I wish I could find a crack for the Bernina embroidery software. My grandmother had the whole package, about $4k worth of software, after she passed away my other half got the machine but the dongle got lost somewhere in the handling of the estate so we have a fancy machine that is only useful as a sewing machine. I'm sure as hell not going to drop $2k on a new copy of something we already own just to have another stupid dongle that could get lost.
Finally you had the dongle emulators.
These worked roughly like this: a free tool would read out the dongle data. This sounds simple but really involved doing a brute force attack on the dongle to guess the provider and dongle ID. What is often forgotten is that new dongles would often break or malfunction after such a procedure.
If you read out the data successfully prior of breaking the dongle (much like the SIM extraction tools for SIM cards), you could send it to one of the crackers (or semi-legal companies - very popular in Germany, they used to place adds "Dongle-Ärger") and get the dongle emulator. I guess these dongle emulators ended up leaking for the general public.
Thanks for sharing!
Foundation packs and pistons in the shelf. That's an unusual combination.
I have bad memories about the Foundation software pack. This stuff was bad.
It didn't calculate the resistance of the internal paths correctly, so when I had like 5 cells driven by another cell across the entire chip I had to set and locate a buffer manually.
Otherwise the data would not make it. Back then I used the XC5200.
It was the first software that did not cost an arm an a leg. For the real stuff like Synopsys or Synplicity they demanded your soul.
I didn't have all this drama with the dongle shown. It's nothing more than a few gates and an EEPROM. I wrote my own tool to scan it and there is no concern of breaking the dongle by running it. Also no need to send the data to some crackhead.
I didn't have all this drama with the dongle shown. It's nothing more than a few gates and an EEPROM. I wrote my own tool to scan it and there is no concern of breaking the dongle by running it. Also no need to send the data to some crackhead.
This was not possible on the Sentinel SuperPro USB dongles. You needed to do a brute force attack, which could/would leave the dongle in a non-functional state. For many years I kept updated on all forms of cracks for the software we distribute and I tried it myself.
But yes, it did work with the emulator - but the physical dongle was messed up afterwards.
The bigger parallel port dongles are really old - I only worked with those from 1994 to around 1996. They were replaced by the shorter ones. I still have some around.
Regards,
Vitor
We still use the Globetrotter FLEXLM but I think the last dongle I saw was for the Mentor tools or when they were still owned by Innoveda. That's been several years ago.
Of course we were not dealing with stolen software! I find that an offensive question, actually.
We are software distributors and as such I have always kept an eye on what cracks were available for the software we were selling, in order to help development fix the weak spots and to easily identify cracked software in the companies I visited.
And before someone raises a red flag - we never went to the authorities. All illegal use of that software was always settled in a rather friendly and constructive way.
Regards,
vitor
I can't help that you take offense to my questions or comments. Ignore me if you like. Your company distributes software and you attempt to crack it to help the suppliers fix their weak spots??? That has to be the oddest thing I have heard in a while. It seems your company woudl be in direct violation of the license agreements.
Is this some service that your company is charging the suppliers for or is the idea that your company is loosing sales to thieves and you feel you can limit that? As I said, this is really odd to me and I would like to understand more about it.
I can't help that you take offense to my questions or comments. Ignore me if you like. Your company distributes software and you attempt to crack it to help the suppliers fix their weak spots??? That has to be the oddest thing I have heard in a while. It seems your company woudl be in direct violation of the license agreements.
Is this some service that your company is charging the suppliers for or is the idea that your company is loosing sales to thieves and you feel you can limit that? As I said, this is really odd to me and I would like to understand more about it.
The rudeness of your comments comes from your assumtion of me or my company practicing any illegal activity. And yet in this new post of yours, you keep implying that once again.
Where did I say that I was cracking the software we are distributing?
On the other hand, you claimed: "I wrote the reader after I had upgraded Altera with which they supplied me with a new dongle. Tired of reading the EEPROM with the programmer, it was easier just to read it with software and store the file. "
That certainly is/was an illegal thing to do, especially if you were located in the US, since reverse-engineering and/or extracting key data out of the dongle is against your laws. Additionally it was for sure a direct violation of the license agreements. Also, it seems an odd thing to do in a company, that purchased a legal license. You could have simply used and extension cable to move the dongles to a more suitable location. Just saying...
Anyway, to answer your questions:
- Yes, we suffered from pirated software back then - not so much nowadays.
- I regularily googled for cracks for our software or they were provided to me by some customers (who suffered from other companies using cracked software and thus being able to offer cheaper prices) and tried to see how these cracks worked (bypassing FlexLM, dongle checks, etc.). Again, I basically just read the instructions (Readme.txt) and/or installed them on a virtual machine.
- I then sent those cracks and findings to the mother company for development to fix the cracks.
- Software got better protected, which was good for us.
- As a side effect I would be quickly able to identify illegal use of our software at companies (i.e. when 1 license was purchased but several instances being used). This would help discussing the situation with the customer and negotiate a friendly deal to get them onto the legal side.
- No we were not paid for this "service".
- The mother company did not do this work themselfes, because they were not aware of the amount of cracks and illegal use of their software at that time - they did not sell the licenses to the end user.
Does this clarify your doubts?
Regards,
Vitor
So what? I won't detail our company's ownership history here. It adds nothing to this topic. If you are interested in becomimg a shareholder, send me a PM!
Anyway, I just wanted to share a bit dongles in this thread.
We don't use them anymore, except for one current product.
Software is nowadays mostly protected through the internet.
Honestly I think the dongles were more user friendly than modern Cloud/online protection. You could use whatever computer you wanted and just had to pop in the dongle. No activation required...
Regards,
Vitor
So you start with a video of a teardown, open the thing, then you laugh at the rubbed off part numbers, yet immediately back away and start rambling about random guesses...
The weird thing was that the software was for special equipment and you could not do anything with the software, without the equipment. So why having a dongle in the first place was beyond me !
So because those companies do not trust each other they put it on their customers by irritating them with useless and annoying gadgets.