CompuServe Thread

#Copy protection?

3 messages in this thread
#149312From: Mr. ChalleronMay 29, 1994 2:25 AM
"Gould and Mehdi are looking for work"? How do you know this? I'll agree with you on the idea of somebody "de-dongling" your office computer, and how that could be a royal pain in the @ss; that's a different argument (dongle security), which could also be solved with a "dongle drawer" that uses buttons (the drawer could be lockable). "What happens when every piece of commercial software requires a dongle?" Software security wouldn't have become an issue if the public looked upon "lending programs" as the thievery it truly is; but the problem _does_ exist, and _corporations_ are usually the biggest pirates — and I'm telling you, in the future we're either going to have "software police" raids, or everybody's going to learn to live with dongles. Mr. C (Amiga: Muerte O Suerte?)
#149536From: Robert LittleMay 29, 1994 11:07 PM
>>or everybody's going to learn to live with dongles. Bull, there is no way that we will live with 'hardware' dongles in the future. They are, have, and always will be, absurd. Software keys (read dongles, in my book) are a different story, although, a simlilar pain in the a**. Small computers are becoming big computers fast. If we had to have a hardware dongle for every different piece of software on our mainframe, we wouldn't be able to allocate the floor space. Think about the future when these, so called, micros are running everthing from god knows who and every one requires a dongle, not likely, it's simply not practical, it never has been and it will not be in the future. Period. Robb
#149573From: Harry ManolopoulosMay 30, 1994 2:32 AM
Alpha Micro puts SSD's (Software Security Devices) on each CPU. The PC equivalent would be a serialized chip on each motherboard or an internal dongle. An installation program patches the program code to key it to the device. Install the software on a different PC and it won't work. The problem in the PC market is the volume of software and many manufacturers of clones. HarryM