[jt3]

“I’ve had several authors find their own software and thank me for preserving it. One author even apologized for the copy protection. He understood it was a “necessary evil” at the time, but he was so glad that someone had finally bothered to cut through it. He said it was so exciting to be able to experience his own work again, for the first time in decades.”

That’s cool.

[slantyyz]

>> He understood it was a “necessary evil” at the time

Looking back at those days, I'm not sure it was a necessary evil. None of my friends, including myself, owned any originals, and incurred real expenses (buying tons of floppies, double side punchers, long distance fees for BBSes) to get the stuff. I could have at least forgone buying a few boxes of discs and bought a game or two in its place.

It's not like today where the Internet is a fixed cost for most home users (in the West at least) and storage costs nearly nothing. There's definitely some residual guilt for those activities from the 80s, especially now that I work in the tech industry.

These days, I don't have reason to copy much at all. In general, software is reasonably priced or free/oss, tv/music/movie streaming is reasonably priced, and for games, I have Steam (and mainly buy when stuff is heavily discounted).

[oldcynic]

Game developers seemed to be swapping just as many floppies as everyone else. With the added advantage they often had stuff you weren't otherwise going to come across.

Later when I was buying everything the first thing I'd do was find the No CD hack online.

[kbenson]

To my understanding, that was one of the easiest ways to get a virus. Those Crack programs always triggered AV. I'm not entirely sure game companies didn't somehow get cracks included as viruses, but since you're already circumventing legal requirements to use the crack and getting it through back channels, it seems a very useful and likely infection channel for virus authors.

[stonogo]

While some cracks definitely shipped malware, and more commonly someone would release a crack and then a distributor would add the malware, the reason those things triggered antivirus was because they were doing their jobs: writing to memory addresses within a separate process space. This is how the cracks worked, but it's also extremely common infection tactics from malware authors.

[Moru]

They were using pack programs that unpacked the crack program over itself to save space. This was what triggered the antivirus. The actual crack was often just there to rewrite the launcher code to skip the copy protection.

[digi_owl]

That is the eternal problem of automated security stuff, the action may be legitimate or not based on context. And code is notoriously blind to context.

[codetrotter]

Yes, this is the correct answer.

[oldcynic]

I'm sure there were some, and I'm not saying never but as I was the one usually asked to help fix friends and family I'd like to think I'd catch local ones. Usually the AV trigger on cracks were one of the generic catches for writing to unusual places etc.

There was one NoCD site that was highly reliable. Random Google searches were, as with everything, asking for trouble.

[Scoundreller]

gamecopyworld?

Wow, it still looks the same way it did 15 years ago!

[Semaphor]

Gcw. The site you went to to avoid damaging your discs. And improve performance. Well, and sometimes to play games you couldn't afford :D

[oldcynic]

Ah yeah, that was the one. :)

[StanislavPetrov]

Back in the early days of cracked flippies virtually nobody had a hard drive to be infected.

[btbuilder]

I fell victim to a virus on PC that only had a floppy drive.

The virus was a DOS TSR virus that would stay resident, hook itself into DOS' interrupts and infect any executables run, even if on a different disk.

[wolco]

Back in those days I bought what I really wanted or asked for it for christmas but copied what friends had available. Some games had 300 page manuals and maps, by not buying you had a more difficult experience. I wouldn't feel guilty because you might have told someone at school how cool it was and they purchased a copy based on your experience.

[Digital-Citizen]

It wasn't necessary (people who weren't going to buy the program still got a copy via file sharing, and as I point out later DRM chiefly hurts those who cooperate with the abuser/publisher). And Steam is not your friend (as it is proprietary which is untrustworthy by default, and we see now with Steam being made not to work fully for older OSes instead of liberating Steam to let people port and maintain it for whatever system they want to run).

DRM was profoundly bad for the user and reinforced the class structure of proprietary software -- those who got to control your computer versus you. This class difference has far worse effects now because computers are so prevalent and the data they hold is so much more important than what we had available to a game on the old 8-bit computers. Sometimes the data on a modern computer is a matter of life & death, or access to that data allows a ne'er-do-well to make someone become insolvent, and other seriously horrible outcomes.

The lesson is that proprietary software users have been taken advantage of by a system intent on deceiving them. You can see a bit of the ill effect of this in the language the article uses: "copy protection" frames the issue from the proprietor's viewpoint because their interests are being "protected". The much larger class of users and their interests, even decades later, are subordinated. I see the software 4am seeks to remove as removing anti-copying routines or removing copying prevention, something beneficial to everyone.

The chief underlying problem here is proprietary (non-free, user-subjugating) software. Software you're not allowed to run, inspect, modify, or share (also known as 'software freedom'). Proprietary software is licensed and distributed to keep you from running the program despite you acquiring the software in a legitimate way. This software is meant to keep you from treating your friends as friends by sharing a copy, inspecting the program to see what it does, and distributed to prevent you from modifying your copy the program should you wish to for any reason.

I came to realize this with the Commodore 64: A video game called Elite on the C-64 had an anti-copying scheme so clumsy and prone to problems it drove me to understand what was really going on. Today we'd properly call this DRM—digital restrictions management (expanded that way because I take the side of the user class, not the publisher class) which was only visited upon those who obtained their copy of the program in a way the publisher found acceptable. Typically this meant buying a copy, but I later came to understand some copies were distributed gratis. The packaged game came with media, a manual, and a flat plastic device with a see-through window. The device could be bent so it resembled a table like an inverted letter "U". On starting the game, the user was shown some blocky image that looked incomprehensible. When the plastic device was folded, placed on the monitor at the proper distance (via the "legs" of the device), and peered through one could see the blocky image turn into something readable. If I recall correctly, the readable image was a page number reference in the manual one was expected to look up and type in the proper word to get past this stage of the loading program.

After I did this a couple of times it dawned on me that those who engage in filesharing and treating friends like friends (sometimes propagandistically called "pirates") never have to put up with this. Only the people who used the publisher-distributed copy did. And most of those users had paid for this treatment.

Those who shared copies were doing us all a favor: they let us try programs before buying a copy, they let us run copies that didn't have what we now call DRM; the anti-copying code had been stripped away. They let us have copies that one could copy in an ordinary fashion, no need for special copiers (such as "nibblers", or any copier that knew how to get past the errors which were deliberately added to the disk to defeat the standard file and disk copiers). There was no need to work around the issue by using audio tapes instead of disks (since audio tapes didn't have copy-prevention added to the media). These so-called "pirates" were doing us a service, a service I might have paid for if offered the opportunity to pay a publisher for a headache-free copy of the program.

Later I obtained a memory snapshotting cartridge called "Isepic" which let me make my own copy of the RAM-resident portion of the game. Isepic produced a copy which loaded faster, never prompted me for the manual lookup, and played identically to the other copy loaded from the distributor's media (no surprise there, it was the same code being loaded into memory). I never loaded the distributor's media again. But this got me to thinking about all the other programs (not just games) that treated the users this way across all the computers I had used. And I began to realize that this was a scam perpetrated on the people who treated the publishers the best. We were literally exchanging our money for being treated badly. And this harm pushed on the users was indiscriminate, everyone who got a copy in the typical way was mistreated.

There was one more issue to wrestle with: proprietary software. This was an issue even the filesharers couldn't really contend with. Almost all of the software I saw anyone use on the C-64 was proprietary: users weren't allowed to do things we wanted to do: understand how the program worked, share copies, modify the program, or (in some cases) even run the program whenever we wanted. At best, the filesharers could grapple with runtime limits: Want to play 'Elite' from the publisher's media without the plastic device? Too bad; that plastic device and loading routine is DRM to stop one from running the program (meaning that even if you copy the media you'll probably make a copy you can't really use). It's not likely one will be able to look at the screen and manually decode the image, by design. Tough on the paying users, easy on the users who know how to share with each other. But this won't help you with the other freedoms of free software.

As a practical matter we didn't face some very serious problems with always-networked computers: We didn't have our C-64s constantly on, we didn't store sensitive credentials on the C-64, and we didn't connect them to networks most of the time. So we didn't have the privacy-busting ramifications proprietary software poses for ordinary computer users today (for example, FlightSimLabs was caught distributing software that covertly copied users' website credentials to FlightSimLabs. Copying people's credentials to websites ought to be criminal; this is very likely to include copying credentials to medical, banking, and work-related websites). What if that flight simulator company doesn't keep the lid on whatever they illicitly copied from the users? Remember that FlightSimLabs did this indiscriminately: They did this to all of their users; there's no reason to believe they won't mistreat a paying user. FlightSimLabs lied to all their users by misrepresenting what that flight simulator does—I'll bet that people who got a copy thought they were getting a flight simulator, not a credentials copier.

In the end I came to recognize that the heart of this issue where the computer owner has less power over their computer than an organization that convinces the user to run their software is the main issue of software freedom. Software proprietors have unjust power over the users. The only way to break that power and keep people opting for freedom is to teach people to value software freedom for its own sake, and then choose free software consistently: play free software games, run free software apps for other jobs, and install and use free software operating systems. You'll have to have the spine to say 'no' to a lot of what is advertised, but you'll retain control of your data and your computer and it's a lot less likely you'll ever bump into DRM. Free software DRM is ineffective—edit out the DRM code and run that version instead. You also get to treat your friends in a way that is natural to do with digital computers—sharing copies of published software.

[majos]

What's the point of the folded table viewer? How is it any better than just including a password in the manual? Is the idea that the password changes, so you need the viewer and manual each time?

[mbiondi]

I think it is to make it harder for the end user to circumvent copy protection. You could just make a xerox copy of the manual and give it to your friend, but it's hard to xerox a plastic trinket.