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When floppy disk copy protection was a thing

When floppy disk copy protection was a thing

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Back in the day, software didn’t come on encrypted, online, distributed marketplaces, they came on humble floppy disks. This made them susceptible to copying. To fight this, developers started using all kinds of interesting tricks, which hackers would try to break. Thus started a nearly decade-long war of hackers and copy protection schemes.

GloriousCow started a series of investigations on historical floppy protection schemes on his blog. His site is amazing – he makes his own tools as well as shows the assembly code and has great diagrams. He covers things like EliaShim CodeSafe, XEMAG Xelok, Vault Prolok, EA Interlock, Softguard Superlok, Formaster Copy-Lock, and even got an interview with Robert McQuaid who made the protection circumventing CopyWrite software.

I particularly like his article about Copy-Lock mechanism used by Kings Quest. Copy-Lock employed several tricks such as sectors with non-standard sizes and putting purposefully incorrect CRC values on tracks to make standard copying incorrect.

In this case, Copy-Lock used a mechanism in which sector 1 on track 6 was intentionally written as only 256 bytes (instead of 512 bytes), with a 256-byte blank section to fill the gap. Additionally, the CRC was also altered to make a normal read think it was invalid. A normal INT 13h disk read would search and fail the read and CRC check.

CopyLock worked by bypassing the BIOS and talking directly to the disk controller. It would issue an INT 13h read on sector 1 track 6 that it knew would fail. This would place the head on the right track. The code would then tell the floppy controller directly to read track – and dump all 512 bytes. It was looking for the special byte 0xF7 as the final byte of that supposedly empty section of the track. The key is that it is not possible to create invalid tracks with invalid CRC’s like this using a standard IBM PC floppy controller. Copy-Lock created the special hardware that could write in this way and sold that, along with the checking code, as their solution.

His article has all the assembly code – which is really awesome.

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Security expert hacks the USPS text scammers

Security expert hacks the USPS text scammers

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Grant Smith got one of the USPS delivery scam text messages. He decided to track the scammers and uncovered a Chinese-language group behind the campaign. He hacked their systems, discovered their mechanisms, and gathered victim data. He handed it to USPS, bank, and FBI investigators – as well published information about their operations online and at Defcon.

He discovered the group sold their scamming kits to set up their own operations for a $200/mo subscription. Similar scams showed up in half dozen other countries.

What’s interesting is he reported how many people fell for it. The triad sent 50,000-100,000 text messages a day. In total, US victims for just this one (albeit very large) operation entered 438,669 credit card numbers. Many people entered multiple cards.

Read more about it here.

A brief encounter with Hyperbowl

A brief encounter with Hyperbowl

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LGR had a recent video about the PC game Hyperbowl. They brought up the fact it started life as an arcade game at Sony’s Metreon Entertainment Center in downtown San Francisco.

The game came in several forms, but the one I remember is the one above. There was a giant bowling ball mounted as a trackball style controller that let you steer the ball down the course. There was a mock ball return and a set of bowling alley style seats while waiting your turn.

What’s more interesting is I met the developers of this game around 1999 and visited their studio in California – which I believe included Terence Bordelon. I remember seeing physical mockups of the arcade system setting around the studio – which was really just a big room with black painted walls, black curtains to hide different parts, and no windows. Secrecy was definitely a thing. There were various full-size mockups of what would become the official arcade machines sitting around. The trackball bowling ball controller was on a stand, There was the ball return mock in 2 pieces, and one of the stand-up arcade verisons. What I do remember is that the stand-up arcade version had a standard Windows mini-tower PC bolted into the arcade cabinet. I believe when they booted it I saw the logo for a 3DFX card in it.

This was the late 1990’s, and it was that awkward time where arcade games stopped using custom hardware and started using off the shelf PC hardware. It was much cheaper, much faster to develop on, and meant you already had your game ported to a PC platform – which opened selling the game on two fronts. Now games are written on engines that let you ship on 4 and even more platforms simultaneously. Video games were always about 5 years ahead of other software development when it came to maximizing sales.

LGR’s video reminded me of this wonderful bit of history. It’s amazing how far the industry has developed in 25 years…

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Set up Windows 11 without an annoying Microsoft Account

Set up Windows 11 without an annoying Microsoft Account

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Being required to connect to the internet while installing Windows 11 has been one, in a long line of reasons, why many users refuse to update to the new OS, even though it has been out for 4 years (since Nov 2021). After finally reaching an adoption rate of just over 50%, it has since dropped to 49.08%

The most popular bypass to having to log in with an internet connected Microsoft account was to use “oobe\bypassnro” which, when typed into the command prompt during the Windows 11 setup experience, would enable a button that let you skip connecting to the internet

Unfortunately, Microsoft is removing that trick, but user @witherornot1337 on X found that typing “start ms-cxh:localonly” into the command prompt during the Windows 11 setup experience will allow you to create a local account directly without needing to skip connecting to the internet first.

Or you could, you know, actually give customers what they want instead of the kind of backwards thinking that gave us the universally hated Windows 8.

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X-ray backscatter with compressed sensing

X-ray backscatter with compressed sensing

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Compressed sensing is an image/signal processing algorithm that allows you to re-construct an image/signal even when you’ve lost up to 95% of the samples. It’s so good that it can even be cranked up to restore images even above what would normally be the Nyquist limit.

Applied Science walks through using an X-ray backscatter device to reconstruct images as near to x-ray vision as you can get at low doses.

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