I think it was AutoCAD that had the most diabolical dongle of all. Some ancient version of the software would seemingly work without the dongle, leading cheap offices buying less licences than installs and plenty of architects installing them on their home computers. Everything seems to work fine, except every save a tiny fraction of a decimal far far away is off. Way too small for anyone to notice. Until they have been working for weeks and months on a project. And then and only then do they realize that all the lines have been slowly drifting apart.
Pure evil, and pure genius.
Must have been fun trying to explain that to tech support
I’d imagine they got a lot of furious calls that turned into embarassment fast.
This accounting firm was actually using a Windows 98 computer (yep, in 2026)
Could have used FreeDOS.
Btw, i have seen a large-ish (for local ratios) furniture vendor doing receipts in a text-mode software back in 2023. Each clerk used it selling furniture.
Wait until you find out about healthcare. Or banking.
Oh I hated these warts.
All the effort that goes into protecting content and almost none works for a longer period of time.
But it always affects the rightful user (if it gets in the way). Looking at you HDCP, you are the reason for the few seconds delay before the HDMI connection is made.
This takes me back. I worked for a software company a long time ago that used these types of physical dongles and they would serve two purposes. One to prevent the software from running, and also to store data in one or more registers with more detailed license entitlements beyond just will it run. Like how many client connections are allowed, license expiry, etc. There was a switch to USB based dongles at some point and then software licenses often tied to physical attributes of the server that the software was running on.
Physical dongles remained popular with customers for longer than you would expect mostly in my often air gapped previous industry where the ability to rapidly deploy new hardware in the case of a failed server, transferring a dongle based license was a simple matter of plugging the existing dongle into the new server and you were up and running again. Many soft licenses required internet connectivity or required you to revoke the license from the old server and reassign on the new computer taking into account the new hardware identifiers for locking the license down to the specific server.
I can still hear them rattling about in my top work drawer as I opened and closed them.
Security by obscurity would have made a lot more sense before global communications allowed people to share the results of poking around like this.
Even after the Internet was invented probably 99% or more of users would have no clue about digging into the systems.
I’ve mentioned this before, but on one of my early contracts I found an ‘encryption’ function with a keyspace of 32… values. I don’t mean 32-bit. The key was prepended as the first byte to the stream, and the decryption function could accept the full 8-bit range.
Fortunately that was replaced by real encryption some time before I left. But I’m pretty sure nobody actually cracked it before then, because I think nobody thought to try it.
I owned one of the nice Microsoft cable free Keyboards in the early 00s.
That is, until I threw it to the garbage, after some tinkerer had a look at the RF protocol and discovered that the entire encryption just consisted of XORing each keystroke with a fixed 8 bit value…That somehow doesn’t surprise me
Security by obscurity would have made a lot more sense before global communications allowed people to share the results of poking around like this.
Bulletin boards existed. Hacker parties existed. You made contacts and kept in touch. You mailed discs to each other.
We communicated before the internet.
That’s true, and I should have been less absolute in my language. However all of those activities were niche and actively scary sounding to the ‘normies’ (and to a lesser extent still are)
I actually did find “warez” on BBSs before I had Internet access. But I really think even finding BBS numbers in the back of a magazine and trying them out put me outside most computer users of the time.
Pretty fascinating! I would’ve expected the dongle to be doing something more complex but, as the author says, it’s possible that these developers underused it.
Many did. One common thing is to store some important data on a dongle.
I remember a game called DJ Max Trilogy that stores your entire save data on it, so even if you bypass the dongle check to get the game to boot, you’d have to rewrite the entire save/load system too.
Ah, those…
I’ve seen USB variants for modern software that served the same purpose.
