Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!bellcore!decvax!ucbvax!pasteur!agate!ig!uwmcsd1!bbn!husc6!linus!philabs!micomvax!zap!iros1!ouareau!desmarai From: desmarai@ouareau.iro.umontreal.ca (Stephane Desmarais) Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga Subject: Re: About Software Piracy! (software that bites back) Summary: false contact on dongles Message-ID: <399@mannix.iros1.UUCP> Date: 28 Jan 88 21:27:21 GMT Sender: news@iros1.UUCP Reply-To: desmarai@iros1.UUCP (Stephane Desmarais) Organization: Universite de Montreal Lines: 30 Posted: Thu Jan 28 16:27:21 1988 References: Wade Bickel proposed the idea of a dongle, and suggested something that looked like this: 1) if the dongle isn't there when you try to load of the program, don't load it (and don't do any damage (after all, some could have forgotten to put is dongle in place (put I suppose usually everybody would leave his dongle in place all the time (too many parentheses :-)))) (funny face with quadruple chin) 2) If the dongle isn't detected later during the execution, supposedly meaning sombody tried to pirate the software, erase some files (only files related to the same program) Let me describe a problem with 2). I have an *old* C-64, and I use a disk drive accelerator on a cartridge. The pins on the expansion port are really worn out. So, sometimes, in the middle of a session, there is a false contact which makes the computer think that there isn't any cartrige. I can really see the same thing appenning to dongles... Don't take me wrong. I'm not against dongles (a unique dongle for each computer, not one for each software), but I'm against the 2) idea. --- -- cccc 666 4 Stephane Desmarais c c 6 44 Departement d'informatique c == 6666 4 4 Universite de Montreal c c 6 6 44444 uunet!utai!musocs!iros1!desmarai cccc 666 4 Avis: Sante et bien-etre social Canada considere que le danger croit avec l'usage.