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Posted by zdw 5 days ago

Defeating a 40-year-old copy protection dongle(dmitrybrant.com)
855 points | 286 commentspage 6
jeffwass 5 days ago|
Really interesting read, wonder how many other installs are using (and trapped into continuing to use) such obscure legacy software.
RagnarD 5 days ago||
Fun hack, sure, but why on earth isn't the focus on porting the accounting data to a new, currently supported accounting system?
soanvig 5 days ago||
I want to read the rest of the migration story
Piraty 5 days ago||
well done. this brought up fond memories of crackme communities in the early web... looking at asm callgraphs in ollydbg ... I just found my +20y old patch.exe that 'NOP's the correct address of a popular windows archive handling software just to get rid of its nag screen ;-)
thenthenthen 5 days ago||
As a hardware guy I would first start with opening up the dongle, but hey! Still very curious to see whats inside!
medwards666 5 days ago||
I always thought the internals were encased in potting compound for these things to prevent exactly this scenario (certainly the ones I had for LightWave back in the day were)...
alibarber 5 days ago||
Yes my first thought would be to probe the parallel lines and see what went in and came out, but this approach was just as interesting!
kwanbix 5 days ago||
My father, an accountant, used to have a program like that, that used RPG and a dongle! Good times. Horrible donle.
burnt-resistor 5 days ago||
And they probably could've just used Neverlock Business which cracks zillions of programs.
jijji 5 days ago||
i used to use SoftIce to patch software the same way and sometimes just add a JMP to bypass the registration check completely
doctor_blood 5 days ago||
Today on "Hacker" News: a third of the commenters wring their hands and question the morality and legality of subverting copy protection on software almost half a century old.
kstrauser 5 days ago|
To be fair, I might question the legality of it, although from a purely academic perspective. Like, exactly how illegal could it be, and are there any possible paths of it actually being enforced? That’s an interesting conversation to have.

In practice, I couldn’t care less and it’s obviously morally OK.

maximgeorge 5 days ago|
[dead]
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