🚀 go-pugleaf

* Doug Jacobs:

> Ugh.  I hated those things!  Stupid dongles!  A friend of mine worked in a 
> lab that used such a program.  Only theirs was locked to the MAC address 
> of an ancient, ISA, 10baseT ethernet card.  The company was long gone, but 
> he still needed the software and it wouldn't work without its key.  
> Eventually they had to buy a new program because PCs no longer came with ISA 
> slots.

If the program was locked to the NICs MAC address then he probably would 
have been able to use a modern PCI NIC and just change the MAC address 
in the driver settings. If it checks the hardware MAC or anything else, 
too, then well...

> What's to stop me from doing a dump of the USB key and cloning it?

The strong encryption that is used in modern dongles? It's not the same 
like dongles 20 years ago which only contained some fixed data which 
were checked by the program. Today dongles use very strong encryption 
chips (AES and the like) which makes it impossible to just to make a 
dump. If you can't find a security hole in the encryption chain then 
you're lost...

> And what of the legitimate users who lose their key and the original 
> company is no longer around so they can't even get a replacement?

Then they are screwed...

> Or the fact that including a dongle with each game will drive prices up at 
> least $10.

Probably much more than that. Even for software manufacturers dongles 
already cost ~40-70USD, and that is only the hardware price and doesn't 
include the additional costs for implementation. Dongles probably would 
add at least 100 bucks to the sales price...

Benjamin