[HN Gopher] 111-1111111 is a valid Windows 95 key (2021) [video]
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111-1111111 is a valid Windows 95 key (2021) [video]
Author : hexadec
Score : 45 points
Date : 2023-02-26 02:53 UTC (20 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.youtube.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.youtube.com)
| zerr wrote:
| It was valid for Visual Studio 97 as well.
| JoshGlazebrook wrote:
| Yup, I remember using this key for visual studio 6.0 when I was
| like ten years old.
| snotrockets wrote:
| This video could've been a textual content.
| jeroenhd wrote:
| MS activation mechanisms always remind me of this video:
| https://youtu.be/rXHu9OmLd8Y; how Microsoft Bob was used to
| initialize a chunk of random data used with the cryptographic
| activation mechanism of Windows XP.
| toasteros wrote:
| It's valid for Quake 3, too!
| apprenticemason wrote:
| 000-0000000 was the key I kept in my memory in case I needed to
| install Visual Basic 6.0 on a new computer back in my middle
| school days :) great memory I forgot about, thank you for sharing
| the link.
| eclipxe wrote:
| FCKGW
| tim-- wrote:
| I probably am overthinking this; I always wondered if that
| key was purposely leaked by someone who didn't like Bill
| Gates.
| twawaaay wrote:
| It may sound strange to people who were born later.
|
| But in 90s these mechanisms were in infancy. It was normal for
| computers to auto-login and have no password at all, processes
| could each read entire memory on the machine. Software was
| cracked the moment it came out and it was assumed people bought
| any software because they feared legal action rather than because
| they had no other way to get their hands on it -- late 90s and
| early 2000s you could download pretty much anything you wanted,
| immediately, for no cost.
|
| There really wasn't much possibility to protect your piece of
| software. If it was put on a CD somebody will either extract the
| key or modify your software to accept any key.
|
| Windows security mechanism was no better and there were copies
| distributed so much that probably many people remember "standard"
| CD Keys even to this day.
|
| And it was pretty much safe because most software did not have
| ability to phone home so the software developer would have no way
| of knowing that somebody used an illegal copy.
|
| The business model was mostly companies paying for software
| (fearing an ex-employee reported illegal use). I remember most
| teens and young adults (which is most people who used computers)
| would never buy any kind of software, music or video. The only
| exception was sometimes people bought OEM software with their
| hardware.
| forinti wrote:
| One mechanism which was sometimes used for more expensive
| software was a dongle connected to the parallel port.
| RedShift1 wrote:
| This still exists today, only now with USB dongles.
| PapaSpaceDelta wrote:
| I've heard stories about high end recording studios, with
| shrink wrapped boxes of expensive audio software, that used
| cracked versions on their workstations because they don't
| want to deal with the inevitable iLok hassles...
| georgemcbay wrote:
| These were generally useless at the time, at least as it
| pertains to online piracy.
|
| Enough to keep honest people honest and not copy the software
| to their immediate friends, but if the software had people
| interested in pirating it someone would disassemble it and
| just jump over the part that looked for the dongle while
| keeping all the software functionality intact and these
| patched versions would be readily available online to anyone
| who knew where to look.
|
| At the end of the day not really any more secure than various
| software-based copy protection schemes, just more wasteful
| due to the extra hardware.
| londons_explore wrote:
| FCKGW-...
| pxx wrote:
| It's _FCKGW_, not what you have. It's easier to remember this
| way...
| vidanay wrote:
| And your biggest fear was that an outgoing employee would drop
| a dime and report you to the BSA (not the Boy Scouts of
| America).
| zaps wrote:
| Don't copy that floppy
| amiga386 wrote:
| That didn't stop people creating hard-to-crack copy-protected
| software.
|
| Since disk drives existed, games makers created floppy disks
| that industrial disk duplicators that standard computers could
| read, but couldn't write, and ensured their games had code to
| check for that. It generally wasn't feasible to replicate these
| special tracks with a normal floppy drive, so instead people
| had to reverse engineer the game and remove the copy protection
| checks.
|
| This could be easy or hard, depending on how devious the
| programmers were. One of the legendary games for this was
| Dungeon Master on the Amiga or Atari ST which took crackers
| about a year to find _all_ the copy protection checks [0]
|
| This wasn't the only form of copy protection.
|
| * Games since their earliest day had things like "enter word 7
| on page 5 of the manual". Some games had a red-on-red "copy
| protection sheet", designed so that it would be very difficult
| to replicate with a standard black-and-white photocopier.
| Monkey Island came with a two-piece "Dial-a-pirate" code wheel
| [1]
|
| * To thwart third party software developers, and to distort
| fair trade and give themselves lucrative pricing monopolies,
| the Nintendo NES had a "lockout chip", the 10NES [2]
|
| * Sony Playstation games had a "wobble" built into the groove
| of their pressed discs that normal CD-Rs didn't have, and the
| frequency of the wobble indicated which region the game was
| sold to, preventing free and fair international trade by foul
| means [3]
|
| * Products like AutoCAD came with a dongle, [4] it connected to
| the parallel port because USB hadn't been invented.
|
| But yes, for software like Windows, where the entire product
| has to be installed on a hard drive, it wasn't within customer
| expectations to have to permanently attach a dongle or have
| media in a drive, and there wasn't commonplace network access
| with which to "phone home", the serial key or CD key was used
| to limit distribution. As you say, Microsoft enforced this
| mainly with licence audits - the BSA not only offered a reward
| for employees to rat out their companies [5] but they also
| generally acted as a front for Microsoft; Microsoft would drop
| their lawsuit for your minor infringement of some of their
| software, if you agreed to stop using Microsoft's competitors'
| software and convert your business to becoming a Microsoft-only
| shop.
|
| Microsoft also got paid by doing deals with OEMs. If you bought
| a PC in the 1990s, you likely paid a "Windows tax", where every
| PC sold, even ones which will only run Linux, gave a portion of
| the sales price to Microsoft. They illegally used their
| exclusive agreements with OEMs to prevent BeOS entering the PC
| operating system market. Microsoft was found guilty of using
| illegal anticompetitive tactics to crush their rivals in the
| x86 operating system market. [7]
|
| [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VheNpiSZxf0&t=489s
|
| [1] https://oldgames.sk/codewheel/secret-of-monkey-island-
| dial-a...
|
| [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIC_(Nintendo)#10NES
|
| [3]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlayStation_(console)#Copy_pro...
|
| [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_protection_dongle
|
| [5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_Alliance
|
| [6]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bundling_of_Microsoft_Windows#...
|
| [7] https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/district-
| courts/FSupp2/...
| wkat4242 wrote:
| Yeah elite on pc had such a copy protection mechanism.
|
| But they picked any word in the book, even simple ones like
| "the". So just entering that 20x or so would get you in.
| JeanMarcS wrote:
| I remember a text adventure game on Amstrad CPC ("Le passager
| du temps" in french, roughly translating as "Time passenger")
| which I had a pirated copy.
|
| You could play the adventure until you found the time travel
| machine (could take 1 to 3 hours depending).
|
| You start the machine and then it went on infinite loop text
| : "tired of piracy tired of piracy tired of piracy..." !
|
| Highly frustrating, but you couldn't help to admire the
| developper.
|
| If I remember correctly, it was something about the way that
| a floppy track was formated, with the wrong number of
| sectors, which was readable by the disk drive, but it
| couldn't write it using normal copy mode.
| lloeki wrote:
| Could also be something like that:
|
| https://scarybeastsecurity.blogspot.com/2020/12/the-
| cleveres...
|
| I remember reading some article I can't find again about a
| very unusual floppy protection that involved nonstandard
| floppy format, something like non standard sector sizes
| that could be read by the hardware but not written, and the
| protected software implemented some direct access to the
| floppy hardware to read data.
| VBprogrammer wrote:
| I'm pretty sure I remember a pirated version of Metal Gear
| solid on the original play station where the fact you where
| using a pirated version came up in the gameplay at some
| point.
| SpaceL10n wrote:
| It's weird reading about my life as if it's history.
|
| Everyone was doing it. I remember my teachers, friends, and
| family all giving me pirated software at some point. I remember
| my friends and I getting excited when someone got a ripped copy
| of some game and we couldn't wait to burn new CD-ROMs to share.
| If one of us got our hands on the copy of some game, we all got
| copies. It was kind of like a free-for-all in the world was
| starving for cool applications. Computers were starting to live
| up to their promises and software was just like recipe cards.
| treeman79 wrote:
| Linus from Tech Tips still pirates windows. He even has a
| whole video on why.
|
| https://youtu.be/M3bezYerYxQ
| vidanay wrote:
| I remember the days of cracked software on Apple II systems.
| The crackers would add custom splash screens advertising
| themselves.
|
| http://artscene.textfiles.com/intros/APPLEII/
| LocalH wrote:
| The related C64 cracking scene also begat the demo scene.
| The flashy crack intros with sprites, scrollers, and raster
| bars became the flashy demo intros, and from there they
| learned about a wonderful thing called "design".
| washadjeffmad wrote:
| In many cases, disassembling and modding was often necessary
| to get software working on your system. We all shared
| executables that patched bugs, added features, and improved
| performance back in the 90s and 00s.
| KronisLV wrote:
| > It's weird reading about my life as if it's history.
| Everyone was doing it.
|
| Here in Latvia that's still somewhat the case, at least
| according to statistics like these:
| https://eng.lsm.lv/article/society/society/latvia-leading-
| in...
|
| I've personally seen people who choose to pirate everything
| from movies, to OSes and IDEs, and have no problem with doing
| that whatsoever. That said, I can kind of understand it, due
| to many not exactly having lots of money to throw around.
|
| Personally, I live a bit more ethically, but it kind of
| sucks: I'm not sure what I'd do without JetBrains offering
| student licenses, followed by a graduation discount and
| recurring discounts. I've also not bought a AAA game on
| release in years, it's always sometime later on sale etc. The
| same goes for server hosting, most PaaS solutions are too
| expensive and vendors like AWS and GCP are outside of my
| price point.
|
| But hey, OSes like Linux and software like LibreOffice are a
| godsend. As are free IDEs and text editors as well,
| sometimes.
| wkat4242 wrote:
| I used to copy like crazy but now that I have a good job I
| pay for most of my software. Mainly because I like to keep
| my computer clean from malware. If I ever need to run
| something pirated because it's ridiculously expensive (like
| Adobe stuff or IDA pro) I run it in a VM or an isolated
| machine.
|
| It's less out of an ethical sense though. Video I still
| pirate by the terabyte. Most of that comes from large media
| concerns that I don't really have much care for. The small
| games industry I support as much as I can on GOG.
|
| Latvia and Bulgaria are great for torrent sites indeed,
| there seems to be nobody even trying to take them down
| unlike in western europe.
| [deleted]
| ta1243 wrote:
| Everyone took software from the office and installed it at
| home, that's why everyone uses microsoft at home, you got it
| for free from work.
|
| Worked for microsoft, worked for the people taking it home.
| Everyone was happy.
| johannes1234321 wrote:
| > it was assumed people bought any software because they feared
| legal action rather than because they had no other way to get
| their hands on it
|
| With windows specifically a factor is that it is/was almost
| impossible to get a computer (PC/Desktop) without Windows
| license. Compared to that the number of potentially illegal
| copies was neglectable. And even for Office it was probably
| better that people use a copy from dubious source than a
| competitor so they don't find out that alternatives are good
| enough.
| seydor wrote:
| > late 90s and early 2000s you could download pretty much
| anything you wanted, immediately, for no cost.
|
| This is still true today btw, but the broader user base
| includes a lot more people willing to pay
| toss1 wrote:
| What may prevent more of it today is that "cracked" software
| has been found to be a handy delivery mechanism for malware
| so, especially after the spread of cryptocurrency and
| ransomware utilizing it for payment, there is a reasonable
| fear of your download coming with an extremely costly
| payload.
|
| So, oddly enough, the transnational criminal gangs are
| helping the corporations in a way they never could do for
| themselves.
| voidfunc wrote:
| I really really miss the 90s computing environment. I was young
| but it was a total wild west and the internet was beautiful and
| totally open. For a curious kid without a lot of friends it was
| amazing.
| boredemployee wrote:
| That really was me in the 90s. Made all my real and best
| friends using mIRC and ICQ. the good old days.
| YPPH wrote:
| >was normal for computers to auto-login and have no password
|
| This persisted for longer than it should have on Windows! I
| remember on Windows XP Home Edition, you could just press Ctrl
| Alt Delete to drop to the classic winlogon.exe screen and then
| log in as "Administrator" with no password!
|
| By that time, though, Microsoft had implemented product
| activation. To my knowledge, no one ever cracked the telephone
| activation algorithm. That is, there were no tools to get a
| confirmation ID from an install ID. At the very least, no tools
| were ever made widely available, and don't seem to be even to
| this day. I suppose there wasn't a lot of need, since pirates
| just distributed volume licenced versions that did not require
| product activation (FCKGW).
| metadat wrote:
| Devils0wn Windows XP Final serial key, yeah baby! Seared into
| my mind forever after entering it so much:
|
| FCKGW-RHQQ2-YXKRT-8TG6W-2B7Q8
|
| I used to reinstall windows anytime anything got weird, which
| was often because I was always messing with disabling
| combinations of system services in attempts to reduce OS
| memory consumption. Wtf is svchost.exe doing? I don't want
| it! Wireless Zero Config? I don't have Wi-Fi, too flaky and
| slow (remember, it's 2003). Distributed Link Tracker? Sounds
| cool, but what distributed links am I tracking? I don't think
| this is part of Napster or KaZaa.. DCOM Sockets.. <disable>,
| and so on, until the eventual: Oops, the network is messed
| up. What was this originally set to? Haha. Oh well, time to
| refresh and start anew..
|
| _Sigh._ Those were good times. Eventually I got more memory
| and gave it all up and devolved all the way to allowing Win10
| to indulge in it 's wasteful memory ways and report it's
| telemetry about me or whatever the fuck else creepy shit it
| wants to do. It also helps that now we tend to have a bit
| more than 512MB total RAM.
| JackGreyhat wrote:
| Oh...my...god...
|
| That CD key. I remember that one as well. Good times :)
| Thanks for bringing up these memories.
| gvx wrote:
| I killed so many instances of svchost.exe back in the day!
| Never ran into anything bad that a reboot wouldn't fix. I
| remember figuring out by trial-and-error which instances
| were safe to kill by looking at their memory usage.
|
| There was something exciting about stripping Windows XP to
| its bare essentials, and also it seemed necessary at the
| time, if you wanted to run it smoothly on an ageing laptop
| that was basically obsolete when it was new. Especially if
| you wanted to run such RAM and CPU hogs like The Sims 2!
| (Not to mention the 40 GiB disk space that just filled up
| so fast with save games and expansion packs.)
|
| I wonder if Windows 10 still lets you use an alternative to
| explorer.exe for its desktop shell? I used to write my own
| little launchers and spotlight-esque programs.
| recursive wrote:
| I wish you still could. I resent being required to create a
| user account to use my own computer.
| winsid wrote:
| The activation process relies on public key cryptography. The
| private keys, held by Microsoft, are amongst their most well-
| protected assets. Much more so than their source code, for
| instance, which is developed with the expectation that it
| will be leaked in part or in whole.
| metadat wrote:
| Given the length of Windows serial keys is not that long,
| why couldn't one extract the check function and run an
| iteration attack to generate valid keys?
|
| Edit: @ale42: makes sense, thanks for putting this one to
| rest. 36^25 is approximately 8 x 10^38 which is a really,
| really big number.
| ale42 wrote:
| There are 25 characters, each of which has 36 possible
| values. So 36^25 possibilities, and log2(36^25) = 129.2.
| There are basically 129 bits of entropy in there, so good
| luck bruteforcing it.
|
| This makes me think of a shareware app (I think an icon
| editor) for Windows 3.1 back in 1994 or so... I could
| find a valid registration key by entering random numbers
| by hand in around 2 minutes. And I wasn't lucky as I
| tried and succeeded several times ;-) But the rule
| (figured out after I had 10 or so valid keys) was simple
| maths with the digits, no crypto behind.
| AlotOfReading wrote:
| Not if their cryptography is done properly. Cryptosystems
| are designed to maintain their security even if the
| complete algorithm is known to the adversary. You'll
| commonly see this phrased as "don't rely on security
| through obscurity".
| mschuster91 wrote:
| What stops people from just exchanging the public key that
| is used for verification?
|
| (Not that it matters in a world where kmspico and dazloader
| exist, but still)
| LocalH wrote:
| Imagine the shitshow that would happen if those keys leaked
| lmao. They've got to have a ton of them, across all their
| services.
|
| It'd be cool to be able to build "legitimate" LIVE packages
| that would be usable on unmodified 360s lol
| msla wrote:
| > But in 90s these mechanisms were in infancy. It was normal
| for computers to auto-login and have no password at all,
| processes could each read entire memory on the machine.
|
| Only in the home computing world, which is why people on Real
| Computers thought home computers were toys back then. Real
| Computers, running Unix and VMS and MVS, damn well did have the
| protections Wintendo didn't, and didn't mandate a reboot every
| forty-odd days, either. Microsoft didn't even begin to achieve
| parity until Windows XP or later, and Apple didn't until MacOS
| X.
| stevekemp wrote:
| Very true, there are a lot of sites out there back in the day
| that a lot of oldtimers would remember.
|
| My personal favourite was astalavista, named in relation to the
| legit search-site altavista I guess.
|
| Actually I take that back, my favourite site was +fravia's
| reverse engineering pages. Mostly because the legitimate crack-
| sites were safe, but there was always a risk of downloading
| something with a virus, or a trojan instead. So it was more
| rewarding to read up on the reversing techniques and do the job
| myself.
|
| Happy days using Numega's soft-ice (kernel mode debugger) to
| remove the protection it shipped with.
|
| When I switched to Linux one of the first "problems" was that
| there were few commercial binaries which required a license
| key, so there were fewer reasons to actual get into reverse
| engineering / decompiling & patching linux binaries.
| strictnein wrote:
| Wow astalavista brings back some great memories. Hadn't
| thought about that site for a long, long time.
| bunabhucan wrote:
| Prior to W95/NT4 windows didn't even have a license key, scary
| warning text was the upper limit of enforcement. In some
| companies part of the IT departments job was to find unlicensed
| software and delete or pay for it.
| kivlad wrote:
| I know that a few pieces of software distributed on floppy
| showed a warning if it detected it was previously installed
| (which wrote to some file on the disk, given it wasn't write
| protected). Which basically amounted to a sternly-written
| paragraph to say that they're using honor system to make sure
| you follow the rules.
| popcalc wrote:
| Letting people pirate your software early on is a valid
| business strategy. Enterprise users pay, students/hobbyists
| find a simple crack. Once those students enter the workforce
| they decide the market.
| LocalH wrote:
| And in the Windows 9x days, even if the user _did_ have a
| password, you could bypass that with the novel method of...
| pressing Escape.
| dividuum wrote:
| Couldn't that be disabled? I vaguely remember bypassing the
| login using the little help icon, then opening the help
| and/or (not sure) printer dialog and finally using the file
| open dialog to run explorer.exe :-)
| hyperman1 wrote:
| I always thought the password was for the network shares
| only. You could perfectly log in without a username and
| password, except networking partially fails. The login dialog
| only appeared after installing win9x networking components.
|
| A windows password would have been silly, pressing F8 at boot
| would drop you in msdos
| lloeki wrote:
| > A windows password would have been silly, pressing F8 at
| boot would drop you in msdos
|
| As it is to this day with many many Linux installs (unless
| some disk encryption is set up): edit the kernel command in
| GRUB and add init=/bin/bash. boom, you're root without any
| password.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| Yeah but as with Windows, in a decent environment you'd
| still need credentials for access to networked resources.
| wkat4242 wrote:
| That's why one sets up disk encryption :3
| merb wrote:
| good idea on computers with 100 mhz, an encryption
| algorithm would've probably not slowed down anything at
| all, especially not because there was no encryption
| extension.
| prettyStandard wrote:
| TLDW: First three digits are ignored, The remaining are mod 7.
|
| Reminds me of this classic.
|
| https://xkcd.com/424/
| morninglight wrote:
| Software Piracy
|
| That is the reason Microsoft went bankrupt, and
|
| Bill Gates is living in a mobile home in the Ozarks.
|
| You should be ashamed!
| aaronmdjones wrote:
| I was reinstalling Win95 and Win98 so much in my youth that, to
| this day, I still have my Windows 95 OEM number and Windows 98SE
| CDKEY memorised and can recall them with no effort. 20 and 25
| alphanumerics respectively.
|
| I didn't know about the much smaller 10-digit Win95 keys.
| vocram wrote:
| I wish more YouTube videos were like this: no intro, outro, ads,
| annoying music, please like and sub, captivating voice.
| [deleted]
| LeoPanthera wrote:
| Some recommendations of this type:
|
| VWestlife: https://www.youtube.com/@vwestlife
|
| Big Clive: https://www.youtube.com/@bigclivedotcom
|
| Posy: https://www.youtube.com/@PosyMusic
|
| Techmoan: https://www.youtube.com/@Techmoan
|
| Technology Connections:
| https://www.youtube.com/@TechnologyConnections
| ecliptik wrote:
| Ask me 5 years ago if I'd regularly watch someone play Doom on
| youtube and I would have laughed. Then I discovered Decino and
| their Doom deep dive and playthrough channel [1].
|
| Similar thing, no intro or self-promotion, not even a Patron.
| Just someone playing Doom levels with a calm and even tone
| explaining things about the game I never would have guessed and
| it's strangely relaxing.
|
| 1.
| https://m.youtube.com/channel/UCJ8V9aiz50m6NVn0ix5v8RQ#botto...
| teddyh wrote:
| Behold, salvation is near: https://sponsor.ajay.app/
| danrl wrote:
| there are tons of these videos on all kinds of topics.
| Unfortunately, without a captivating thumbnail view counts are
| extremely low and click through rate is laughable. Yet some
| creators refuse to A/B test crafted thumbnails that have often
| nothing to do with the video but drive views. Similarly, I keep
| my videos short and concise as I see viewer time as at least as
| valuable as mine and so do plenty of other creators.
| Unfortunately, viewers don't appreciate this en mass. My sad
| conclusion is that people don't value their time high enough to
| immediately leave a video that is wasting their time or, as so
| often, has almost nothing to do with the title or thumbnail.
| People forget why they clicked on a video within seconds of
| watching it.
|
| Source: I am a creator myself, releasing a mew video every
| Friday. I have read the engagement guides from YouTube and
| other creators and decided to not take part in this landgrab
| for viewer time. People have more important things in their
| life than my videos and I should be mindful of how I use their
| time.
| nayuki wrote:
| A mew video, you say? stacksmashing has one ;-) :
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U8fWTDUdWGA "Exploring the
| Mew Glitch"
| Logans_Run wrote:
| If memory serves (and it was a long time ago) Win98, Office 97
| and NT4 all had an easy to guess key. As long as the ABC (product
| type eg. Pro, Home) followed by the -xxx (first two digits added
| up to 9 as the last digit eg 639) -xxxx and the last 4 digits
| also added up to 9 as the last digit) all would be good and
| passed all the validation checks. A product key of xyz-000-0000
| _would_ work although it was a bit obvious where as something
| like fgh-729-32139 would sail through.... Ah, the good ol ' days
| skipkey wrote:
| So my last name is Key, and my initials are C D, so in the mid-
| late 90s any time I was prompted to enter a CD Key I would always
| try "yes". It worked at least half a dozen times.
| mdip wrote:
| Thanks for that, it brought me back to my teens.
|
| In the Renegade BBS system, for like one minor version or so,
| you could authenticate to any account, including SysOp, by
| hitting Enter instead of providing a password. Of course, in
| Renegade and many BBSes, you could login with either your
| account name or ID, which was an auto-incrementing (the manual
| way) integer starting at "0", the Sysop. And I'm fairly certain
| that the problem wasn't triggered _unless_ you logged in by ID,
| which few ever did.
|
| On one Saturday nearly every BBS in my area code running that
| software was restoring from backup.
|
| I stumbled upon it because I was "1" on another BBS[0] and
| accidentally popped "Enter" aiming for Shift when typing my
| password. After picking my jaw up from the table I called my
| buddy and told him to unplug the phone line. :)
|
| [0] Actually, I had hacked up and substantially re-written from
| the leaked Telegard 2.5 source (whichever was the origin of
| Renegade's code) and the password validation code was
| _insanity_ -- I was young enough to see hacking as mystical and
| suspected I 'd found a cleverly hidden back-door so I rewrote
| the entire thing to be as "dumb as the rest of the password
| handling logic was"; I had heard, later, that there was
| something funny going on but I stopped playing with that code
| by then and the Internet quickly ended that world. In all
| likelihood, the original developers were doing something novel
| that I was totally unfamiliar with and I made it worse, but I
| like to think I "locked that up". :)
| vxxzy wrote:
| Interesting! I once lost my original StarCraft CD Key. In a
| desperate attempt to simply install and play the game I tried
| converting "StarCraft" to numbers using A1Z26 cipher. Honesty
| didn't know it at the time what to call what I was doing. I was
| just a kid! But, guess what? It worked! It only worked for local
| play. BattleNet did not see it as a valid key. I like to think
| some SWE somewhere hid that in there on purpose. Whoever you are,
| if you see this, thank you!
| Waterluvian wrote:
| There's also a valid key pre-brood war that was something like
| "1234567890123"
| pxx wrote:
| Brood war didn't have its own keys. Both 1234567890123 and
| 3333333333333 worked for StarCraft.
| hadlock wrote:
| All 'G' was valid for Quake 3. I was surprised to find this
| out from my friend's 11 year old little sibling.
| flatiron wrote:
| I used a key gen for quake 3 when it came out. Was
| surprised when I was able to play online. Told my friends
| who were not able to play online. I guess I was just
| lucky my key was an actual key!
| gandalfian wrote:
| I once used the example key shown in a software manuals how to
| register section. It worked. I was rather chuffed at the time.
| noAnswer wrote:
| My brother bought CorelDRAW for Win95 and only kept the CD,
| forgetting how important the paper with the key was. On a
| reinstall he than entered 11223344556677889900 and it worked. I
| used that method multiple times as a teen on software from
| different manufacturers. It worked quite often. Though
| sometimes you had to play with the numbers at the end.
| (sometimes 000 other times 011 etc.)
| boredemployee wrote:
| wtf. he entered that number just out of nowhere and it
| worked? what a wizard!
| pimlottc wrote:
| It took me a while to realize this meant "license key", my first
| thought was about keyboard codes.
| vidanay wrote:
| The "111-1111111" key is right next to the "any" key on your
| keyboard.
| tastysandwich wrote:
| I recently wanted to use a program for a short amount of time for
| personal use, but the trial period was only 7 days.
|
| I used strace to find that it kept the timestamp of its first run
| in a text file, and would read that on startup. Deleting that
| completely reset the trial period.
|
| I was pretty amazed - I know most people aren't computer savvy to
| bypass trial periods, but I figured there'd be third-party
| libraries a developer could use to effortlessly guard against
| this sort of thing?
|
| (If I ever need it again I will buy it. I just literally needed
| it a couple of times for something personal and will likely never
| need it again)
| mseepgood wrote:
| Why were all triplets blacklisted except 000, 111 and 222? What
| was the thought process behind it?
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