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Comment by tgv | Hacker News Reader

Idk. Was ilok ever cracked?

There's no one 'ilok' protection scheme, there are many. And most of them have been cracked.

How so? I always figured it was simply a decryption service/library with the dongle serving as a the secret. So e.g. samples (or important information about the samples) can only be read when the dongle is present. Is that view too simple?

I'm only able to go by what R2R put in their .nfos, since I've not tried reverse engineering ilok plugins at all. But they claim that different companies use different ilok algorithms, and some of them haven't been cracked, yet.

Some seem to work a little like what you say, UVIs for example decrypt libraries against the ilok, and R2R has UVIEMU for that, but clearly it's not sufficient to crack all ilok plugins that way, or Softube's wouldn't remain uncracked.

And since ilok doesn't require a dongle anymore - there are machine and cloud licensing options too, and developers can opt in or out to each of the 3 license holder systems...

Yes, by R2R

No. It's always interesting to me how music apps were the only ones adopting hardware copy protection wholeheartedly. Multi-thousand dollar scientific apps? nope. Music apps.

That’s not surprising at all. I don’t about the scientific apps you’re talking about, but I assume that their user base would be accessing them through academic site licenses. Music apps, however, would be predominantly used by hobbyists, a few of which would later make it big. The problem was/is that the price tags assumed studio budgets. But if you wanted those studio sounds at home, well the price is a big challenge until you start making solid money. Which is even fewer

Didn’t CAD automation software also adopt it? I remember MasterCam, SolidWorks and others needing hardware dongles.

The market for that is tiny compared to music but, the money made basically guaranteed given adoption rates. Even today I think there are too few contenders to pose a significant market risk to these companies.

I think these have modernised, because SolidWorks now uses floating e-licenses for example.

From a consumer perspective hardware dongles are mega-problematic right now because of the USB C vs USB A debacle on new laptops, and also because many AVs now block USB devices by default and require ITS admin to unblock it.

From a distributor perspective, they require shipping physical product to customers which reduces margins and can take weeks, especially-so when you talk about shipping from overseas.

They did. I worked in a technical college in the 90s and Autodesk and others were huge fans of the single plugged into the serial port. Was a huge problem not only daisy chaining them all together but also they would get stolen if not secured. We’d ribbon cable them back inside the case where’d there would be a many inches of dongle precariously joined. Fond memories.

CAD/CAM has mostly been FlexLM protected for as long as I remember. Flex used a hardware dongle for a while, but then moved away from it.

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