Brad Templeton wrote:
who really wants the full video. Dongles were (mostly) abandoned by
commercial software vendors as not worth the support cost, but at least
they did something, in theory, for their piracy fears.

One type of dongle that gets a lot of use is the HU cards in
satellite receivers.
-Joe
--
I love my TiVo - http://www.inwap.com/u/joe/tivo/

Brad Templeton ) wrote in alt.video.ptv.tivo:
And even though you can do that, the first copy you get has to have
a dongle to play? This makes less sense than before.

Unless, of course, the primary goal was to stop copying of the software
so that Sonic can sell more copies. For that, this behavior makes perfect
sense.

--
Jeff Rife | "Space. It seems to go on and on forever. But
For address harvesters: | then you get to the end and a gorilla starts
| throwing barrels at you."
| -- Philip J. Fry, "Futurama"
|

In article [email protected]_s04,
Joe Smith wrote:
Brad Templeton wrote:
who really wants the full video. Dongles were (mostly) abandoned by
commercial software vendors as not worth the support cost, but at least
they did something, in theory, for their piracy fears.

One type of dongle that gets a lot of use is the HU cards in
satellite receivers.

They are not really a dongle. They could make the satellite receivers
stand-alone locked devices, but the problem is they would get cracked and
once cracked, they would have to replace all receivers to fix it. So
they isolate various factors in the smart card, and can afford to send
out new cards to customers in new circumstances, or such is my
impression. (Of course the presence of smart card programming
machines, legal in themselves, has in some ways allowed the facilitation
of more scarfing of satellite and PPV because you only have to hack
the smartcard.)

Since you can't really copy protect software on its own, the dongle
became popular in the 80s as a piece of hardware (which could be
made reasonably tamper proof) to go with the software (which is very
hard to make tamper proof) to stop copying.

However, hardware has support costs, and most companies decided the
support costs of the dongle, and the legitimate uses they interfered
with (such as easily using the program on laptop and desktop) weren't
worth it in terms of saved revenue. Plus you would get multiple
dongles and further problems with those. (In those days most dongles
were parallel port or serial port, and you only had so many of those.)

Dongles persist in a few areas. Video games effectively use them,
selling on cartridges or special CDs. Some specialized small volume
high cost packages use them because if you charge $15,000 for the
software you can afford the support costs of the dongle. But not on
a $40 piece of software -- or so the industry had judged. Games also
kept them because games have higher illicit copying rates than
business software.

So the smart card is not a dongle, but this USB device that is going
to come with the Tivo PC viewer sure sounds like one.

Early dongles, btw, were something the software just tested for
the presence of. Later they would do fancier things like perform
some important function the software needed.
--
Spam was 25 years old in May of 2003 -- read more
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Brad Templeton ) wrote in alt.video.ptv.tivo:
They are not really a dongle. They could make the satellite receivers
stand-alone locked devices, but the problem is they would get cracked and
once cracked, they would have to replace all receivers to fix it.

The DigiCipher II protection on C-Band receivers is built into the
receiver (making it a "stand-alone locked device"), and it is precisely
because of this that it has never been hacked.

--
Jeff Rife |
For address harvesters: | http://www.nabs.net/Cartoons/Dilbert/LoveRanking.jpg
|
|
|

Martha Stewart's cellmate wrote:

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmp...m/tech_tivo_dc

Pictures of the TiVo dongle:
http://www.anandtech.com/showdoc.html?i=1945&p=5

--
I love my TiVo - http://www.inwap.com/u/joe/tivo/