16 ms·

It 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

It 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 -- late 90s and early 2000s you could download pretty much anything you wanted, immediately, for no cost. There really wasn't much possibility to protect your piece of software. If it was put on a CD somebody will either extract the key or modify your software to accept any key. Windows security mechanism was no better and there were copies distributed so much that probably many people remember "standard" CD Keys even to this day. And it was pretty much safe because most software did not have ability to phone home so the software developer would have no way of knowing that somebody used an illegal copy. The business model was mostly companies paying for software (fearing an ex-employee reported illegal use). I remember most teens and young adults (which is most people who used computers) would never buy any kind of software, music or video. The only exception was sometimes people bought OEM software with their hardware.

ta1243 4y ago
Everyone took software from the office and installed it at home, that's why everyone uses microsoft at home, you got it for free from work. Worked for microsoft, worked for the people taking it home. Everyone was happy.
forinti 4y ago
One mechanism which was sometimes used for more expensive software was a dongle connected to the parallel port.
- RedShift1 4y ago
  This still exists today, only now with USB dongles.
  - PapaSpaceDelta 4y ago
    I’ve heard stories about high end recording studios, with shrink wrapped boxes of expensive audio software, that used cracked versions on their workstations because they don’t want to deal with the inevitable iLok hassles…
- georgemcbay 4y ago
  These were generally useless at the time, at least as it pertains to online piracy. Enough to keep honest people honest and not copy the software to their immediate friends, but if the software had people interested in pirating it someone would disassemble it and just jump over the part that looked for the dongle while keeping all the software functionality intact and these patched versions would be readily available online to anyone who knew where to look. At the end of the day not really any more secure than various software-based copy protection schemes, just more wasteful due to the extra hardware.
- ornornor 4y ago
  Hello Cubase!
seydor 4y ago
> late 90s and early 2000s you could download pretty much anything you wanted, immediately, for no cost. This is still true today btw, but the broader user base includes a lot more people willing to pay
- toss1 4y ago
  What may prevent more of it today is that "cracked" software has been found to be a handy delivery mechanism for malware so, especially after the spread of cryptocurrency and ransomware utilizing it for payment, there is a reasonable fear of your download coming with an extremely costly payload. So, oddly enough, the transnational criminal gangs are helping the corporations in a way they never could do for themselves.
  - akho 4y ago
    Decent torrent sites get rid of those very quickly. It’s corporations doing their own work by creating a scare.
YPPH 4y ago
>was normal for computers to auto-login and have no password This persisted for longer than it should have on Windows! I remember on Windows XP Home Edition, you could just press Ctrl Alt Delete to drop to the classic winlogon.exe screen and then log in as "Administrator" with no password! By that time, though, Microsoft had implemented product activation. To my knowledge, no one ever cracked the telephone activation algorithm. That is, there were no tools to get a confirmation ID from an install ID. At the very least, no tools were ever made widely available, and don't seem to be even to this day. I suppose there wasn't a lot of need, since pirates just distributed volume licenced versions that did not require product activation (FCKGW).
- winsid 4y ago
  The activation process relies on public key cryptography. The private keys, held by Microsoft, are amongst their most well-protected assets. Much more so than their source code, for instance, which is developed with the expectation that it will be leaked in part or in whole.
  - LocalH 4y ago
    Imagine the shitshow that would happen if those keys leaked lmao. They've got to have a ton of them, across all their services. It'd be cool to be able to build "legitimate" LIVE packages that would be usable on unmodified 360s lol
  - metadat 4y ago
    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.
    - ale42 4y ago
      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 and succeeded several times ;-) But the rule (figured out after I had 10 or so valid keys) was simple maths with the digits, no crypto behind.
bunabhucan 4y ago
Prior to W95/NT4 windows didn't even have a license key, scary warning text was the upper limit of enforcement. In some companies part of the IT departments job was to find unlicensed software and delete or pay for it.
- popcalc 4y ago
  Letting people pirate your software early on is a valid business strategy. Enterprise users pay, students/hobbyists find a simple crack. Once those students enter the workforce they decide the market.
  - userbinator 4y ago
    That apparently worked well for Adobe products too.
- kivlad 4y ago
  I know that a few pieces of software distributed on floppy showed a warning if it detected it was previously installed (which wrote to some file on the disk, given it wasn't write protected). Which basically amounted to a sternly-written paragraph to say that they're using honor system to make sure you follow the rules.
londons_explore 4y ago
FCKGW-...
- pxx 4y ago
  It's _FCKGW_, not what you have. It's easier to remember this way...
  - Tade0 4y ago
    I used the mnemonic "FuCK Gates, William...".
    - nobleach 4y ago
      All these years I assumed it was George W....
vidanay 4y ago
And your biggest fear was that an outgoing employee would drop a dime and report you to the BSA (not the Boy Scouts of America).
- zaps 4y ago
  Don’t copy that floppy
  - isatty 4y ago
    This huge thread is such a send back to old times. Nostalgia overload.
amiga386 4y ago
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 remove the copy protection checks. This could be easy or hard, depending on how devious the programmers were. One of the legendary games for this was Dungeon Master on the Amiga or Atari ST which took crackers about a year to find _all_ the copy protection checks [0] This wasn't the only form of copy protection. * Games since their earliest day had things like "enter word 7 on page 5 of the manual". Some games had a red-on-red "copy protection sheet", designed so that it would be very difficult to replicate with a standard black-and-white photocopier. Monkey Island came with a two-piece "Dial-a-pirate" code wheel [1] * To thwart third party software developers, and to distort fair trade and give themselves lucrative pricing monopolies, the Nintendo NES had a "lockout chip", the 10NES [2] * Sony Playstation games had a "wobble" built into the groove of their pressed discs that normal CD-Rs didn't have, and the frequency of the wobble indicated which region the game was sold to, preventing free and fair international trade by foul means [3] * Products like AutoCAD came with a dongle, [4] it connected to the parallel port because USB hadn't been invented. But yes, for software like Windows, where the entire product has to be installed on a hard drive, it wasn't within customer expectations to have to permanently attach a dongle or have media in a drive, and there wasn't commonplace network access with which to "phone home", the serial key or CD key was used to limit distribution. As you say, Microsoft enforced this mainly with licence audits - the BSA not only offered a reward for employees to rat out their companies [5] but they also generally acted as a front for Microsoft; Microsoft would drop their lawsuit for your minor infringement of some of their software, if you agreed to stop using Microsoft's competitors' software and convert your business to becoming a Microsoft-only shop. Microsoft also got paid by doing deals with OEMs. If you bought a PC in the 1990s, you likely paid a "Windows tax", where every PC sold, even ones which will only run Linux, gave a portion of the sales price to Microsoft. They illegally used their exclusive agreements with OEMs to prevent BeOS entering the PC operating system market. Microsoft was found guilty of using illegal anticompetitive tactics to crush their rivals in the x86 operating system market. [7] [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VheNpiSZxf0&t=489s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VheNpiSZxf0&t=489s [1] https://oldgames.sk/codewheel/secret-of-monkey-island-dial-a-pirate https://oldgames.sk/codewheel/secret-of-monkey-island-dial-a... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIC_(Nintendo)#10NES https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIC_(Nintendo)#10NES [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlayStation_(console)#Copy_protection_system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlayStation_(console)#Copy_pro... [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_protection_dongle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_protection_dongle [5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_Alliance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_Alliance [6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bundling_of_Microsoft_Windows#The_%22Windows_tax%22 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bundling_of_Microsoft_Windows#... [7] https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/FSupp2/87/30/2307082/ https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/FSupp2/...
SpaceL10n 4y ago
It's weird reading about my life as if it's history. Everyone was doing it. I remember my teachers, friends, and family all giving me pirated software at some point. I remember my friends and I getting excited when someone got a ripped copy of some game and we couldn't wait to burn new CD-ROMs to share. If one of us got our hands on the copy of some game, we all got copies. It was kind of like a free-for-all in the world was starving for cool applications. Computers were starting to live up to their promises and software was just like recipe cards.
- vidanay 4y ago
  I remember the days of cracked software on Apple II systems. The crackers would add custom splash screens advertising themselves. http://artscene.textfiles.com/intros/APPLEII/ http://artscene.textfiles.com/intros/APPLEII/
  - LocalH 4y ago
    The related C64 cracking scene also begat the demo scene. The flashy crack intros with sprites, scrollers, and raster bars became the flashy demo intros, and from there they learned about a wonderful thing called "design".
  - nonethewiser 4y ago
    Keygen music is another similar relic. They are chiptunes included in cracked software. Their names were often just whatever software they were cracking. I like Adobe Create Suite 4 here https://youtube.com/watch?v=FVX6t-ivMfE&feature=share https://youtube.com/watch?v=FVX6t-ivMfE&feature=share
    - can16358p 4y ago
      I sometimes just opened keygens after I was done cracking, just to listen to it more.
- KronisLV 4y ago
  > 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-online-piracy.a194644/ 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 many not exactly having lots of money to throw around. Personally, I live a bit more ethically, but it kind of sucks: I'm not sure what I'd do without JetBrains offering student licenses, followed by a graduation discount and recurring discounts. I've also not bought a AAA game on release in years, it's always sometime later on sale etc. The same goes for server hosting, most PaaS solutions are too expensive and vendors like AWS and GCP are outside of my price point. But hey, OSes like Linux and software like LibreOffice are a godsend. As are free IDEs and text editors as well, sometimes.
johannes1234321 4y ago
> 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 With windows specifically a factor is that it is/was almost impossible to get a computer (PC/Desktop) without Windows license. Compared to that the number of potentially illegal copies was neglectable. And even for Office it was probably better that people use a copy from dubious source than a competitor so they don't find out that alternatives are good enough.
LocalH 4y ago
And in the Windows 9x days, even if the user did have a password, you could bypass that with the novel method of... pressing Escape.
- hyperman1 4y ago
  I always thought the password was for the network shares only. You could perfectly log in without a username and password, except networking partially fails. The login dialog only appeared after installing win9x networking components. A windows password would have been silly, pressing F8 at boot would drop you in msdos
  - lloeki 4y ago
    > A windows password would have been silly, pressing F8 at boot would drop you in msdos As it is to this day with many many Linux installs (unless some disk encryption is set up): edit the kernel command in GRUB and add init=/bin/bash. boom, you're root without any password.
    - mschuster91 4y ago
      Yeah but as with Windows, in a decent environment you'd still need credentials for access to networked resources.
    - wkat4242 4y ago
      That's why one sets up disk encryption :3
      - merb 4y ago
        good idea on computers with 100 mhz, an encryption algorithm would've probably not slowed down anything at all, especially not because there was no encryption extension.
        wkat4242 4y ago
stevekemp 4y ago
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 instead. So it was more rewarding to read up on the reversing techniques and do the job myself. Happy days using Numega's soft-ice (kernel mode debugger) to remove the protection it shipped with. When I switched to Linux one of the first "problems" was that there were few commercial binaries which required a license key, so there were fewer reasons to actual get into reverse engineering / decompiling & patching linux binaries.
- strictnein 4y ago
  Wow astalavista brings back some great memories. Hadn't thought about that site for a long, long time.
- girvo 4y ago
  > 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
- dools 4y ago
  > 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
  - stevekemp 4y ago
    I noticed the terminator connection, but I wasn't too sure of the timescale - which came first. Anyway it's a definitely a nice memory!
- selcuka 4y ago
  > My personal favourite was astalavista, named in relation to the legit search-site altavista I guess. The domain box.sk [1] hosted other interesting sites as well. [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20000229151347/http://www.box.sk/ https://web.archive.org/web/20000229151347/http://www.box.sk...
voidfunc 4y ago
I really really miss the 90s computing environment. I was young but it was a total wild west and the internet was beautiful and totally open. For a curious kid without a lot of friends it was amazing.
- boredemployee 4y ago
  That really was me in the 90s. Made all my real and best friends using mIRC and ICQ. the good old days.
  - ornornor 4y ago
    Got locked out of my OG ICQ years ago and can’t get access back because I can’t prove it’s mine with a copy of my id or birthday (obviously, not even sure I entered anything…) My icq number is locked forever although I still remember it to this day. For a while I had the icq incoming message sound for texts on my phone but that sound got obnoxious real quick, even though I had good memories associated with it. “UHOH!”
- cobbaut 4y ago
  Early 90s (and end 80s) was more "copy parties" than Internet iirc.
msla 4y ago
> 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. Only in the home computing world, which is why people on Real Computers thought home computers were toys back then. Real Computers, running Linux/Unix and VMS and MVS, damn well did have the protections Wintendo didn't, and didn't mandate a reboot every forty-odd days, either. Microsoft didn't even begin to achieve parity until Windows XP or later, and Apple didn't until MacOS X.
ajxs 4y ago
When I was young we had a family friend who regularly flew to Hong Kong for work. Whenever we wanted software that was expensive he would kindly pick it up for us there on one of his business trips. He must have known all the right places to look, because he never let us down! I still have a pirated copy of Macromedia Studio MX in a cupboard somewhere. The idea of installing pirate software you bought at an open market in Hong Kong seems absolutely insane in today's world, but 2002 was a very different time! For anyone wondering, we had dial-up internet back then, so even if I'd known the right places to look for pirated software, there was no way we could reasonably download it! I was using Getright download manager to download things over the course of weeks!
- randlet 4y ago
  > Getright That's a name I haven't heard in a long time! It's still available! https://getright.com/ https://getright.com/
cm3hy 4y ago
cm3hy-26vyw-6jryc-x66gx-jvy2d reporting for duty. Probably did 50-100 OS reinstalls a week so it is burned into memory.
- askiiart 4y ago
  Is that also a key for Windows 95?
  - batiudrami 4y ago
    Windows XP, I believe.
- junon 4y ago
  Can you confirm please that you have only installed Windows XP on a single computer please? Yes. Okay sire here is your activation key.
webreac 4y ago
Microsoft software (and borland) were easy to copy, but it was not the case before. There were many tricks to protect software like "weak bits", "laser holes", fancy sector layout. We had special software to copy protected disks.
Causality1 4y ago
Being able to just do anything you want was so incredible, though. For example, the Google Assistant DING is one of the most ear-splittingly obnoxious sounds I've ever heard and there's not a damn thing I can do about it besides stop using Google Assistant. When I had similar problems in the 90s I could just go find the audio file in question and quiet or replace it with whatever I wanted.
bouncycastle 4y ago
We also had p2p file sharing before the internet or any networking existed. Files were shared physically, literally from peer to peer. You would meet with your friends and exchange floppies or CDs, take them home, copy and return back. No IP addresses, no VPNs, nobody could take us down. True decentralization.
shanghaikid 4y ago
In old days, software is not that soft. Floppy disk, CD, DVD are gone now.
- ranger_danger 4y ago
  fun fact: in Japanese, software is literally just called "soft", regardless of the medium. and hardware is "hard". no joke.
  - acuozzo 4y ago
    Is this why that popular secondhand store in Japan is called "Hard-Off"?
rqtwteye 4y ago
Computing and software dev definitely was much more fun back then. No worries about security and systems way less complex. I often shake my head when I get a PR that adds one fields to the data model and you have ten different files changes in UI layer and possibly several services. Can't wait until AI writes that code and verifies it works across all layers.
smeyer 4y ago
>I remember most teens and young adults (which is most people who used computers) would never buy any kind of software, music or video. I don't think it's true that "most people who used computers" were teens or young adults. Since we're talking about Windows 95, here is some mostly contemporary usage data from the 1997 US Census[0]. A few of the strongest predictors of computer usage for a household are income, education, and using a computer at work. Being older (55+) is a pretty strong negative correlation (along with some correlated characteristics like being widowed). I don't see a direct statistics tying computer usage to number of children, although the household size does indicate that houses with children probably are more likely to use a computer. Even just looking at the sample, about a third of households use a computer at work, at third don't, and a third don't work, which gives you a very large pool of people using computers who aren't teens or young people. I suspect it's more likely that many of the people on this board were a young person in the 90s if they were a person at all, and so it felt like many computer users were like them. In fact, plenty of not so young adults were using computers. PS: if by young person you just mean "under 50", I retract everything above and instead am confused by your definition. [0] https://www2.census.gov/programs-surveys/demo/tables/computer-internet/1997/p20-522/tab03.pdf https://www2.census.gov/programs-surveys/demo/tables/compute... , https://www2.census.gov/programs-surveys/demo/tables/computer-internet/1997/p20-522/tab05.pdf https://www2.census.gov/programs-surveys/demo/tables/compute...
Dalewyn 4y ago
>It was normal for computers to auto-login and have no password at all, processes could each read entire memory on the machine. To be fair, this is specifically to do with personal computers of the time; MS-DOS, Windows 3x, and Windows 9x were all single user operating systems: They simply had no concept of multiple users at all. The concept was bolted on later as an afterthought, but it was really janky and paled in usability and security to proper multi user environments like that seen in Windows NT. Incidentally, this lack of understanding multi users is also why it's a royal pain in the arcane arse to join a Windows 3x or 9x machine to a Windows NT network. A network is fundamentally a multi user environment, something Windows 3x and 9x don't understand. As for memory access, this too was simply a thing of the times. MS-DOS, Windows 3x, and Windows 9x all simply did not have the concept of segregating and securing memory access between kernel and userland and between each process. All the BSODs that traumatized us back then stemmed from this architecture, and the BSODs quickly diminished once Windows NT became mainstream because the NT kernel operated on the concept of segregated and secured memory access for better security and reliability.
- consp 4y ago
  I distinctly remember having lots BSODs with IRQ_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL errors due to shoddy drivers all the time on XP (which is the first consumer NT kernel windows version), especially in the early days. Maybe not related to shared memory but overall not great either.
  - J-Kuhn 4y ago
    Things got better with newer windows versions. * Userland printer drivers (that don't bring down the machine if they have a bug) * Mandatory driver signing... Nowadays I can run my machine 24/7 without any crashes. Which would be unthinkable back in the day.
    - ornornor 4y ago
      Back in the day, your uptime was a source of pride. So much so that I remember using samurize to display my PC’s uptime right in the desktop… my Linux workstation of today isn’t impressed at all.
andrew_ 4y ago
Remember Windows 95/98 and the shared-by-default $C network mount that was read/write to anyone? Had a lot of fun with that one in the dorms.
- rasz 4y ago
  This is how NESTicle source code was stolen https://patpend.net/articles/zd/article2.html https://patpend.net/articles/zd/article2.html > How did he steal the source code? Sardu was running Windows 95 at the time. He made the mistake of leaving drive sharing on
ajsnigrutin 4y ago
> software did not have ability to phone home This is the main reason for the simplicity of key checks. If you copied someone elses windows installation (cd burners were very expensive, but a floppy version existed), you'd also copy the serial number, and just use that. Even if the serial verification algorithm was complicated, noone would really have to crack it at all, because they'd just use the original serial for all the copies. Piracy was (and still is) rampant with home users, but business users still needed some kind of a simple check (so.. a simple serial) to match the installation to an actual licence, which was more "protected" than the actual medium (cd, floppy), by using holograms, microprint, etc: https://media.karousell.com/media/photos/products/2018/09/13/microsoft_windows_95_product_license_key_and_manual_1536843745_3e76e6c7_progressive.jpg https://media.karousell.com/media/photos/products/2018/09/13...
- phire 4y ago
  > (cd burners were very expensive, but a floppy version existed) You just borrowed the install CD. The only time you needed it was for the install and (sometimes) installing drivers after installing new hardware. You could actually copy one of the folders from the windows CD onto your HDD and use that instead of the install CD for device drivers. From memory, you could actually complete a full install from a folder copied onto the HDD.
  - GeneralMaximus 4y ago
    You can still do this with Windows 11! I had to do this recently because of an old, well-known, but relatively rare bug with Windows installs. I created an 8GB partition at the start of the target hard disk, booted from it, and installed the OS into the rest of the disk. When the OS was up and running, I cleaned out the install partition. Now I have an empty 8GB partition on my computer, which is a bit irritating. But I try not to think about it too much.
  - porbelm 4y ago
    Yeah, first thing reinstalling a computer was a clean format, copy the CD to C:\WIN.CD\ and install from there. That way, it never asked for the Windows CD when installing drivers or functionality later -- that functionality always read where Windows was installed and only asked if it couldn't find the source. It was really worth it taking up 1/20 of a hard drive back then.
aneeshnl 4y ago
V2C47-MK7JD-3R89F-D2KXW-VPK3J Yes, I still remember. Even after 12 years or so.
seanp2k2 4y ago
I still remember that all 7s and IIRC all 8s works in Quake 3 Arena as a CD key too. I found this out button-mashing as a kid after my actual CD key wouldn’t take. Probably something screwy with their CD key verification algo that probably just passes stuff around internally as 1 or something. I’m sure this is some whole sub-genre of cryptography — finding inputs that break the verification calculations — but I don’t know the name of it beyond “cracking”, albeit “non-patching-based”.
jakogut 4y ago
VDDF2-JJWM3-X7P27-FRHRT-8BVHT
fsckboy 4y ago
>It may sound strange to people who were born later. But in 90s... Your remembrances are valid, and fun to read, but people gotta temper their memories with how old they were. You're not describing "the 90s" as much as describing "being a teen and up to the usual teen highjinks"... in the 90's. I'm sure teens today have many equivalent sorts of hustles, but that's not how everybody lives. I had jobs with high bandwidth uplinks and could've downloaded boatloads of stuff. But I didn't because who needs the hassle of getting your employer a nasty call from the ISP, and I could generally buy the things I wanted. a lot of software downloads had trojans and other malware. not trying to be a buzzkill, just accurate to the history. by way of signing off, let me say astalavista .box.sk
can16358p 4y ago
This. As a teenager those days, I never bought software and always cracked them. I grew up learning to use Photoshop, Visual Studio, 3ds max etc. cracked. Now I'm an adult who learned some of those tools profesionally, and paying for them (or services around some of them) legally. If I didn't use them cracked in my teenage years, perhaps I would have never become a paying user in the first place.
temac 4y ago
Software is still widely "cracked" and tons of people still want to not break the law. In some case telemetry is removed. Otherwise you run it in a VM without network access. This has little to do with autologin and lack of efficient memory protection: if you are root: you can still read everything in most cases. The only exception is if some kind of "trusted" enclave is used, but I don't think this is very common.
b3lvedere 4y ago
Microsoft tried a lot of weird things preventing piracy or refunds. I remember the Windows cd cases were protected by this seal. If you opened the cd case to install Windows the seal broke and that was kinda your agreement you were not eligble for any refund. However, it was very possible to click open the hinges of the plastic jewel case, use the cd and put it back on its case, so the seal did not break.
psychphysic 4y ago
In the gaming space prompt cracks are still common place. Empress cracked Hogwarts Legacy in about 2 weeks to much fanfare[0]. Cracker efforts are now even crowd funded. Maybe this is a Peter Pan moment, you grew up but the ever-child world of Piracy continues. [0] https://nfomation.net/info/1677131115.EMPRESS.nfo https://nfomation.net/info/1677131115.EMPRESS.nfo
- raxxorraxor 4y ago
  The goal is to not have it immediately cracked on release, so for that the copy protection does work. To protect it indefinitely isn't the main objective. The copy protection should be called malware though, because it basically is. Same goes for some anti-cheat tools. I think it should be made more transparent if a game uses such tools.
  - psychphysic 4y ago
    Sometimes it is cracked immediately on release. Hogwarts Legacy had a playable beta crack in only a few days. Denovu v17 is broken but it still takes work to apply the process and it's tedious which is why only one person works on any/all game (Empress) (a few others only crack single games presumably those they enjoy themselves). Although I'm sure 2 weeks is a very nice cushion, ideally it'd be at least a month. There is a conspiracy theory that Day 1 patches are to mitigate cracks. I've taken my eye off DRM as I believe the real big issue will be cloud gaming. But Empress at least cracks Denuvo due to not liking the idea of intrusive DRM.
zxcvbnm 4y ago
Everyone used pirated software, Bill still got rich, software developers did make a living, and software prices did not cripple companies. Good old times.
schlauerfox 4y ago
While it seems like a lost battle, Bill Gates chiding letter about software sharing being bad, versus the FSF/Stallman philosophy that hiding what the program does from the user is morally wrong is still being fought out. People need to earn a living, but as Cory Doctorow says, these are computers we put out bodies in and put in our bodies, hiding the flaws behind license contracts hurts us all long term. We all build on each others tools so grabbing all that value for yourself seems wrong. I personally don't know how we allow copyright on software without some kind of source code escrow at the library of congress level. Enforcing these license contracts is a waste of time in the free software paradigm, that could be better used perhaps, but Bill Gates owns a yacht and Richard Stallman doesn't, so I suppose the question depends on your point of view.
nunez 4y ago
> But in 90s these mechanisms were in infancy. It was normal for computers to auto-login and have no password at all. Indeed, Windows 98 and earlier did not require a username/password pair by default. However, it was stupid easy to log into computers and steal stuff. Processes could read from each other's pages, but it was also stupid easy to download warez and viruses that took advantage of that. Remember, this was the age of HTTP and plain text all day every day (because computers were too slow to do client-side encryption). Antivirus reviews and comparisons were really valid, as virus databases were also in their infancy, and some companies had better data that others. > There really wasn't much possibility to protect your piece of software. If it was put on a CD somebody will either extract the key or modify your software to accept any key. Yup. Which is why Photoshop cost $600 and a non-gimped version of Office cost $400. They baked piracy into the price and had the big companies that thought nothing of these prices pay. Also, downloading cracks was a super easy way of getting viruses, doubly so if you didn't have AV running (many didn't). Doubly also, finding them was hard(er) before the days of WinMX, BitTorrent, etc. You had to know IRC and newsgroups. Not super friendly places.

ta1243 4y ago

Everyone took software from the office and installed it at home, that's why everyone uses microsoft at home, you got it for free from work. Worked for microsoft, worked for the people taking it home. Everyone was happy.

forinti 4y ago

One mechanism which was sometimes used for more expensive software was a dongle connected to the parallel port.

RedShift1 4y ago
This still exists today, only now with USB dongles.
- PapaSpaceDelta 4y ago
  I’ve heard stories about high end recording studios, with shrink wrapped boxes of expensive audio software, that used cracked versions on their workstations because they don’t want to deal with the inevitable iLok hassles…
georgemcbay 4y ago
These were generally useless at the time, at least as it pertains to online piracy. Enough to keep honest people honest and not copy the software to their immediate friends, but if the software had people interested in pirating it someone would disassemble it and just jump over the part that looked for the dongle while keeping all the software functionality intact and these patched versions would be readily available online to anyone who knew where to look. At the end of the day not really any more secure than various software-based copy protection schemes, just more wasteful due to the extra hardware.
ornornor 4y ago
Hello Cubase!

seydor 4y ago

> late 90s and early 2000s you could download pretty much anything you wanted, immediately, for no cost. This is still true today btw, but the broader user base includes a lot more people willing to pay

toss1 4y ago
What may prevent more of it today is that "cracked" software has been found to be a handy delivery mechanism for malware so, especially after the spread of cryptocurrency and ransomware utilizing it for payment, there is a reasonable fear of your download coming with an extremely costly payload. So, oddly enough, the transnational criminal gangs are helping the corporations in a way they never could do for themselves.
- akho 4y ago
  Decent torrent sites get rid of those very quickly. It’s corporations doing their own work by creating a scare.

YPPH 4y ago

>was normal for computers to auto-login and have no password This persisted for longer than it should have on Windows! I remember on Windows XP Home Edition, you could just press Ctrl Alt Delete to drop to the classic winlogon.exe screen and then log in as "Administrator" with no password! By that time, though, Microsoft had implemented product activation. To my knowledge, no one ever cracked the telephone activation algorithm. That is, there were no tools to get a confirmation ID from an install ID. At the very least, no tools were ever made widely available, and don't seem to be even to this day. I suppose there wasn't a lot of need, since pirates just distributed volume licenced versions that did not require product activation (FCKGW).

winsid 4y ago
The activation process relies on public key cryptography. The private keys, held by Microsoft, are amongst their most well-protected assets. Much more so than their source code, for instance, which is developed with the expectation that it will be leaked in part or in whole.
- LocalH 4y ago
  Imagine the shitshow that would happen if those keys leaked lmao. They've got to have a ton of them, across all their services. It'd be cool to be able to build "legitimate" LIVE packages that would be usable on unmodified 360s lol
- metadat 4y ago
  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.
  - ale42 4y ago
    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 and succeeded several times ;-) But the rule (figured out after I had 10 or so valid keys) was simple maths with the digits, no crypto behind.

bunabhucan 4y ago

Prior to W95/NT4 windows didn't even have a license key, scary warning text was the upper limit of enforcement. In some companies part of the IT departments job was to find unlicensed software and delete or pay for it.

popcalc 4y ago
Letting people pirate your software early on is a valid business strategy. Enterprise users pay, students/hobbyists find a simple crack. Once those students enter the workforce they decide the market.
- userbinator 4y ago
  That apparently worked well for Adobe products too.
kivlad 4y ago
I know that a few pieces of software distributed on floppy showed a warning if it detected it was previously installed (which wrote to some file on the disk, given it wasn't write protected). Which basically amounted to a sternly-written paragraph to say that they're using honor system to make sure you follow the rules.

londons_explore 4y ago

FCKGW-...

pxx 4y ago
It's _FCKGW_, not what you have. It's easier to remember this way...
- Tade0 4y ago
  I used the mnemonic "FuCK Gates, William...".
  - nobleach 4y ago
    All these years I assumed it was George W....

vidanay 4y ago

And your biggest fear was that an outgoing employee would drop a dime and report you to the BSA (not the Boy Scouts of America).

zaps 4y ago
Don’t copy that floppy
- isatty 4y ago
  This huge thread is such a send back to old times. Nostalgia overload.

amiga386 4y ago

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 remove the copy protection checks. This could be easy or hard, depending on how devious the programmers were. One of the legendary games for this was Dungeon Master on the Amiga or Atari ST which took crackers about a year to find _all_ the copy protection checks [0] This wasn't the only form of copy protection. * Games since their earliest day had things like "enter word 7 on page 5 of the manual". Some games had a red-on-red "copy protection sheet", designed so that it would be very difficult to replicate with a standard black-and-white photocopier. Monkey Island came with a two-piece "Dial-a-pirate" code wheel [1] * To thwart third party software developers, and to distort fair trade and give themselves lucrative pricing monopolies, the Nintendo NES had a "lockout chip", the 10NES [2] * Sony Playstation games had a "wobble" built into the groove of their pressed discs that normal CD-Rs didn't have, and the frequency of the wobble indicated which region the game was sold to, preventing free and fair international trade by foul means [3] * Products like AutoCAD came with a dongle, [4] it connected to the parallel port because USB hadn't been invented. But yes, for software like Windows, where the entire product has to be installed on a hard drive, it wasn't within customer expectations to have to permanently attach a dongle or have media in a drive, and there wasn't commonplace network access with which to "phone home", the serial key or CD key was used to limit distribution. As you say, Microsoft enforced this mainly with licence audits - the BSA not only offered a reward for employees to rat out their companies [5] but they also generally acted as a front for Microsoft; Microsoft would drop their lawsuit for your minor infringement of some of their software, if you agreed to stop using Microsoft's competitors' software and convert your business to becoming a Microsoft-only shop. Microsoft also got paid by doing deals with OEMs. If you bought a PC in the 1990s, you likely paid a "Windows tax", where every PC sold, even ones which will only run Linux, gave a portion of the sales price to Microsoft. They illegally used their exclusive agreements with OEMs to prevent BeOS entering the PC operating system market. Microsoft was found guilty of using illegal anticompetitive tactics to crush their rivals in the x86 operating system market. [7] [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VheNpiSZxf0&t=489s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VheNpiSZxf0&t=489s [1] https://oldgames.sk/codewheel/secret-of-monkey-island-dial-a-pirate https://oldgames.sk/codewheel/secret-of-monkey-island-dial-a... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIC_(Nintendo)#10NES https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIC_(Nintendo)#10NES [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlayStation_(console)#Copy_protection_system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlayStation_(console)#Copy_pro... [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_protection_dongle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_protection_dongle [5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_Alliance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_Alliance [6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bundling_of_Microsoft_Windows#The_%22Windows_tax%22 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bundling_of_Microsoft_Windows#... [7] https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/FSupp2/87/30/2307082/ https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/FSupp2/...

SpaceL10n 4y ago

It's weird reading about my life as if it's history. Everyone was doing it. I remember my teachers, friends, and family all giving me pirated software at some point. I remember my friends and I getting excited when someone got a ripped copy of some game and we couldn't wait to burn new CD-ROMs to share. If one of us got our hands on the copy of some game, we all got copies. It was kind of like a free-for-all in the world was starving for cool applications. Computers were starting to live up to their promises and software was just like recipe cards.

vidanay 4y ago
I remember the days of cracked software on Apple II systems. The crackers would add custom splash screens advertising themselves. http://artscene.textfiles.com/intros/APPLEII/ http://artscene.textfiles.com/intros/APPLEII/
- LocalH 4y ago
  The related C64 cracking scene also begat the demo scene. The flashy crack intros with sprites, scrollers, and raster bars became the flashy demo intros, and from there they learned about a wonderful thing called "design".
- nonethewiser 4y ago
  Keygen music is another similar relic. They are chiptunes included in cracked software. Their names were often just whatever software they were cracking. I like Adobe Create Suite 4 here https://youtube.com/watch?v=FVX6t-ivMfE&feature=share https://youtube.com/watch?v=FVX6t-ivMfE&feature=share
  - can16358p 4y ago
    I sometimes just opened keygens after I was done cracking, just to listen to it more.
KronisLV 4y ago
> 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-online-piracy.a194644/ 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 many not exactly having lots of money to throw around. Personally, I live a bit more ethically, but it kind of sucks: I'm not sure what I'd do without JetBrains offering student licenses, followed by a graduation discount and recurring discounts. I've also not bought a AAA game on release in years, it's always sometime later on sale etc. The same goes for server hosting, most PaaS solutions are too expensive and vendors like AWS and GCP are outside of my price point. But hey, OSes like Linux and software like LibreOffice are a godsend. As are free IDEs and text editors as well, sometimes.

johannes1234321 4y ago

> 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 With windows specifically a factor is that it is/was almost impossible to get a computer (PC/Desktop) without Windows license. Compared to that the number of potentially illegal copies was neglectable. And even for Office it was probably better that people use a copy from dubious source than a competitor so they don't find out that alternatives are good enough.

LocalH 4y ago

And in the Windows 9x days, even if the user did have a password, you could bypass that with the novel method of... pressing Escape.

hyperman1 4y ago
I always thought the password was for the network shares only. You could perfectly log in without a username and password, except networking partially fails. The login dialog only appeared after installing win9x networking components. A windows password would have been silly, pressing F8 at boot would drop you in msdos
- lloeki 4y ago
  > A windows password would have been silly, pressing F8 at boot would drop you in msdos As it is to this day with many many Linux installs (unless some disk encryption is set up): edit the kernel command in GRUB and add init=/bin/bash. boom, you're root without any password.
  - mschuster91 4y ago
    Yeah but as with Windows, in a decent environment you'd still need credentials for access to networked resources.
  - wkat4242 4y ago
    That's why one sets up disk encryption :3
    - merb 4y ago
      good idea on computers with 100 mhz, an encryption algorithm would've probably not slowed down anything at all, especially not because there was no encryption extension.
      - wkat4242 4y ago

stevekemp 4y ago

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 instead. So it was more rewarding to read up on the reversing techniques and do the job myself. Happy days using Numega's soft-ice (kernel mode debugger) to remove the protection it shipped with. When I switched to Linux one of the first "problems" was that there were few commercial binaries which required a license key, so there were fewer reasons to actual get into reverse engineering / decompiling & patching linux binaries.

strictnein 4y ago
Wow astalavista brings back some great memories. Hadn't thought about that site for a long, long time.
girvo 4y ago
> 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
dools 4y ago
> 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
- stevekemp 4y ago
  I noticed the terminator connection, but I wasn't too sure of the timescale - which came first. Anyway it's a definitely a nice memory!
selcuka 4y ago
> My personal favourite was astalavista, named in relation to the legit search-site altavista I guess. The domain box.sk [1] hosted other interesting sites as well. [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20000229151347/http://www.box.sk/ https://web.archive.org/web/20000229151347/http://www.box.sk...

voidfunc 4y ago

I really really miss the 90s computing environment. I was young but it was a total wild west and the internet was beautiful and totally open. For a curious kid without a lot of friends it was amazing.

boredemployee 4y ago
That really was me in the 90s. Made all my real and best friends using mIRC and ICQ. the good old days.
- ornornor 4y ago
  Got locked out of my OG ICQ years ago and can’t get access back because I can’t prove it’s mine with a copy of my id or birthday (obviously, not even sure I entered anything…) My icq number is locked forever although I still remember it to this day. For a while I had the icq incoming message sound for texts on my phone but that sound got obnoxious real quick, even though I had good memories associated with it. “UHOH!”
cobbaut 4y ago
Early 90s (and end 80s) was more "copy parties" than Internet iirc.

msla 4y ago

> 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. Only in the home computing world, which is why people on Real Computers thought home computers were toys back then. Real Computers, running Linux/Unix and VMS and MVS, damn well did have the protections Wintendo didn't, and didn't mandate a reboot every forty-odd days, either. Microsoft didn't even begin to achieve parity until Windows XP or later, and Apple didn't until MacOS X.

ajxs 4y ago

When I was young we had a family friend who regularly flew to Hong Kong for work. Whenever we wanted software that was expensive he would kindly pick it up for us there on one of his business trips. He must have known all the right places to look, because he never let us down! I still have a pirated copy of Macromedia Studio MX in a cupboard somewhere. The idea of installing pirate software you bought at an open market in Hong Kong seems absolutely insane in today's world, but 2002 was a very different time! For anyone wondering, we had dial-up internet back then, so even if I'd known the right places to look for pirated software, there was no way we could reasonably download it! I was using Getright download manager to download things over the course of weeks!

randlet 4y ago
> Getright That's a name I haven't heard in a long time! It's still available! https://getright.com/ https://getright.com/

cm3hy 4y ago

cm3hy-26vyw-6jryc-x66gx-jvy2d reporting for duty. Probably did 50-100 OS reinstalls a week so it is burned into memory.

askiiart 4y ago
Is that also a key for Windows 95?
- batiudrami 4y ago
  Windows XP, I believe.
junon 4y ago
Can you confirm please that you have only installed Windows XP on a single computer please? Yes. Okay sire here is your activation key.

webreac 4y ago

Microsoft software (and borland) were easy to copy, but it was not the case before. There were many tricks to protect software like "weak bits", "laser holes", fancy sector layout. We had special software to copy protected disks.

Causality1 4y ago

Being able to just do anything you want was so incredible, though. For example, the Google Assistant DING is one of the most ear-splittingly obnoxious sounds I've ever heard and there's not a damn thing I can do about it besides stop using Google Assistant. When I had similar problems in the 90s I could just go find the audio file in question and quiet or replace it with whatever I wanted.

bouncycastle 4y ago

We also had p2p file sharing before the internet or any networking existed. Files were shared physically, literally from peer to peer. You would meet with your friends and exchange floppies or CDs, take them home, copy and return back. No IP addresses, no VPNs, nobody could take us down. True decentralization.

shanghaikid 4y ago

In old days, software is not that soft. Floppy disk, CD, DVD are gone now.

ranger_danger 4y ago
fun fact: in Japanese, software is literally just called "soft", regardless of the medium. and hardware is "hard". no joke.
- acuozzo 4y ago
  Is this why that popular secondhand store in Japan is called "Hard-Off"?

rqtwteye 4y ago

Computing and software dev definitely was much more fun back then. No worries about security and systems way less complex. I often shake my head when I get a PR that adds one fields to the data model and you have ten different files changes in UI layer and possibly several services. Can't wait until AI writes that code and verifies it works across all layers.

smeyer 4y ago

>I remember most teens and young adults (which is most people who used computers) would never buy any kind of software, music or video. I don't think it's true that "most people who used computers" were teens or young adults. Since we're talking about Windows 95, here is some mostly contemporary usage data from the 1997 US Census[0]. A few of the strongest predictors of computer usage for a household are income, education, and using a computer at work. Being older (55+) is a pretty strong negative correlation (along with some correlated characteristics like being widowed). I don't see a direct statistics tying computer usage to number of children, although the household size does indicate that houses with children probably are more likely to use a computer. Even just looking at the sample, about a third of households use a computer at work, at third don't, and a third don't work, which gives you a very large pool of people using computers who aren't teens or young people. I suspect it's more likely that many of the people on this board were a young person in the 90s if they were a person at all, and so it felt like many computer users were like them. In fact, plenty of not so young adults were using computers. PS: if by young person you just mean "under 50", I retract everything above and instead am confused by your definition. [0] https://www2.census.gov/programs-surveys/demo/tables/computer-internet/1997/p20-522/tab03.pdf https://www2.census.gov/programs-surveys/demo/tables/compute... , https://www2.census.gov/programs-surveys/demo/tables/computer-internet/1997/p20-522/tab05.pdf https://www2.census.gov/programs-surveys/demo/tables/compute...

Dalewyn 4y ago

>It was normal for computers to auto-login and have no password at all, processes could each read entire memory on the machine. To be fair, this is specifically to do with personal computers of the time; MS-DOS, Windows 3x, and Windows 9x were all single user operating systems: They simply had no concept of multiple users at all. The concept was bolted on later as an afterthought, but it was really janky and paled in usability and security to proper multi user environments like that seen in Windows NT. Incidentally, this lack of understanding multi users is also why it's a royal pain in the arcane arse to join a Windows 3x or 9x machine to a Windows NT network. A network is fundamentally a multi user environment, something Windows 3x and 9x don't understand. As for memory access, this too was simply a thing of the times. MS-DOS, Windows 3x, and Windows 9x all simply did not have the concept of segregating and securing memory access between kernel and userland and between each process. All the BSODs that traumatized us back then stemmed from this architecture, and the BSODs quickly diminished once Windows NT became mainstream because the NT kernel operated on the concept of segregated and secured memory access for better security and reliability.

consp 4y ago
I distinctly remember having lots BSODs with IRQ_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL errors due to shoddy drivers all the time on XP (which is the first consumer NT kernel windows version), especially in the early days. Maybe not related to shared memory but overall not great either.
- J-Kuhn 4y ago
  Things got better with newer windows versions. * Userland printer drivers (that don't bring down the machine if they have a bug) * Mandatory driver signing... Nowadays I can run my machine 24/7 without any crashes. Which would be unthinkable back in the day.
  - ornornor 4y ago
    Back in the day, your uptime was a source of pride. So much so that I remember using samurize to display my PC’s uptime right in the desktop… my Linux workstation of today isn’t impressed at all.

andrew_ 4y ago

Remember Windows 95/98 and the shared-by-default $C network mount that was read/write to anyone? Had a lot of fun with that one in the dorms.

rasz 4y ago
This is how NESTicle source code was stolen https://patpend.net/articles/zd/article2.html https://patpend.net/articles/zd/article2.html > How did he steal the source code? Sardu was running Windows 95 at the time. He made the mistake of leaving drive sharing on

ajsnigrutin 4y ago

> software did not have ability to phone home This is the main reason for the simplicity of key checks. If you copied someone elses windows installation (cd burners were very expensive, but a floppy version existed), you'd also copy the serial number, and just use that. Even if the serial verification algorithm was complicated, noone would really have to crack it at all, because they'd just use the original serial for all the copies. Piracy was (and still is) rampant with home users, but business users still needed some kind of a simple check (so.. a simple serial) to match the installation to an actual licence, which was more "protected" than the actual medium (cd, floppy), by using holograms, microprint, etc: https://media.karousell.com/media/photos/products/2018/09/13/microsoft_windows_95_product_license_key_and_manual_1536843745_3e76e6c7_progressive.jpg https://media.karousell.com/media/photos/products/2018/09/13...

phire 4y ago
> (cd burners were very expensive, but a floppy version existed) You just borrowed the install CD. The only time you needed it was for the install and (sometimes) installing drivers after installing new hardware. You could actually copy one of the folders from the windows CD onto your HDD and use that instead of the install CD for device drivers. From memory, you could actually complete a full install from a folder copied onto the HDD.
- GeneralMaximus 4y ago
  You can still do this with Windows 11! I had to do this recently because of an old, well-known, but relatively rare bug with Windows installs. I created an 8GB partition at the start of the target hard disk, booted from it, and installed the OS into the rest of the disk. When the OS was up and running, I cleaned out the install partition. Now I have an empty 8GB partition on my computer, which is a bit irritating. But I try not to think about it too much.
- porbelm 4y ago
  Yeah, first thing reinstalling a computer was a clean format, copy the CD to C:\WIN.CD\ and install from there. That way, it never asked for the Windows CD when installing drivers or functionality later -- that functionality always read where Windows was installed and only asked if it couldn't find the source. It was really worth it taking up 1/20 of a hard drive back then.

aneeshnl 4y ago

V2C47-MK7JD-3R89F-D2KXW-VPK3J Yes, I still remember. Even after 12 years or so.

seanp2k2 4y ago

I still remember that all 7s and IIRC all 8s works in Quake 3 Arena as a CD key too. I found this out button-mashing as a kid after my actual CD key wouldn’t take. Probably something screwy with their CD key verification algo that probably just passes stuff around internally as 1 or something. I’m sure this is some whole sub-genre of cryptography — finding inputs that break the verification calculations — but I don’t know the name of it beyond “cracking”, albeit “non-patching-based”.

jakogut 4y ago

VDDF2-JJWM3-X7P27-FRHRT-8BVHT

fsckboy 4y ago

>It may sound strange to people who were born later. But in 90s... Your remembrances are valid, and fun to read, but people gotta temper their memories with how old they were. You're not describing "the 90s" as much as describing "being a teen and up to the usual teen highjinks"... in the 90's. I'm sure teens today have many equivalent sorts of hustles, but that's not how everybody lives. I had jobs with high bandwidth uplinks and could've downloaded boatloads of stuff. But I didn't because who needs the hassle of getting your employer a nasty call from the ISP, and I could generally buy the things I wanted. a lot of software downloads had trojans and other malware. not trying to be a buzzkill, just accurate to the history. by way of signing off, let me say astalavista .box.sk

can16358p 4y ago

This. As a teenager those days, I never bought software and always cracked them. I grew up learning to use Photoshop, Visual Studio, 3ds max etc. cracked. Now I'm an adult who learned some of those tools profesionally, and paying for them (or services around some of them) legally. If I didn't use them cracked in my teenage years, perhaps I would have never become a paying user in the first place.

temac 4y ago

Software is still widely "cracked" and tons of people still want to not break the law. In some case telemetry is removed. Otherwise you run it in a VM without network access. This has little to do with autologin and lack of efficient memory protection: if you are root: you can still read everything in most cases. The only exception is if some kind of "trusted" enclave is used, but I don't think this is very common.

b3lvedere 4y ago

Microsoft tried a lot of weird things preventing piracy or refunds. I remember the Windows cd cases were protected by this seal. If you opened the cd case to install Windows the seal broke and that was kinda your agreement you were not eligble for any refund. However, it was very possible to click open the hinges of the plastic jewel case, use the cd and put it back on its case, so the seal did not break.

psychphysic 4y ago

In the gaming space prompt cracks are still common place. Empress cracked Hogwarts Legacy in about 2 weeks to much fanfare[0]. Cracker efforts are now even crowd funded. Maybe this is a Peter Pan moment, you grew up but the ever-child world of Piracy continues. [0] https://nfomation.net/info/1677131115.EMPRESS.nfo https://nfomation.net/info/1677131115.EMPRESS.nfo

raxxorraxor 4y ago
The goal is to not have it immediately cracked on release, so for that the copy protection does work. To protect it indefinitely isn't the main objective. The copy protection should be called malware though, because it basically is. Same goes for some anti-cheat tools. I think it should be made more transparent if a game uses such tools.
- psychphysic 4y ago
  Sometimes it is cracked immediately on release. Hogwarts Legacy had a playable beta crack in only a few days. Denovu v17 is broken but it still takes work to apply the process and it's tedious which is why only one person works on any/all game (Empress) (a few others only crack single games presumably those they enjoy themselves). Although I'm sure 2 weeks is a very nice cushion, ideally it'd be at least a month. There is a conspiracy theory that Day 1 patches are to mitigate cracks. I've taken my eye off DRM as I believe the real big issue will be cloud gaming. But Empress at least cracks Denuvo due to not liking the idea of intrusive DRM.

zxcvbnm 4y ago

Everyone used pirated software, Bill still got rich, software developers did make a living, and software prices did not cripple companies. Good old times.

schlauerfox 4y ago

While it seems like a lost battle, Bill Gates chiding letter about software sharing being bad, versus the FSF/Stallman philosophy that hiding what the program does from the user is morally wrong is still being fought out. People need to earn a living, but as Cory Doctorow says, these are computers we put out bodies in and put in our bodies, hiding the flaws behind license contracts hurts us all long term. We all build on each others tools so grabbing all that value for yourself seems wrong. I personally don't know how we allow copyright on software without some kind of source code escrow at the library of congress level. Enforcing these license contracts is a waste of time in the free software paradigm, that could be better used perhaps, but Bill Gates owns a yacht and Richard Stallman doesn't, so I suppose the question depends on your point of view.

nunez 4y ago

> But in 90s these mechanisms were in infancy. It was normal for computers to auto-login and have no password at all. Indeed, Windows 98 and earlier did not require a username/password pair by default. However, it was stupid easy to log into computers and steal stuff. Processes could read from each other's pages, but it was also stupid easy to download warez and viruses that took advantage of that. Remember, this was the age of HTTP and plain text all day every day (because computers were too slow to do client-side encryption). Antivirus reviews and comparisons were really valid, as virus databases were also in their infancy, and some companies had better data that others. > There really wasn't much possibility to protect your piece of software. If it was put on a CD somebody will either extract the key or modify your software to accept any key. Yup. Which is why Photoshop cost $600 and a non-gimped version of Office cost $400. They baked piracy into the price and had the big companies that thought nothing of these prices pay. Also, downloading cracks was a super easy way of getting viruses, doubly so if you didn't have AV running (many didn't). Doubly also, finding them was hard(er) before the days of WinMX, BitTorrent, etc. You had to know IRC and newsgroups. Not super friendly places.