Posted by shdon 14 hours ago
Why do we think that CCITY is a code for Computer City and not Circuit City?
Gold was ~$400 back in 1996. Now it's ~11 times that.
An expensive game however you gib it.
Install locates the damage and gives you code encoding locations. Over the phone You receive ECC code. No more magic keygens, pirates have to distribute whole multi megabyte games.
Of course there are voice that do want real disks but sadly that time is over. Digital sales won.
Like 15 years ago Steam launched CEG (Custom Executable Generation) - I remember reading a write-up a while ago, but each user had a customer launcher generated on install I think, and I think there was an extra segment put into the .exe file and that was put to use somehow, though I don't know if CEG is still a thing.
CEG is long dead/was broken immediately in a pragmatic, automatable way.
By that logic, wouldn't real symmetric crypto also be considered the same, since it's still just math that similarly swaps the data with other bytes, based on an "obscured" password or key?
Mind, this was also intended for a world where internet connectivity was not to be expected. The majority of PC owners were not online.
I feel like either way, you'd need the key to be different for every CD, otherwise you could just share the shared key. But if the encryption of every CD is different, why not just share the block cipher key directly? They can have a list of CDs and the associated key(s).
What additional security or functionality does an RSA like step add here?
Also the same way we got viruses, long before anyone I knew had the Internet.
If I ask you to pass on a message to someone, and the message is encrypted using a symmetric key known only to me, and I expect the recipient to be able to decrypt it because he knows that the key is written on the back of the paper, that's security by obscurity. You're just as able to do the decryption as the intended recipient is; I'm just hoping that you won't realize that.
I have a rather badly written tool [2] I made about 5–6 years ago. If you connect it to your Google Custom Search Engine (along with the appropriate CSE keys), you can quickly search, copy, and download images from before 2022. It also has a ban list so you can filter out Shutterstock, Alamy, and other heavily watermarked sources.
The app is a hot circle of garbage code, but it might still be useful as a starting point.
Except their logo or name was never "Compu USA". Where in the world did they get a store hung with signs that all say "Compu USA"? Is this some Mandela Effect that has me in its clutches? The business was definitely never named or branded that way. I did my Wikipedia and Bing Images research. There are no serious search hits. Gemini is giving some truly b.s. explanations that I do not believe.
Is this a concrete example of a USA store tolerating mis-branded signage... inside their own store? Or is it some third-world knockoff? The merch on the shelves, the bros shopping for themselves, the tie-wearing salesmen, they all seem totally legit. What kind of big-box computer store lets that happen to their signage?