Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!cbosgd!ucbvax!jade!eris!spencer
From: spencer@eris.BERKELEY.EDU (Randy Spencer)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Re: An Idea for Hardware Protection
Keywords: "personal" dongle
Message-ID: <6512@jade.BERKELEY.EDU>
Date: 10 Jan 88 03:58:35 GMT
Sender: usenet@jade.BERKELEY.EDU
Reply-To: spencer@eris.BERKELEY.EDU (Randy Spencer)
Organization: Infinity=Software
Lines: 34

In article <8801090958.AA20842@ucscb.UCSC.EDU> lupin3%ucscb.UCSC.EDU@ucscc.UCSC.EDU writes:
>
>  I was thinking about having hardware dongles, and I was thinking about
>the Apple Lisa (remember THAT? :).  The Lisa had the machine's serial number
>stored in the ROMs of the machine somewhere, and the first time brand-new
>software was run, it would impress that machine's serial number onto the disk,
>so that the software could not be run on any other machine.  This was kind of
>unpopular...
>  What I'm proposing is about two steps farther than that.  First of all, this
>would have to be designed INTO the machine, so it's too late for the current
>crop of Amigas...

I have yet to see the advantage of hardware protection, I think it is just 
really screwy to do stuff like that, I have got three Amigas on this desk
here at home, if I buy a piece of software (course, that'll be the day,
I just trade my companies software for whatever I need...), if I buy a 
piece of software, and it works on one machine, but not on the rest of the
desk I would feel pretty screwed.  What happens when I have moved the
BBS over to machine 2 (Duey), and I want to run a piece of software on
machine 3 (Louie), while the first machine finishes formatting a hard disk,
but no!  I originally ran that software on Duey, and it won't recognize
Louie, but there is someone on the BBS, so I can't bring it down to 
run the software.  That would suck worse than DAT copy protection, OK, OK,
DAT copy protection is the worst thing that could happen to humanity,
but hardware protection would be pretty bad!  There just isn't a solution,
so stop talking about protecting my software, and spend the effort on
making the software something really impressive!

>larry      /   hastings        _/    BITNET: lupin3@ucscb@ucscc.BITNET
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Randy Spencer      P.O. Box 4542   Berkeley  CA  94704        (415)222-7595 
spencer@mica.berkeley.edu        I N F I N I T Y         BBS: (415)222-9416
..ucbvax!mica!spencer            s o f t w a r e                  AAA-WH1M
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