"rbowman" wrote in message
...
On 10/03/2015 11:39 PM, Robert Green wrote:
There's poetic justice in a convoluted
scheme to protect against software copying that ignored real-world
consequences to users bringing a whole software company to its knees.

We still use a third party application that uses a dongle. It's morphed
from a parallel port to a USB dongle over the years but they're still
there.

A dongle is livable. Something like Superlok that demands a file be written
in a non-standard way, not so much. I recall we came in on two Mondays in a
row with the entire network locked up because the backup had failed due to
Lotus' copy protection failing verification.

Plans to replace Lotus with Excel were soon underway and it was gone by the
next accounting cycle with only a few die hards having Lotus still on their
desktops. When tech inquiries to Lotus made it clear they weren't going to
work with us on the subject of failed restores we chose another option.

There are still plenty of industrial programs that use dongles, but very few
that I know of that use deliberately corrupted media. (Ducks in fear that
I will now learn about all the software that still uses corrupt media to
protect their IP).

--
Bobby G.