PC Floppy Copy Protection: Vault Prolok | Hacker News Reader

PC Floppy Copy Protection: Vault Prolok

martypc.blogspot.com

63 pointsGloriousCow8 comments

Don't miss the interview with Robert McQuaid, a fascinating read:

https://martypc.blogspot.com/2024/09/pc-floppy-copy-protecti...

>There is one part that fills me with guilt to this day. The software industry had long dreamed of shutting down copiers with litigation. The decision in my case could not have been more favorable to copiers even if I had written it myself. This convinced the software industry, and the music and movie industries, that there would be no relief through the courts as long as they followed Vault vs Quaid. In 1996 they switched from litigation to legislation. The result was the horrible Digital Millennium Copyright Act enacted without opposition in 1998. I feel that in some way I am the godfather of this awful development.

man, talk about suffering from success

An investigation into the infamous 80's copy protection scheme PROLOK that involved burning holes on diskettes.

Also included is an interview with Quaid Software founder, Robert McQuaid. Vault sued Quaid Software for producing CopyWrite, a utility that could copy PROLOK protected diskettes.

The article mentions that the company died when they announced copy protection that, upon a failed check, would wipe your hard drive and potentially install a worm.

It reminded me of when FTDI decided to combat clones, and released a driver that intentionally fried the clones.

That got them in a lot of hot water, so they backed off...but then released a driver that, upon thinking it was talking to a clone, would spew garbage data out the serial port.

https://www.eevblog.com/forum/microcontrollers/ftdi-gate-2-0...

I wonder if that garbage-spewing ever inadvertently caused unexpected or dangerous behavior in microcontroller boards, PLCs, etc that control really important processes or big hardware. Imagine the scandal if it caused something like a PLC in a chemical plant to go bonkers. On the surface it seems unlikely, but somewhere out there is a microcontroller that takes really short, simple serial commands and random data could eventually generate a 'valid' command that does something that really shouldn't be done.

The clones even fixed errata in the FTDI chip.

It's just like the IBM PC and its clones: before long, the clones were better than the real thing, and cheaper too.

iirc the garbage data from FTDI's driver is the string "NON GENUINE DEVICE FOUND". Instead of returning the real data serial data, it replaces it with bytes from that string, read 5 bytes from the chip and you would get "NON G" read another 5 and you would get "ENUIN" and so on.

This brings back old memories. My first ever consulting gig in the early 90s was to come up with floppy-based copy protection software for an accounting package. It was written in assembly and C.

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