elg@killer.UUCP (Eric Green) (07/13/87)
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
roy@phri.UUCP (Roy Smith) (07/19/87)
In article <1131@killer.UUCP> elg@killer.UUCP (Eric Green) writes: > I had a program with a dongle once. What's a "dongle"? -- Roy Smith, {allegra,cmcl2,philabs}!phri!roy System Administrator, Public Health Research Institute 455 First Avenue, New York, NY 10016