebro.mp4.exes but these days I don’t trust cracked software to not be mining coins or exfiling my personal data.
I suppose it was still the case back in the day (more for botnets than coins?) but I just simply cared less. Had to get my hands on the AAA games.
Re: 111-1111111 is a valid Windows 95 key (2021) [video]
#95I remember using this key to install hundreds (possibly thousands?) of school PCs back in the 1990s since I couldn't remember our volume license key. And Microsoft's terms explicitly stated the key we used didn't matter as long as an audit revealed that the number of installed systems matched the number of purchased licenses. Similarly, 111-1111112 was a valid key for Office.
That practice never stopped: even today, the current version of Visual Studio 2022 Enterprise available for download from MSDN (well, "Visual Studio Subscription") has an option to use a static product-key (which I believe is the same for everyone, considering the search-results I get for the first 5 digits...) - but for some reason the lower SKUs (Community, Standard (rip), and Professional) switched to _only_ supporting MSA-based online activation, so if you have an air-gapped or disconnected dev situation you have to shell-out for the full-fat edition - but at least you get to use it indefinitely.
...which is always really important considering the 20-30+ year lifecycle of actual software - whereas Adobe and their Creative Cloud service is copying Apple's strategy of pretending all their software older than 5-6 years simply never existed in the first place. "Adobe Flash/Fireworks/FreeHand? Never heard of it." - which is a huge PITA for people who might have old source files in those lovely propreitary binary file-formats that can't be opened in newer versions of Adobe software - so what on earth does Adobe expect them to do? This is insane...
Re: 111-1111111 is a valid Windows 95 key (2021) [video]
#96Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
There are 25 characters, each of which has 36 possible values. So 36^25 possibilities, and log2(36^25) = 129.2. There are basically 129 bits of entropy in there, so good luck bruteforcing it. This makes me think of a shareware app (I think an icon editor) for Windows 3.1 back in 1994 or so... I could find a valid registration key by entering random numbers by hand in around 2 minutes. And I wasn't lucky as I tried an…
Not used characters: 015AEILNOSUZ
So less possible combinations.
Re: 111-1111111 is a valid Windows 95 key (2021) [video]
#97It 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…
Very true, there are a lot of sites out there back in the day that a lot of oldtimers would remember. My personal favourite was astalavista, named in relation to the legit search-site altavista I guess. Actually I take that back, my favourite site was +fravia's reverse engineering pages. Mostly because the legitimate crack-sites were safe, but there was always a risk of downloading something with a virus, or a trojan…
> My personal favourite was astalavista, named in relation to the legit search-site altavista I guess.
That name contains two very iconic pop culture references from the 90s: altavista and the terminator
Re: 111-1111111 is a valid Windows 95 key (2021) [video]
#98Re: 111-1111111 is a valid Windows 95 key (2021) [video]
#99Earlier quoted context omitted.
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'm pretty sure I remember a pirated version of Metal Gear solid on the original play station where the fact you where using a pirated version came up in the gameplay at some point.
While I have no recollection of this pirated version, it sounds like something Psychomantis would say.
Re: 111-1111111 is a valid Windows 95 key (2021) [video]
#100Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Oh...my...god... That CD key. I remember that one as well. Good times :) Thanks for bringing up these memories.
It's famous enough it's in wikipedia - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volume_licensing#Leaked_keys