My old man vs LC Standalone

[kee nethery]

My wife built a Hypercard stack standalone that was protected by a dongle. But, every call to the dongle was something you could search for in the scripts. So she had scripts that did hashes of the scripts that talked to the dongle. And she had scripts that did hashes of the scripts that checked the hashes of the scripts …

Plus, she broke up the calculations into various sections of other code. When a script noticed stuff was being altered, it would start erasing stuff in the app stack. And it would look for Hypercard itself on their disk and start erasing stuff in it. It would hold on as long as possible doing as much damage as possible.

Setting the code to do all this protection was a carefully scripted process because one false step and it would self destruct and damage her Hypercard. It was pretty obvious to me when that happened because the cursing would be rather loud and prolonged.

She’d do things like add up all the chars in a script, do a modulo on that number, and then go to script ID <that answer> to execute a line of code in that script.

I’m sure someone could have eventually gotten past all that stuff but don’t think anyone ever did.

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All that said, shareware authors would routinely hang out on crack sites and seconds before releasing their app, they would post a crack. No one wants to be the second person to crack an app so the author would be the only crack. That crack would allow someone to use the app for some period of time (months) and then it would develop some kind of error. Users would call in for support on XYZ error and the answer was, the more recent version fixes that. It’s a simple upgrade, here’s the URL for users with this error. And those folks would become paid users.

Kee