[alt.2600,...] Re: Need help to bypass security plug on my professional software
Steve
Newsgroups: alt.2600,sci.electronics.basics,sci.electronics.cad,sci.electronics.components,sci.electronics.design,sci.electronics.equipment,sci.electronics.misc,sci.electronics.repair
Subject: Re: Need help to bypass security plug on my professional software
clo...@nr.infi.net (Giles Cloninger) wrote:
>i've been doing this for over 20 years but what the hell is a
>dongle???
Well, dongles have fallen out of favor, so it's no surprise that you
haven't been exposed to them.
The Dongle -- A brief history.
The dongle is a device used to prevent software piracy. The device
attaches to your computer's parallel port, serial port, or other I/O
port. The software interrogates the dongle to ensure that it is
running on a machine that is being used by a licensee of the software.
Originally, dongles were a crude attempt at biometric authentication.
The dongle would attach to both the computer, and one's penis (or
"dong"). Thus, the dongle would offer continuous authentication of
the user attached to the computer, without hampering the use of the
user's hands.
A variety of measurement methods were used, including mechanical
measurement and infared mapping of blood vessels.
This approach soon proved to be problematic, however, as it was not
usable by female computer users. Initially, this was not considered
to be a fatal flaw; in the early eighties, high-end software was used
almost exclusively by males.
Other flaws in this technology surfaced. Authentication was not
reliable, due to the variable nature of the degree of tumescence of
the computer user. Later models attempted to address this problem by
continually vibrating or applying vacuum, thereby providing a more
constant level of erection. This strategy also failed, as many dongle
users found these dongles to be too distracting. Few examples of
these dongles exist outside of private collections.
This technology also proved vulnerable to spoofing, as only a limited
number of data points were monitored. A loose international
association of dongle hackers soon discovered how to produce a bogus
dong with which they could spoof the authentication process.
Women continued to make gains in the workplace, and the pressure on
software manufacturers to modify dongle technology proved to be the
undoing of this method.
A female prototype dongle was produced, but corrosion and lubrication
problems forced the abandonment of this strategy in initial testing.
Fortunately, gains were being made in cryptographic technology, and
software manufacturers found that the flawed biometric authentication
could be replaced with an electronic circuit that responded to queries
using a propriatary algorithm.
While the technology under-the-hood was radically different, the name
"dongle" had become firmly entrenched in the lexicon, and remains in
use to this day.
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