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From: elg@killer.UUCP (Eric Green)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga,comp.misc
Subject: Re: Copy protection: boycott it!
Message-ID: <1131@killer.UUCP>
Date: Mon, 13-Jul-87 03:38:11 EDT
Article-I.D.: killer.1131
Posted: Mon Jul 13 03:38:11 1987
Date-Received: Sun, 19-Jul-87 06:36:55 EDT
References: <291@l5comp.UUCP>
Organization: Bayou Telecommunications
Lines: 42
Xref: mnetor comp.sys.amiga:6639 comp.misc:851

in article <291@l5comp.UUCP>, scotty@l5comp.UUCP (Scott Turner) says:
> I can just
> imagine some poor user using oh say a book keeping package that uses a dongle
> and having the "boss" drop by one morning with the "gang" and demand to see
> the books. And the boss crush the dongle as he stomps in (ANYTHING can fall
> on the floor :) and when the user can't produce the books...

I hereby announce The Committe To Banish Dongles From The Face Of The Earth.

Reasons:

1) Here in The Computer Clutter, about three feet of printouts, notepads,
notebooks, reference manuals, and assorted electronic goodies crunch
underneath your feet as you wade through the door. I once lost a VERY
important three-ring binder, full of the specifications and interface
requirements to my latest creation, a big thick brown binder, and didn't find
it until a month later... what chance does a dongle have, through all THAT?!

I had a program with a dongle once. A friend gave it to me. It was something
about horse betting or such, I think. It's still sitting in a box SOMEWHERE --
minus the dongle! I think I saw it once, when I mucked out the room to build a
new workbench... but then I couldn't find the program it went with :-).

2) Dongles take up a port on your computer. Generally it's an "unused" port,
such as the cassette port on a Commodore 64, an RS232 port on an IBM PC (if
the program doesn't telecommunicate), etc. But there's a big problem here --
those ports are very often used by non-standard devices. For example, many
Commodore printer interfaces suck their power off the cassette port, and some
folks are stuck with serial printers on their IBMs.

Conclusion: Dongles are appealing, but their tiny size and their general
fragility makes them less than ideal as a form of copy protection, especially
if they live in a port where they'd have to be plugged and unplugged a lot
(such as a joystick port -- every time you want to play a game, yank it out,
throw it on the workbench somewhere, and hope it hasn't disappeard under a sea
of printouts and little pink reminder notes when you go to boot up the program
again). Comparing dongles with disk-based protection, it is probably MORE
likely that the consumer will eventually be unable to use the program, if the
protection is dongle-based (of course, this is also due to the proliferation
of "nibble"-type copiers! :-).

  Eric Green {ihnp4,cbosgd}!killer!elg  elg@usl.CSNET