I used to make these back in the 80’s to protect a video library software package I was selling. It was just a single CD4031 64bit shift register which I sent a stream of 2048 random bits to and watched to see that they came out again after a delay. Simple but effective back in those days. Yes I did wipe the markings off the chip!
Did anyone even bother reverse-engineering the dongles themselves? Surely it's easier to just patch out the check in the software than to mess around with hardware... Even more sophisticated protection that decrypts it's own code using the dongle, you ought to be able to capture the decrypted code in memory.
@@KarlBaron Back then they'd put multiple checks all over the software and obfuscate the checks using math and bit shifts so there were no absolute addresses (and certainly not BIOS calls) to search for. Some checks didn't happen every time -- maybe every hundredth or thousandth pass through a code. That was to give you the confidence to use the software for awhile before it shut down. Some software was especially nasty by returning incorrect results or creating file corruption (even the executable on disk!) if the dongle wasn't there. You were always taking the risk that there was still one check that wasn't removed that would destroy hours or days of work.
Years ago, we had an expensive copy of "Soft ICE" for windows. It was an in-circuit-emulator that let you break in to system routines and such; very handy for debugging our sound card drivers. the problem was that the dongle it came with was interfering with our hardware we were trying to debug, so pretty early on, one of the other developers stepped through the Soft Ice software using itself, found the routines that checked for the dongle, and patched out the check. :D
Don't let the scrubbed numbers stop you Dave! Ben from Applied Science would have dissolved the epoxy and looked at the die. That said AvE would hit it with a hammer.
Actually there is a channel on here that all it does is decap ICs and analyse them. "Electronupdate". For 74 series you don't need to decap them, you can just LA them. Or stick them into one of those $50 machines from China that automatically figure out what standard IC it is, they can identify thousands of standard types.
@@xxM5xx logic analyser. You know from the layout where the inputs and outputs are, you vary the inputs and see what the outputs are doing, you'll figure out every 74 series with a little bit of effort.
A company I worked for as a service engineer bought some crappy data-capture software with dongles. It was only when they moved to machines with no parallel ports that we found out there wasn't anything inside the dongles except wires. I was full of admiration for the software company to be honest :-)
I see it relatively often in the audiovisual industry, Steinberg’s Nuendo Live requires a dongle to authorise, LSC has used permanent dongles in their lighting consoles, and malighting uses a similar concept with their "free software"
@@timothystevenson7907 Unless things have changed, Pro Tools uses dongles too, or at the very least requires compatible audio interface hardware to be used
As bad as the dongle is it's still better and more secure from an end user standpoint than always online DRM. Online drm the company servers get hacked you can assume your systems got hacked as well they go under the software stops working unless you patch it. Plus some stuff like SCADA systems you are asking for trouble like wannacry if you connect them to the internet.
I made copies of dongles. Those usually contained a PIC microcontroller which was trivial to dump the memory from. You just etch a new board, populate it, flash it and off you go. Some sophisticated dongles had their own microprocessor, RAM, ROM, some even had a RTC. There you just copy the ROM and the parts would be off the shelf. The most clever one was using a 255 bytes EPROM that would get a challenge code and send a reply code. They used the EPROM as the controller and giant logic gate. When I opened one I was thinking "how on earth was it doing it with a single EPROM? That chip has to be special". Nope, just your standard chip, clever
I have a piece of software on an old Mac called "NuCLear Mac" for controlling radiological sample cameras. It uses a National Instruments DAQ PCI card as its dongle, although it appears the thing is straight from NI with no modifications...
The local youth center I volunteered at had a computer with proprietary music playing software on it and a parallel port dongle in the early 2000s. Each month we'd receive an update cd with new music. During a LAN party I hooked up that pc to the network, pulled all the files and software to my pc. Music files appeared to be an encrypted form of MP3, but the best bit was the software only checked for the dongle once on startup. So I switched the dongle to my pc, booted the software, put the dongle back where it belonged and then ripped a lot of music by digitally recording it through my SoundBlaster Live! 1024 card. Of course this was back in the day when a lot of games and movies were still exchanged on LAN parties or on CD-Rs. Good times :)
@@volvo09 Yeah that was a proper score, high quality but also taking into consideration how long it would have taken to download that many songs over a 1 Mbps internet connection vs 100 Mbps LAN.
@@phil2156 I'm not sure actually if that soundcard recorded its analog output or if it captured its output before the dac, if I remember correctly it was the latter, courtesy of the awesome EMU10K1 chip. Either way it was very convenient and better quality than messing with a jack-jack cable :)
Oh, I remember those, and the joy when you had to use two or even three of those for various bits of CAD software; they only worked when stacked in the right order, and you couldn't push your PC all the way back to the wall. There were even parallel port ISA cards that had the connector on the inside (of the PC) so you could lock your valuable dongles inside the case.
many audio software packs and plugin packs had dongles through the early 2000s. Random things that didn't catch up to download-platforms and subscription services. Digidesign (Now Avid) Pro-Tools is a notable one.
I hated Digidesign for their dongles, since I got a PCI controller and a matching 8ch IO rack module for cheap a long time ago, but was never able to use it. I thought a PCI card could pretty much function as a license for software, since who is using the software without the Digidesign hardware? But I am not from this field, I just want to build a 5.1 microphone array back than
In the Land Survey business (at least here in the USA), certain programs needed a dongle to work past the demo version. We had TerraModel as our CAD (runs rings around AutoCAD for land work) from 1995 to at least 2009 when I left that company, and it was a Sentinel model from Rainbow Technologies, at least 3 of the parallel port units, and when we upgraded, we had to switch to the USB versions. Currently (in my new job- well 6th year. lol) i have a USB Sentinel key for the Foresight DXM Survey Software, which is used for the really old Data Collector. I really only use it for file conversion, but at least it still works. So, yeah, there are still some in use out there.
I used to be an automotive tech, and had AllData (repair manuals on cd) they would send new disks every 3 months, but you had to pay a subscription to the service and it had one of these. you never had to change the dongle but the disks would not work without the dongle. the disks would quit working just after 3 months, (they would not send the new ones if you did not pay).
Takes me back to the days that we had a program called FastBack that would insist you insert the original disk in the floppy drive before you started backing up your computer to other floppy disks. It took me a single afternoon to step through the program with DEBUG in MS-DOS and just jumping into and over CALL instructions until I found the subroutine that checked for the original floppy. I wrote a batch file that executed the DEBUG instructions from the command line and from then on we could leave the original disk out... I didn't even have to patch the program.
Around the mid 90s, a customer of ours, used some pricey manufacturing management software which came with one of these Rainbow brand dongles. The owner wanted to run two copies. One at the office and one at home. He let me borrow the dongle. I hooked it up to my PC and put a logic analyzer on it. Found that only one data pin was used to send a serial data stream. But always the same data sequence. I made a bootleg dongle copy, in about an hour, which worked just fine. I don't now how many versions of these security dongles Rainbow made, but due to how quickly I defeated it, I was not impressed. I'm not the "lock picking lawyer". Just some old goober, the state of California gave an engineering degree. Its from California, so take it for what its worth.
I used to work for Data Encryption Systems when they were based at the bosses house about a mile outside Cannington in Somerset. This was back in the early nineties, and since then the company moved to Taunton and, according to a quick google search, is still selling dongles today, even adopting the USB C standard...
I have several of these things here, just can't bring myself to throw them out! Two that are badged Rainbow Sentinel are for Lattice Semiconductor, another larger one for COCAD and two that are unknown. I remember also i think it was Cubase on the Atari ST used a dongle in the cartridge port.
Parallel port had one wonderful thing - IT JUST WORKED. You connect the cable, write to a register and boom, data bounces to your external device. No DTE/DCE, secret handshakes, parity bits, random pinouts and so on being the typical joy of serial communication.
As a kid I have build some "dongles" for me and good friends in the 90's. It was a simple inverter in the data read and write lines to an external floppy drive. Other drives can't read these disks, of course ;-).
We actually just went from dongle to software based licenses on the SCADA system I support @work. Much easier to handle it all from a central server (VM) in the data center.
I work also in Industrial automation segment (SCADA, Step7 and RsLogix5000), yes and no: Iconics uses usb dongles (which are "nicely" unrecognized when you have to reboot virtual server), Ignition doesn't have dongles (it uses an license file obtained from producer website). Last time i used parallel dongle was when i had to install GE Fanuc on an new system due hardware failure. Obviously, version is old, but it works well for the single task it is purposed.
@@jakp8777 with prices, it is like Siemens: you have to spend at least 7000€ for an full license. Like Siemens, you can use one server to distribute license across network (Factory Talk). However, i wonder why you have to pay for this software when you have to spend much more for a basic Controllogix chassis.
My first digital electronics consulting job, back in 1983, was to design a dongle (serial port, I think). All it did was oscillate, so that it could be sampled more than once and would read 1 some of the time and 0 some of the time.
We still use (USB) dongles for our Mentor board design & analysis tools. It's much cheaper than buying the floating network licenses yet still allows users to share the license.
Software that still use dongles: most RIPs for large format printers like Onyx, Wasatch etc. Also software for sign production like SignLab, EngraveLab, Enroute, FlexiSign (partially dongled) and so on. More and more are moving over to "soft dongles" which makes life easier, no more broken dongles.
I can remember as a kid I played with this idea. Took a dip header and put some resistors across the pins and had the software look for the specific range. The dip header plugged into the internal game control dip socket on the motherboard.
The Aladdin company produced these dongles and they were quite secure. They moved to USB with some updates on security, AES on the hardware chip along with memory. Thales now owns the IP and is still selling them under the Gimelto? brand. I don't know about the one you have but the new USB ones I've worked with are very impressive, but when your software costs $50k a copy you want to protect it with hardware. I know from experience that the software is decrypted by the dongle and you can store keys on the hardware that your software uses so it's difficult to bypass (probably not impossible, just costly).
Still used to this day for video games in arcades. Popular with the company 'Raw Thrills" Might have gone out of favor as things progress... But they are around and rarely ever fail.
I used a altera max programming development environment back in the early 90s which probably used the same dongle. But I cracked it by tracing the disassembled startup code on the the computer which was recognizably compiled C or something and i found that I intermittently called a function which would check the dongle and then return one or zero and if zero it would bomb out an complain you needed a dongle. So I just changed one single byte in the code so that the return value was always one, and that worked, because while it frequently call this to check the dongle was plugged in, after my change it always returned true.
I was still using a parallel port dongle in 2007. It was a software for controlling an engraver we used at work. I managed to install the software and the dreaded dongle on a windows server and use multiple TSE sessions successfully though. The license stated it was for a single computer. Didn't say anything about multiple sessions. I believe this setup is still in use to this day!
In 1990 when I was an apprentice I worked in the engineering department. One engineer was using this Quartus Software on a 386DX-16. They bought this software but some colleagues reverse engineered this dongle and replaced the logic with: One ALTERA EPLD :) So they used a Dolch Logic Analyzer and the Altera software to hack this, it was awesome. Unfortunately I don not have no contact to any of them anymore.
CAD and structural engineering software still had hardware locks both parallel and USB well into the 21st century. At least until about 2009 when I was doing IT work in that sector.
While the Rainbow name may be gone, they probably merged with Sentinel and eAladdin, so now owned by Thales/Gemalto. In general, software companies would license a proprietary library to talk to the dongle and some dongle-protected software to configure both the protection in the software and the dongles sent to each customer. The protection tools could encrypt part of the program so you couldn't even read the application code without a valid dongle. Further details may still be under NDA.
Secure Computing was one of this companies names during the middle of it's life. I've got a Rainbow dongle protected release of Newtek's Lightwave 3D 5.5 for Windows NT 4 on DEC Alpha.
Yes, dongles used in the 2000’s - we used parallel port dongles up until around 2008 for engine management and genset controller software protection at a large global Diesel engine company. They went to USB just after that (I think because they couldn’t buy laptops with parallel ports by then), and I left just after that so not sure if/when they were phased out.
At my work, emergency services, our dispatch software is dongled with usb interface gadgets. Definitely still a thing as our software runs into the 'million dollars per desk' licensing and support cost.
@@alerighi maybe a third world country would, but I doubt they are potential paying customers in the first place. The usual problem with DRM is that it's usually only getting in the way of your legitimate customers, pirates just bypass it.
The company I work for sells enterprise database software, with per-machine, per-core licensing. And we discovered about fifteen years ago that even big-name companies *will* cheat on their service and licensing contracts by running the software on more machines (and more powerful machines) than they're paying for - especially when the software vendor is a fairly small company that doesn't really have the money to pursue a lawsuit to its conclusion. (We don't use a hardware dongle, though - they now have to enter some unique machine details into a form on our website and they get a digitally-signed file back which they install on the machine - so we know exactly how many machines it's running on and how many cores each one has.)
Until last year, my school had a classroom full of windows xp computers that had one of these dongles plugged into the parallel port of every computer. Didn't know these were this old
The company I work for still uses dongles to prevent unauthorized service people from accessing the onboard diagnostic software. If a client hires a third party service company they still need to contact us when firmware needs to be updated or secure sub-assembly has been replaced and needs authorization. They have to call us to go out to do the update or authorize a secure sub-assembly. If you don't have a service contract with us we charge a nuisance rate for the service.
Fascinating to see these old school parallel port dongles. Some softwares still use but now its all USB dongles. many niche software products I've used from vector ,dSPACE et. al. still use hardware licences like this one. I think both the mentioned companies outsource these dongles from wibu systems.
In terms of modern software dongles, the iLOK is still going strong in the Audio industry. It handles licences via USB for a large number of professional software packages and plugins.
@@axa.axa. Hmmm... let's think... - Forcing wheel reinvention - Monopolistic conservatism - Making users captive - No racket/extortion-free guarantee - Preventing good knowledge sharing - Distrusting the user base
@@nashaut7635 Silly. So they had no right to protect their IP if they choose to, how they choose to. So this might make it a bit more difficult for you to freeload, but they weren't meant for freeloaders to begin with. the Sun UNIX workstations using these Altera dongles were meant for professionals making money, not dude in his basement that can't justify the expense.
We deal with Australian made access control systems from Inner Range that still use USB hardware dongles from Safe Inc. They come up as a HASP device in device manager. The really old access control software from the same company used to use similar looking parallel port dongles to the one in this video.
Biesse (italian CNC machine manufacturer) still used dongles in 2013 for their XNC software which was used to load g-codes from a different file and/or create and simulate a new file
Yeah, I worked for a small software dev house in the early 2000's, they were still using dongles when I left in 2007 (Rainbow Sentinel Super Pro). They switched to "soft" licensing for their later products.
I did a quick and dirty crack of a simulation software package back in my University days. This was in the mid-2000’s and it used a Sentinel HASP USB dongle. Didn’t want to sit around all day waiting for sims to run in the computer labs so decided to reverse engineer it. It didn’t do anything smart - just checked for the presence of the dongle and that’s it, so was easy to crack.
Pretty much anything from PC-DMIS still does, though its USB now. The worst part is they want $2000 to replace them if they break even is you give them the broken one with the license.
I still have a few of the USB dongles from the 2000s, which were still in use at least up through 2005, along with their matching counterparts in parallel form - would you be at all interested in those? They were for old point-of-sale terminals, and have 1-4 lane licenses on them for Microsoft CRM (Customer Resource Management) - all older versions, of course, but I think across 3 generations of the software? Perhaps useful to do a comparison between them? Or just teardown the USB ones? If you're interested, I'd be more than glad to send them to you.
Back around 1992 I bought an $8k dongle-protected data acquisition system from HP to run on one of their $24k HP-9836C desktop controllers. Four years later, HP was still selling the same acquisition system, but now with a dongle allowing you to use a $500 generic DOS 486 machine.
Audio engineer here. We still have a stupid dongle called the iLok. However, you can now license Pro Tools and some other software via the internet each time it is being run. Good luck going dongle-less without an internet connection though. I still have plug one into my laptop because of this.
We used to use those type of parallel licenses for Mitek OCR(character level) and the Rainbow usb dongle for ABBYY full page OCR. Back when testing meant stealing throughout from production :) We had Mitek dongles that would limit the API throughput to 25 and 50 characters per second. I don’t miss the bad old days.
There's still software which does this! Motive, the software for Optitrack mocap systems, uses a USB dongle. You can download the software for free, but it won't actually load without the hardware license key.
At work we use a RF Test machine to test mobile phones after repair and software that runs on the PC requires a USB dongle to be plugged in + licenses need to be updated every once in a while via a file received from the company that makes these.
I used to run some automated pre-press software in the 90s that would batch process images in Photoshop…. I’d spend a whole day scanning and cropping, then feed the whole lot to my Mac IIfx (overclocked to a *whopping* 50hz and an outrageous 20MB of RAM) which would then spend the whole night optimising the images for print, colour correcting for the the press specs… Had a cute little ADB dongle. I must still have it in a box around here someplace. I remember selling and installing CAD packages in the 80s for pipework layout and such that had it’s own dongle carrier, and you’d add modules to it depending on which optional bits of cad software you had. Some scary high-res massive CRT screens to go with that setup. There was more money in the graphics cards than in the PC…
I started a new job a few months ago, but my previous position actually still had a hardware dongle THIS YEAR! (2020) -- though these days, it's a USB dongle, which is even more confusing because by the time that was feasibly cheap enough to develop, cheaper approaches involving Internet access were long since available.
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PC-Doctor, a computer hardware diagnostic suite uses a USB dongle, at least it did in the late 2000s and early 2010s, though I imagine it still does. It limits how many machines you can use it in at once.
In the mid 80s there was a CAD package called "VersaCad", at the time just as good as AutoCad. Well they had a box that was in series with the keyboard. It simply was a LUT box that send different codes for the characters. Super easy to hack, just monitor the output, A= .... B= ..... and so on.
In a previous company we were actually using Dallas iButton usb dongles for this purpose, had a tiny bit of storage for keys and basically off the shelf. This was into the late 2000’s even. Funny thing was they even included the temp sensor which was standard on the Dallas 1-wire iButtons. You could even reuse for your own stuff them after we stopped using them.
I used to use lots of those, awesome devices! Stuck them all inside thermal chambers to get profiles, and even put them in canyon water to log temperature over a year.
The security DVR software I use at work uses an USB security dongle. Yep. Called “CompleteView” and has “Copyright 2006” all over it. Dongle has a key tag hanging from it that says “CompleteView License Key.”
Every laser display software for the ILDA standard uses usb dongles or other hardware keys to this day. Got a little usb dongle which is more expensive than a new phone. Sucks if you lose it.
we had some for a $10,000 software called Zemax for lens design. We were told if you lose the dongle they would still charge you a few thousand to replace it.
I know that the automation system that was used at the public access TV station I work at in the early to mid 00’s used a parallel dongle. I also recently bought an in the groove DDR style arcade machine that was manufactured in about 2004 that was run off an off the shelf PC that used a serial dongle for protection.
I saw an USB-dongle on a cheap chinese 40w laser cutter. It was used to "protect" their printer driver for the laser cutter - and came bundled with a pirated version of CorelDraw. The irony...
@@noodle621 This is damn impressive. I came across this video some time ago as well, I was fascinated by the amount of wire-wrapped connections he has made.
The diodes are for getting power off multiple data bus lines without shorting them together. Remember that you could attach a printer on the other side of the dongle.
Up until 2 years ago, I was programming scada, plc and telemetry systems with citect scada, rockwell(Allen Bradley) rslogix5000, and isagraf. All had USB sentinel dongles, and they weren’t cheap!
Our software for industrial measuring devices has usb dongles that are bound to the mac adress of the network card that is in that specific pc. You can just program different mac adresses into the dongle if you have the dongle programming software and the program version that is allowed to run on those pc's that have those mac adresses.
I saw a video recently where a guy had reverse engineered a license device that was on an ISA card and unlocked all of the features. That wasn't what the video was about, but he was using some kind of FPGA software in the video for his development.
I have some late 90s sentinel v3 dongles. The software is still needed for some fancy hardware, the company producing the hardware and the software has been gone for over a decade. I'll start emulating it when the dongle dies.
I remember the older Rockwell/Allen-Bradley RSLogix software (for PLCs) actually used a "license" that could be "moved" to and from floppy disks. The license was written outside of the filesystem to prevent you from copying it. But the easy workaround: "transfer" the license to the disk, then make an image/clone of the disk, then transfer it back... lol. Consequently, they have now switched to using USB dongles for newer versions. lol
Oh man… I remember a bit of kit for SCSI tape drives that kept track of its licenses on a “special” tape… you installed the software, put in the tape cart and it would increment or decrement the license count and “bless” that machine for use with the software. Handy thing that would allow you mount tape drive volumes as if they were hard-drives and provide (painfully slow) bulk storage. In the end the magic turned out to be a stamp of 4 changed bytes with the devs initials waaaaaay at the end of the file-system of the boot drive. Which was good to find out, as it was painfully easy to lose a partition in those days, lose the blessing, and then your license count was out of whack, never to be recovered...
I saw usb dongles in early 2000s for some sort of home programmable embroidery sewing machine. Also heard of a network analyser that used a PC card network interface and this interface was the dongle.
I remember that one of the software packages for use with Targa (Truevision) cards back in the late 80s-early 90s had one of these which had to be installed or the software would not work. Very effective way to prevent copying of software by making it useless. If you lost the dongle you were screwed. One outfit forgot to retain theirs when they upgraded computers and were out thousands (price of the software package).
Removing IC numbers on a security key seems appropriate. Our $2000 Mentor PADS PCB Software had a Dongle until a Software patch was available. Still use the software today without the Dongle. Old but functional.
Some options for telephone systems (Avaya being a BIG offender in this regard) require a hardware dongle. On older systems, it's a parallel port dongle, but on the newer systems, they've got it down to either a USB or just a data key on what appears to be, at heart, a regular SCSI SSD with a plastic shroud that is molded to look like a proprietary card and an adapter with a different pinout.
Very interesting. Back in the 1980-90's we used ORCAD and this was dongle protected unless you could obtain an educational version. We also ran XILINX which used dongles but never opened up any of these devices. I will venture into the loft one day and see what I can find. I haven't seen a PC for many a year that has either parallel or serial ports.
Davinci resolve, cubase, protools still use dongle. One advantage is you can easily move between computers as long as you have the dongle plug in the running pc
20+ years ago we played with a CAD-dongle. EXE-file first loaded off disk, and in the beginning of the code there was a loop that read some 100 bytes of code from the dongle and wrote them in the middle of the EXE-file. So part of the progam code got replaced by the dongle-code. If you tried to single-step through the process, it did'nt work, you had to do it full speed. Some RC-coupling in the clock line maybe?
late 1990s early 2000 a lot of academic software still had dongles. Isn't it a bit cheap of Altera not to use any of their own programmable logic for the job?
I am blind and use a screen reader to view the computer, it uses a USB dongle which does nothing other than waste a USB port and provides activation for the software. Other options are available, but if you want the ability to move the license round it is the easiest option. Also several banking industry software uses USB dongles as well, I used to have to get USB network server type devices so we could virtualise the application servers that used the dongles.
4 года назад
Until some 10 years ago, a software company that made accounting apps here in Uruguay used these. Then they updated to the USB version.
A company I used to work for started putting them on their older dos based machines. They were also E-fused and if you back dated your systems date it permanently locked out the dongle. It was a real pain in the ass.
Ah, good ol' cubase ... I recently ended up with a midi expander for Atari STs by Steinberg which I wanted to test ... turns out cracked versions of the 20+ year old version aren't easy to find or are broken (since I didn't have a dongle).
I used to make these back in the 80’s to protect a video library software package I was selling.
It was just a single CD4031 64bit shift register which I sent a stream of 2048 random bits to and watched to see that they came out again after a delay.
Simple but effective back in those days. Yes I did wipe the markings off the chip!
Silicon Junkie that was u? Bastard! Just kidding...
That's piss-easy to reverse engineer. Same thing in and out is an easy pattern to recognize
Did anyone even bother reverse-engineering the dongles themselves? Surely it's easier to just patch out the check in the software than to mess around with hardware... Even more sophisticated protection that decrypts it's own code using the dongle, you ought to be able to capture the decrypted code in memory.
@@KarlBaron Back then they'd put multiple checks all over the software and obfuscate the checks using math and bit shifts so there were no absolute addresses (and certainly not BIOS calls) to search for. Some checks didn't happen every time -- maybe every hundredth or thousandth pass through a code. That was to give you the confidence to use the software for awhile before it shut down.
Some software was especially nasty by returning incorrect results or creating file corruption (even the executable on disk!) if the dongle wasn't there. You were always taking the risk that there was still one check that wasn't removed that would destroy hours or days of work.
yeah but that software just got patched with a IEEE port emulator
Years ago, we had an expensive copy of "Soft ICE" for windows. It was an in-circuit-emulator that let you break in to system routines and such; very handy for debugging our sound card drivers. the problem was that the dongle it came with was interfering with our hardware we were trying to debug, so pretty early on, one of the other developers stepped through the Soft Ice software using itself, found the routines that checked for the dongle, and patched out the check. :D
Using the dongle software to detangle the software priceless.
One could say that the dongle was hoisted by its own petard ;)
You used the dongle... to undongle the dongle!
Scott Lawrence *”I used the SoftICE to patch the SoftICE”*
Don't let the scrubbed numbers stop you Dave!
Ben from Applied Science would have dissolved the epoxy and looked at the die.
That said AvE would hit it with a hammer.
Actually there is a channel on here that all it does is decap ICs and analyse them. "Electronupdate".
For 74 series you don't need to decap them, you can just LA them. Or stick them into one of those $50 machines from China that automatically figure out what standard IC it is, they can identify thousands of standard types.
@@SianaGearz LA them?
@@xxM5xx logic analyser. You know from the layout where the inputs and outputs are, you vary the inputs and see what the outputs are doing, you'll figure out every 74 series with a little bit of effort.
Nope AvE would put in the new cnc mill and shred it!
Abom would've used the big shaper to remove its hat... 🙄😂
Dongles are still used even today. But it's mostly USB dongles today. Seen it especially in software used in research.
Not just research - the software for one of my client's big CNC steel cutting/drilling machines has a USB dongle.. as does their timeclock software!
Horrible, one buys research equipment for 200k and the only way to analyze the data is with dongled software(which has to be used by 20+ people).
Audio software, too; iLok being one of the more famous examples.
Datev, if anybody knows it outside germany/europe, ises a dongle.
lighting consoles still use dongles, but its a part of the dmx card. no dongle
A company I worked for as a service engineer bought some crappy data-capture software with dongles. It was only when they moved to machines with no parallel ports that we found out there wasn't anything inside the dongles except wires. I was full of admiration for the software company to be honest :-)
We had a resistor taped to the cassette port of our C64 to simulate the dongle for some piece of software, I forget what...
Back in the 80’s, we used to use a parallel multiplexer with 8 ports. So we managed to use 8 stations with PCAD software and just one dongle.
Dongle secured software still exists today. VariCAD for instance has an option for dongle based licensing (they have other options as well).
Some odd access control software we use at my workplace uses an USB-dongle, just like that. At least that has a red blinky light to gaze at.
I see it relatively often in the audiovisual industry, Steinberg’s Nuendo Live requires a dongle to authorise, LSC has used permanent dongles in their lighting consoles, and malighting uses a similar concept with their "free software"
@@timothystevenson7907 Unless things have changed, Pro Tools uses dongles too, or at the very least requires compatible audio interface hardware to be used
K40 lasers also have USB dongle security keys.
As bad as the dongle is it's still better and more secure from an end user standpoint than always online DRM.
Online drm the company servers get hacked you can assume your systems got hacked as well they go under the software stops working unless you patch it.
Plus some stuff like SCADA systems you are asking for trouble like wannacry if you connect them to the internet.
I made copies of dongles. Those usually contained a PIC microcontroller which was trivial to dump the memory from. You just etch a new board, populate it, flash it and off you go. Some sophisticated dongles had their own microprocessor, RAM, ROM, some even had a RTC. There you just copy the ROM and the parts would be off the shelf. The most clever one was using a 255 bytes EPROM that would get a challenge code and send a reply code. They used the EPROM as the controller and giant logic gate. When I opened one I was thinking "how on earth was it doing it with a single EPROM? That chip has to be special". Nope, just your standard chip, clever
I distinctly remember using a dongle with Edius video editing software which I always felt was a little weird as it had a PCI rendering card....
I have a piece of software on an old Mac called "NuCLear Mac" for controlling radiological sample cameras. It uses a National Instruments DAQ PCI card as its dongle, although it appears the thing is straight from NI with no modifications...
The local youth center I volunteered at had a computer with proprietary music playing software on it and a parallel port dongle in the early 2000s. Each month we'd receive an update cd with new music. During a LAN party I hooked up that pc to the network, pulled all the files and software to my pc. Music files appeared to be an encrypted form of MP3, but the best bit was the software only checked for the dongle once on startup. So I switched the dongle to my pc, booted the software, put the dongle back where it belonged and then ripped a lot of music by digitally recording it through my SoundBlaster Live! 1024 card. Of course this was back in the day when a lot of games and movies were still exchanged on LAN parties or on CD-Rs. Good times :)
Back when finding high quality music wasn't easy, so that must have been a score! Haha
@@volvo09 Yeah that was a proper score, high quality but also taking into consideration how long it would have taken to download that many songs over a 1 Mbps internet connection vs 100 Mbps LAN.
To be fair it wasn't a digital duplication if you routed it through your sound card. It was converted to analog and back again.
Bart Kuijper ha ha, that’s what VMWare was good for. After the dongle was read, save the VM state, then just restart as needed.
@@phil2156 I'm not sure actually if that soundcard recorded its analog output or if it captured its output before the dac, if I remember correctly it was the latter, courtesy of the awesome EMU10K1 chip. Either way it was very convenient and better quality than messing with a jack-jack cable :)
Oh, I remember those, and the joy when you had to use two or even three of those for various bits of CAD software; they only worked when stacked in the right order, and you couldn't push your PC all the way back to the wall. There were even parallel port ISA cards that had the connector on the inside (of the PC) so you could lock your valuable dongles inside the case.
The chinese are selling a software that contains all the schematics for all macbooks/iphones, they are using a dongle. Ironic on so many levels.
Zxw forever
Ironic how?
User65536 r u serious?
@@heyt54 if they've spent the time reverse engineering the boards to create the schematics and board view software, I don't see the irony.
@@phil2156 I believe they are the leaked schematics and not reverse-engineered ones. Someone took them from Apple's engineering department.
many audio software packs and plugin packs had dongles through the early 2000s. Random things that didn't catch up to download-platforms and subscription services. Digidesign (Now Avid) Pro-Tools is a notable one.
Quite a few still do. iLok is the bane of my existence.
@@StompySan same. Yeah we still have iLok here too.
Not just iLok, but eLicenser. I still have to keep both of those plugged in somewhere in 2019 to access all my plugs.
I hated Digidesign for their dongles, since I got a PCI controller and a matching 8ch IO rack module for cheap a long time ago, but was never able to use it. I thought a PCI card could pretty much function as a license for software, since who is using the software without the Digidesign hardware? But I am not from this field, I just want to build a 5.1 microphone array back than
@@StompySan Lots of people hate the ilok, I'm fine with it. For the most part you can activate Visa Cloud now...
In the Land Survey business (at least here in the USA), certain programs needed a dongle to work past the demo version. We had TerraModel as our CAD (runs rings around AutoCAD for land work) from 1995 to at least 2009 when I left that company, and it was a Sentinel model from Rainbow Technologies, at least 3 of the parallel port units, and when we upgraded, we had to switch to the USB versions.
Currently (in my new job- well 6th year. lol) i have a USB Sentinel key for the Foresight DXM Survey Software, which is used for the really old Data Collector. I really only use it for file conversion, but at least it still works. So, yeah, there are still some in use out there.
You answered that question "if any modern software uses a dongle" with your latest dumpster find - the skin machine had a USB dongle...
I used to be an automotive tech, and had AllData (repair manuals on cd) they would send new disks every 3 months, but you had to pay a subscription to the service and it had one of these. you never had to change the dongle but the disks would not work without the dongle. the disks would quit working just after 3 months, (they would not send the new ones if you did not pay).
Takes me back to the days that we had a program called FastBack that would insist you insert the original disk in the floppy drive before you started backing up your computer to other floppy disks. It took me a single afternoon to step through the program with DEBUG in MS-DOS and just jumping into and over CALL instructions until I found the subroutine that checked for the original floppy. I wrote a batch file that executed the DEBUG instructions from the command line and from then on we could leave the original disk out... I didn't even have to patch the program.
Around the mid 90s, a customer of ours, used some pricey manufacturing management software which came with one of these Rainbow brand dongles. The owner wanted to run two copies. One at the office and one at home. He let me borrow the dongle. I hooked it up to my PC and put a logic analyzer on it. Found that only one data pin was used to send a serial data stream. But always the same data sequence. I made a bootleg dongle copy, in about an hour, which worked just fine.
I don't now how many versions of these security dongles Rainbow made, but due to how quickly I defeated it, I was not impressed. I'm not the "lock picking lawyer". Just some old goober, the state of California gave an engineering degree. Its from California, so take it for what its worth.
I used to work for Data Encryption Systems when they were based at the bosses house about a mile outside Cannington in Somerset. This was back in the early nineties, and since then the company moved to Taunton and, according to a quick google search, is still selling dongles today, even adopting the USB C standard...
I have several of these things here, just can't bring myself to throw them out! Two that are badged Rainbow Sentinel are for Lattice Semiconductor, another larger one for COCAD and two that are unknown. I remember also i think it was Cubase on the Atari ST used a dongle in the cartridge port.
Yep Cubase used a cartridge
Because you know as soon as you throw 'em out, you'll need one. Same reason I still have a GW-Basic manual on my bookshelf
Parallel port had one wonderful thing - IT JUST WORKED. You connect the cable, write to a register and boom, data bounces to your external device. No DTE/DCE, secret handshakes, parity bits, random pinouts and so on being the typical joy of serial communication.
As a kid I have build some "dongles" for me and good friends in the 90's. It was a simple inverter in the data read and write lines to an external floppy drive. Other drives can't read these disks, of course ;-).
Dongles and debugging with SoftICE brings back memories from the 80s
Yeah, also industrial SCADA (factory automation) software uses dongles.
They are still used in the medical equipment stuffs.
We actually just went from dongle to software based licenses on the SCADA system I support @work. Much easier to handle it all from a central server (VM) in the data center.
I work also in Industrial automation segment (SCADA, Step7 and RsLogix5000), yes and no: Iconics uses usb dongles (which are "nicely" unrecognized when you have to reboot virtual server), Ignition doesn't have dongles (it uses an license file obtained from producer website).
Last time i used parallel dongle was when i had to install GE Fanuc on an new system due hardware failure.
Obviously, version is old, but it works well for the single task it is purposed.
Marco P Rockwell software, especially licensing and rslinx is a pain.
@@jakp8777 with prices, it is like Siemens: you have to spend at least 7000€ for an full license.
Like Siemens, you can use one server to distribute license across network (Factory Talk).
However, i wonder why you have to pay for this software when you have to spend much more for a basic Controllogix chassis.
My first digital electronics consulting job, back in 1983, was to design a dongle (serial port, I think). All it did was oscillate, so that it could be sampled more than once and would read 1 some of the time and 0 some of the time.
We still use (USB) dongles for our Mentor board design & analysis tools. It's much cheaper than buying the floating network licenses yet still allows users to share the license.
Software that still use dongles: most RIPs for large format printers like Onyx, Wasatch etc. Also software for sign production like SignLab, EngraveLab, Enroute, FlexiSign (partially dongled) and so on. More and more are moving over to "soft dongles" which makes life easier, no more broken dongles.
I can remember as a kid I played with this idea. Took a dip header and put some resistors across the pins and had the software look for the specific range. The dip header plugged into the internal game control dip socket on the motherboard.
I remember using these with software for psychological testing, I always wondered what might exist inside! Thanks for the video.
The Aladdin company produced these dongles and they were quite secure. They moved to USB with some updates on security, AES on the hardware chip along with memory. Thales now owns the IP and is still selling them under the Gimelto? brand.
I don't know about the one you have but the new USB ones I've worked with are very impressive, but when your software costs $50k a copy you want to protect it with hardware. I know from experience that the software is decrypted by the dongle and you can store keys on the hardware that your software uses so it's difficult to bypass (probably not impossible, just costly).
Still used to this day for video games in arcades. Popular with the company 'Raw Thrills" Might have gone out of favor as things progress... But they are around and rarely ever fail.
I used a altera max programming development environment back in the early 90s which probably used the same dongle. But I cracked it by tracing the disassembled startup code on the the computer which was recognizably compiled C or something and i found that I intermittently called a function which would check the dongle and then return one or zero and if zero it would bomb out an complain you needed a dongle. So I just changed one single byte in the code so that the return value was always one, and that worked, because while it frequently call this to check the dongle was plugged in, after my change it always returned true.
I was still using a parallel port dongle in 2007. It was a software for controlling an engraver we used at work. I managed to install the software and the dreaded dongle on a windows server and use multiple TSE sessions successfully though. The license stated it was for a single computer. Didn't say anything about multiple sessions. I believe this setup is still in use to this day!
In 1990 when I was an apprentice I worked in the engineering department. One engineer was using this Quartus Software on a 386DX-16. They bought this software but some colleagues reverse engineered this dongle and replaced the logic with: One ALTERA EPLD :) So they used a Dolch Logic Analyzer and the Altera software to hack this, it was awesome. Unfortunately I don not have no contact to any of them anymore.
CAD and structural engineering software still had hardware locks both parallel and USB well into the 21st century. At least until about 2009 when I was doing IT work in that sector.
While the Rainbow name may be gone, they probably merged with Sentinel and eAladdin, so now owned by Thales/Gemalto. In general, software companies would license a proprietary library to talk to the dongle and some dongle-protected software to configure both the protection in the software and the dongles sent to each customer. The protection tools could encrypt part of the program so you couldn't even read the application code without a valid dongle. Further details may still be under NDA.
Secure Computing was one of this companies names during the middle of it's life. I've got a Rainbow dongle protected release of Newtek's Lightwave 3D 5.5 for Windows NT 4 on DEC Alpha.
Yes, dongles used in the 2000’s - we used parallel port dongles up until around 2008 for engine management and genset controller software protection at a large global Diesel engine company. They went to USB just after that (I think because they couldn’t buy laptops with parallel ports by then), and I left just after that so not sure if/when they were phased out.
At my work, emergency services, our dispatch software is dongled with usb interface gadgets. Definitely still a thing as our software runs into the 'million dollars per desk' licensing and support cost.
frollard
yep, My laptop I use to programme DELWP / Parks Vic Radios has a security key Dongle.
Would someone pirate a software like that? I don't think there is that risk.
@@alerighi maybe a third world country would, but I doubt they are potential paying customers in the first place. The usual problem with DRM is that it's usually only getting in the way of your legitimate customers, pirates just bypass it.
The company I work for sells enterprise database software, with per-machine, per-core licensing. And we discovered about fifteen years ago that even big-name companies *will* cheat on their service and licensing contracts by running the software on more machines (and more powerful machines) than they're paying for - especially when the software vendor is a fairly small company that doesn't really have the money to pursue a lawsuit to its conclusion.
(We don't use a hardware dongle, though - they now have to enter some unique machine details into a form on our website and they get a digitally-signed file back which they install on the machine - so we know exactly how many machines it's running on and how many cores each one has.)
@@RedwoodRhiadra why would you charge more for software running on a more powerful machine? That's just dumb.
Until last year, my school had a classroom full of windows xp computers that had one of these dongles plugged into the parallel port of every computer. Didn't know these were this old
The company I work for still uses dongles to prevent unauthorized service people from accessing the onboard diagnostic software. If a client hires a third party service company they still need to contact us when firmware needs to be updated or secure sub-assembly has been replaced and needs authorization. They have to call us to go out to do the update or authorize a secure sub-assembly. If you don't have a service contract with us we charge a nuisance rate for the service.
Fascinating to see these old school parallel port dongles. Some softwares still use but now its all USB dongles. many niche software products I've used from vector ,dSPACE et. al. still use hardware licences like this one. I think both the mentioned companies outsource these dongles from wibu systems.
In terms of modern software dongles, the iLOK is still going strong in the Audio industry.
It handles licences via USB for a large number of professional software packages and plugins.
Scrubbing should be vandalism, like scrubbing vin numbers on cars.
Scrubbing VIN number is a criminal offense here.
Why? Why exactly should it be a crime...
@@axa.axa. Hmmm... let's think...
- Forcing wheel reinvention
- Monopolistic conservatism
- Making users captive
- No racket/extortion-free guarantee
- Preventing good knowledge sharing
- Distrusting the user base
@@nashaut7635 Silly. So they had no right to protect their IP if they choose to, how they choose to.
So this might make it a bit more difficult for you to freeload, but they weren't meant for freeloaders to begin with. the Sun UNIX workstations using these Altera dongles were meant for professionals making money, not dude in his basement that can't justify the expense.
@@axa.axa. You've just made a logical fallacy called "straw-man argumentation": I said nothing about IP!
We deal with Australian made access control systems from Inner Range that still use USB hardware dongles from Safe Inc. They come up as a HASP device in device manager. The really old access control software from the same company used to use similar looking parallel port dongles to the one in this video.
Biesse (italian CNC machine manufacturer) still used dongles in 2013 for their XNC software which was used to load g-codes from a different file and/or create and simulate a new file
Yeah, I worked for a small software dev house in the early 2000's, they were still using dongles when I left in 2007 (Rainbow Sentinel Super Pro).
They switched to "soft" licensing for their later products.
I did a quick and dirty crack of a simulation software package back in my University days. This was in the mid-2000’s and it used a Sentinel HASP USB dongle. Didn’t want to sit around all day waiting for sims to run in the computer labs so decided to reverse engineer it. It didn’t do anything smart - just checked for the presence of the dongle and that’s it, so was easy to crack.
Pretty much anything from PC-DMIS still does, though its USB now. The worst part is they want $2000 to replace them if they break even is you give them the broken one with the license.
Absolutely... several products we use are still "dongled" today! Gotta have a USB key inserted at all times...
I still have a few of the USB dongles from the 2000s, which were still in use at least up through 2005, along with their matching counterparts in parallel form - would you be at all interested in those? They were for old point-of-sale terminals, and have 1-4 lane licenses on them for Microsoft CRM (Customer Resource Management) - all older versions, of course, but I think across 3 generations of the software? Perhaps useful to do a comparison between them? Or just teardown the USB ones? If you're interested, I'd be more than glad to send them to you.
Back around 1992 I bought an $8k dongle-protected data acquisition system from HP to run on one of their $24k HP-9836C desktop controllers. Four years later, HP was still selling the same acquisition system, but now with a dongle allowing you to use a $500 generic DOS 486 machine.
Rough!
Audio engineer here. We still have a stupid dongle called the iLok. However, you can now license Pro Tools and some other software via the internet each time it is being run. Good luck going dongle-less without an internet connection though. I still have plug one into my laptop because of this.
We used to use those type of parallel licenses for Mitek OCR(character level) and the Rainbow usb dongle for ABBYY full page OCR. Back when testing meant stealing throughout from production :) We had Mitek dongles that would limit the API throughput to 25 and 50 characters per second. I don’t miss the bad old days.
There's still software which does this! Motive, the software for Optitrack mocap systems, uses a USB dongle. You can download the software for free, but it won't actually load without the hardware license key.
At work we use a RF Test machine to test mobile phones after repair and software that runs on the PC requires a USB dongle to be plugged in + licenses need to be updated every once in a while via a file received from the company that makes these.
I remember my dad used CAD software that required one of these.
Blast from the past :)
Software dongles are STILL in use surprisingly.
I used to run some automated pre-press software in the 90s that would batch process images in Photoshop…. I’d spend a whole day scanning and cropping, then feed the whole lot to my Mac IIfx (overclocked to a *whopping* 50hz and an outrageous 20MB of RAM) which would then spend the whole night optimising the images for print, colour correcting for the the press specs… Had a cute little ADB dongle. I must still have it in a box around here someplace. I remember selling and installing CAD packages in the 80s
for pipework layout and such that had it’s own dongle carrier, and you’d add modules to it depending on which optional bits of cad software you had. Some scary high-res massive CRT screens to go with that setup. There was more money in the graphics cards than in the PC…
I started a new job a few months ago, but my previous position actually still had a hardware dongle THIS YEAR! (2020) -- though these days, it's a USB dongle, which is even more confusing because by the time that was feasibly cheap enough to develop, cheaper approaches involving Internet access were long since available.
If you'd send it to me, I'd be interested in reverse engineering it.
Love your name, I love the gb. Make chiptunes with LSDJ pretty much every day!
@@novafawks Thanks. Here's a blatant plug. I haven't really done much with my YT channel so far, but I'm finally planning to start making more serious videos about Gameboy technology, programming and music this year. If you want, feel free to subscribe. If you use LSDj I have a feeling you might like the upcoming videos.
I'm sure the retro game systems could use more reverse-engineering.
So how do I build a Z80 breadBoy :)
Well first you have to start with a GB-Z80 CPU...
I remember 3d Studio Max R2 used a software dongle back in 2004. Brutal.
I recall dongles on the systems running 3D Studio MAX and/or AutoCAD back in high school.
Our fire alarm software is dongled. Without it, the software is crippled so competing companies cannot program our panels.
Still common in electrical power engineering even to this day. The network license versions if available are normally massively more expensive.
PC-Doctor, a computer hardware diagnostic suite uses a USB dongle, at least it did in the late 2000s and early 2010s, though I imagine it still does. It limits how many machines you can use it in at once.
In the mid 80s there was a CAD package called "VersaCad", at the time just as good as AutoCad. Well they had a box that was in series with the keyboard. It simply was a LUT box that send different codes for the characters. Super easy to hack, just monitor the output, A= .... B= ..... and so on.
In a previous company we were actually using Dallas iButton usb dongles for this purpose, had a tiny bit of storage for keys and basically off the shelf. This was into the late 2000’s even. Funny thing was they even included the temp sensor which was standard on the Dallas 1-wire iButtons. You could even reuse for your own stuff them after we stopped using them.
I used to use lots of those, awesome devices!
Stuck them all inside thermal chambers to get profiles, and even put them in canyon water to log temperature over a year.
I replaced a CNC mill computer a few years ago, It had one of these.
Still working today.
The security DVR software I use at work uses an USB security dongle. Yep. Called “CompleteView” and has “Copyright 2006” all over it. Dongle has a key tag hanging from it that says “CompleteView License Key.”
Forensics software like FTK and Encase are dongled, they are pretty pricey with yearly licenses costing between $3,500 to $5,000 a year.
Every laser display software for the ILDA standard uses usb dongles or other hardware keys to this day. Got a little usb dongle which is more expensive than a new phone. Sucks if you lose it.
Did you say dongles? *Apple starts salivating*
CADstar used dongles much more recently. PADS was using them only a couple of years back and might still do.
Dongles were very popular with the CAD software AutoCAD. Witihout one you could not run the software, unless you had the non-dongle US version!
we had some for a $10,000 software called Zemax for lens design. We were told if you lose the dongle they would still charge you a few thousand to replace it.
I know that the automation system that was used at the public access TV station I work at in the early to mid 00’s used a parallel dongle. I also recently bought an in the groove DDR style arcade machine that was manufactured in about 2004 that was run off an off the shelf PC that used a serial dongle for protection.
I saw an USB-dongle on a cheap chinese 40w laser cutter. It was used to "protect" their printer driver for the laser cutter - and came bundled with a pirated version of CorelDraw. The irony...
Tons and tons of modern arcade games use software security usb dongles paired with hard drives in upgrade kits actually
I remember someone made a pci card with 3 fpga and 1 of them was just to emulate a dongle
found it ruclips.net/video/C8txvmXUIJQ/видео.html
@@noodle621 This is damn impressive. I came across this video some time ago as well, I was fascinated by the amount of wire-wrapped connections he has made.
The diodes are for getting power off multiple data bus lines without shorting them together. Remember that you could attach a printer on the other side of the dongle.
Up until 2 years ago, I was programming scada, plc and telemetry systems with citect scada, rockwell(Allen Bradley) rslogix5000, and isagraf. All had USB sentinel dongles, and they weren’t cheap!
As far as I know, CAD CAM packages still use dongles however they are USB packaged. I first encounted this package in the early to mid 90,s
Our software for industrial measuring devices has usb dongles that are bound to the mac adress of the network card that is in that specific pc. You can just program different mac adresses into the dongle if you have the dongle programming software and the program version that is allowed to run on those pc's that have those mac adresses.
I saw a video recently where a guy had reverse engineered a license device that was on an ISA card and unlocked all of the features. That wasn't what the video was about, but he was using some kind of FPGA software in the video for his development.
Here was the video: ruclips.net/video/C8txvmXUIJQ/видео.html
I have some late 90s sentinel v3 dongles. The software is still needed for some fancy hardware, the company producing the hardware and the software has been gone for over a decade. I'll start emulating it when the dongle dies.
I remember the older Rockwell/Allen-Bradley RSLogix software (for PLCs) actually used a "license" that could be "moved" to and from floppy disks. The license was written outside of the filesystem to prevent you from copying it. But the easy workaround: "transfer" the license to the disk, then make an image/clone of the disk, then transfer it back... lol. Consequently, they have now switched to using USB dongles for newer versions. lol
Oh man… I remember a bit of kit for SCSI tape drives that kept track of its licenses on a “special” tape… you installed the software, put in the tape cart and it would increment or decrement the license count and “bless” that machine for use with the software. Handy thing that would allow you mount tape drive volumes as if they were hard-drives and provide (painfully slow) bulk storage. In the end the magic turned out to be a stamp of 4 changed bytes with the devs initials waaaaaay at the end of the file-system of the boot drive. Which was good to find out, as it was painfully easy to lose a partition in those days, lose the blessing, and then your license count was out of whack, never to be recovered...
I saw usb dongles in early 2000s for some sort of home programmable embroidery sewing machine. Also heard of a network analyser that used a PC card network interface and this interface was the dongle.
I remember that one of the software packages for use with Targa (Truevision) cards back in the late 80s-early 90s had one of these which had to be installed or the software would not work. Very effective way to prevent copying of software by making it useless. If you lost the dongle you were screwed. One outfit forgot to retain theirs when they upgraded computers and were out thousands (price of the software package).
Removing IC numbers on a security key seems appropriate. Our $2000 Mentor PADS PCB Software had a Dongle until a Software patch was available. Still use the software today without the Dongle. Old but functional.
Old is good.
Some options for telephone systems (Avaya being a BIG offender in this regard) require a hardware dongle. On older systems, it's a parallel port dongle, but on the newer systems, they've got it down to either a USB or just a data key on what appears to be, at heart, a regular SCSI SSD with a plastic shroud that is molded to look like a proprietary card and an adapter with a different pinout.
Very interesting. Back in the 1980-90's we used ORCAD and this was dongle protected unless you could obtain an educational version. We also ran XILINX which used dongles but never opened up any of these devices. I will venture into the loft one day and see what I can find. I haven't seen a PC for many a year that has either parallel or serial ports.
Still use a that type of dongle for our mid 2000's Electrical CAD software.
Davinci resolve, cubase, protools still use dongle. One advantage is you can easily move between computers as long as you have the dongle plug in the running pc
20+ years ago we played with a CAD-dongle. EXE-file first loaded off disk, and in the beginning of the code there was a loop that read some 100 bytes of code from the dongle and wrote them in the middle of the EXE-file. So part of the progam code got replaced by the dongle-code. If you tried to single-step through the process, it did'nt work, you had to do it full speed. Some RC-coupling in the clock line maybe?
late 1990s early 2000 a lot of academic software still had dongles.
Isn't it a bit cheap of Altera not to use any of their own programmable logic for the job?
I am blind and use a screen reader to view the computer, it uses a USB dongle which does nothing other than waste a USB port and provides activation for the software. Other options are available, but if you want the ability to move the license round it is the easiest option. Also several banking industry software uses USB dongles as well, I used to have to get USB network server type devices so we could virtualise the application servers that used the dongles.
Until some 10 years ago, a software company that made accounting apps here in Uruguay used these. Then they updated to the USB version.
A company I used to work for started putting them on their older dos based machines. They were also E-fused and if you back dated your systems date it permanently locked out the dongle. It was a real pain in the ass.
Cubase audio workstation software uses dongles. Effectively too as they haven't had a cracked version since 2009
Ah, good ol' cubase ... I recently ended up with a midi expander for Atari STs by Steinberg which I wanted to test ... turns out cracked versions of the 20+ year old version aren't easy to find or are broken (since I didn't have a dongle).
I have a dongle for BABY/400, the mainframe emulator from California Software. You need an old PC to run that now.