Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!rutgers!ucla-cs!zen!ucbvax!unisoft!gethen!farren
From: farren@gethen.UUCP (Michael J. Farren)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Re: An Idea for Hardware Protection
Keywords: "personal" dongle
Message-ID: <559@gethen.UUCP>
Date: 10 Jan 88 09:52:56 GMT
References: <8801090958.AA20842@ucscb.UCSC.EDU>
Reply-To: farren@gethen.UUCP (Michael J. Farren)
Organization: There's Unix there in Oakland
Lines: 27

In article <8801090958.AA20842@ucscb.UCSC.EDU> lupin3%ucscb.UCSC.EDU@ucscc.UCSC.EDU writes:
>  The upshot?  You get your new computer home, stick in the dongle, close the
>door.  Click through all the System Requesters it wants, as above.  You buy
>a neat new game, stick it in, imprint it with your serial #.  Play a while,
>decide you want to show this neat new game to your neighbor, who has also
>bought one of these new computers.  You take out your disk, and also take
>out your dongle.  Go over, and stick your dongle on to the end of his, and
>you're set to go.

How about this upshot, instead:  you take out your disk, and take out
your dongle.  In the process, one of the pins on the dongle gets damaged
(as it will, invariably, if you do the old in-out-in-out enough).
When you get over to your friends, you try and insert your dongle into
his computer.  It seems to go in o.k., but the pin you've previously
damaged has shorted the five volt supply directly to an input pin on
his computer's dongle port, burning it out.  The next time he tries
to use his own dongle, nothing happens.  He then comes over to your
house with a ten-pound sledge hammer, which he proceeds to apply to
your computer, with enthusiasm.

Dongles:  just say "Jeez, what a STUPID idea!"

-- 
Michael J. Farren             | "INVESTIGATE your point of view, don't just 
{ucbvax, uunet, hoptoad}!     | dogmatize it!  Reflect on it and re-evaluate
        unisoft!gethen!farren | it.  You may want to change your mind someday."
gethen!farren@lll-winken.llnl.gov ----- Tom Reingold, from alt.flame