Comment on Defeating a 40-year-old copy protection dongle – Dmitry Brant

• whaleross@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

  Welp, I heard the story back in the mid nineties from someone that worked in an architect office. One save or a few without a dongle makes basically no difference but systematic license abuse will make you have to spend man hours to redraw the entire thing before delivering it to the customer. Considering how absolutely hysterical some corporate anti piracy measures were at the time I would not say it is not unbelievable, this being very early internet era and all.

  I recall some other corporate oriented software that would after some time only print blank pages without explanation if it detected a crack, there were a few console games that would corrupt your entire memory card with all your saves from everything, and music software and VSTs that would spread a cracked warez version to “the scene” that would have a trojan do other nasty things to your computer as a pre-emptive revenge.

  But you do you and have all the smarts. Who knows, I’m probably AI too.

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  • Zamboni_Driver@lemmy.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

    “Some tiny fraction of a decimal far far away is off”.

    “All of the lines are slowly drifting apart”

    It sounds incredibly vague and not real.

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    • whaleross@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

      That is me putting it in embellished words of amusement instead of saying that the software ran numbers through the dongle if it was present so that the logic on the dongle would correct it but if it was not present it would allow the run and save except the altered numbers would have a unnoticeably tiny miscalculation that would accumulate over the numerous edits and saves during the project duration.

      Because I assumed that people would put it together themselves. Which apparently most people did. But some people still need everything spelled out for them. Ironically those that credit themselves more intelligent than everybody else.

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