The Hasp dongle -- war stories?

[kee nethery]

>
>> and then slowly destroying hypercard and the stack if the stack was 
>> messed with in any way.
>
> I take the virtually naive approach that intentions were good and 
> report the situation as clearly as I can while minimizing the 
> providing of information useful in hacking.

The product was sold as part of a class presented by the author of the 
information. The distribution was extremely limited and the fear was 
that someone would reverse engineer the data and duplicate the 
intellectual property and that the lack of sales (if people could get 
it for free) would kill the ability to support the product. This had 
happened to other products in the same category. We knew there were bad 
guys out there who would try to attack the protections and try to get 
around them.

Because of the miniscule market and the certainty of attack, we were a 
great deal more aggressive in protecting the code than would make sense 
for most products. For most products the support nightmare of dealing 
with people to whom your code has actively caused problems would be 
terrible. For this situation, it was the right thing to do and it 
worked. There were no reports of the protections causing anyone harm 
and there never was a hacked version available.

Kee Nethery