From: ahersee@dcs.warwick.ac.uk (Andrew Hersee)
Subject: Re: Computer Concepts
Organization: Department of Computer Science, Warwick University, England
Date: Wed, 18 Nov 1992 17:03:13 GMT

ijp@doc.ic.ac.uk (Ian Palmer) writes:
>In article <1992Nov18.111052.10914@cs.nott.ac.uk> rsxdp@unicorn.nott.ac.uk (D.Pead) writes:
>>In article <1eag79INNp27@oak49.doc.ic.ac.uk> ijp@doc.ic.ac.uk (Ian Palmer) writes:
>>>If all these required their own incompatable dongles you'd be stuffed.
>>>The short answer is you can only really have one dongle at a time, and
>>
>>Sorry, but BULL****!!! My machine has both Artworks and Impression
>>dongles on the back and works fine (although strange things happen if you
>>get them in the wrong order).  There is no reason why dongles could
>>not be daisy chained.  Since Impression is a well-established product,
>>any firm producing a program with a non-compatible dongle only has itself
>>to blame.

>And CC are really going to tell all-and-sundry the internals of their
>dongles to anyone who wished to produce a dongle for their product
>arn't they? Oh Yes of course they will, and what's that pig doing over
>there?

Maybe! Remember Oak's Worra CAD well that had a dongle until the A5000's
came out when the simply sent me a version which did not use the dongle. So
what do I do? I take my Worra Cad dongle apart :-) And hey presto the
cheaply manufactured circuit board has CC's symbol on it! Thus any company
could approach CC and ask for some dongles. (They had been quite clever
and attempted to sand the top off the chips so that you could not read
the chip numbers but fortunately wetting them slightly allowed you to
just make out the numbers since the plastick had been slightly effected by the
printing process)

>The fact that Impression and Artworks dongles work together isn't
>really surprising. But notice, as you said yourself, they have to be
>in the right order. Now imagine if many companies used dongles, each
>one would have to be tested with every single possible permutation of
>all available dongles in the entire Arc world. Get above 4 and you're
>stuffed. Add to this the total length of dongle tree involved and
>you'd need an extra desk just for dongles (with or without
>dongle-dangles).

Yes it does state in the Artwoks manual that the Artworks dongle MUST be
the closest dongle to the computer. They also state something along the
lines of (I can't remember exact words) :

We are aware that having more than one dongle is unsatisfactory. Our techinical
people are working on a soloution.

Oh a warning if you are going to buy ArtWorks and already have impression
you may consider buying a dongle dangle (My friend did) don't! they supply
a dongle dangle with ArtWorks.

>>
>>What would be more useful would be if a large number of software
>>manufacturers (and Acorn) got together and produced a univerasal, non
>>retsrictive but yet usable method of protection (and yes it can be
>>done, it's just nobody want's to put the effort in).
>>

Hmmm. Well the A5000s have a private word but don't expect any software
to use it and if some does then it will not prevent the user from using
the software only display a message such as 'Illegal copy'. I am not 100%
sure of the reasons but I think that the educational departments have told
Acorn that they will NOT buy it's machines of software starts being protected
in this way. Thus Acorn have told companies that they may NOT use the
private word (Fervour almost did :-)), and if they do they will no longer
support the company!!

Andrew Hersee


Disclamer:
The above information was not given to me by Clares (The publisher of Fervour)
and was not given to me under an NDA. (Obvious really since I would not have
posted it eitherwise!)

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