
My CAD software called home, and no-one answered, so it shut down - WillyOnWheels
https://www.reddit.com/r/electronics/comments/5upft3/my_cad_software_called_home_and_noone_answered_so/
======
mysterydip
Several years ago, I wanted to get into autocad again but not pay for the
latest and greatest. It was just for my own personal use of playing around and
designing things so I had no worries of format compatibilities with other
companies, etc. I had gotten a stack of autocad lt 2002 books for free from a
professor at the college I worked at, so I set out on ebay to find a copy. Got
one complete in box!

When it arrived, I fired up the installer, used the serial, and everything
installed without a hitch. I ran the program and it asks to activate online.
"No problem," I think, I used a legit serial from a legit copy, I should be
fine. What I didn't consider was that the activation server was taken offline
(I'm sure the official reason was "cost savings" but "force people to upgrade"
fits in there pretty well in my opinion).

So now I had a perfectly good box of software and a stack of manuals for a
product I couldn't use for no technical reason other than the company didn't
want me to use it.

~~~
trome
Damn, not even a decade of keeping their activation servers online by Autocad
for their own software? That is ridiculous, it'd be like Microsoft shutting
down their infrastructure for Windows 7 activations today.

I feel at a certain point, if you've sold software that calls home and you are
unwilling to maintain the servers and there are still people using it, you
should hand it off to the Internet Archive or a similar org so they can run
it. Leaving users stranded with no hope of using software they're familiar
with, have paid for, and have supported is just a bad move.

Moves like what Autocad did to you are why large companies are using libre
software, if upstream dies for some reason, your business won't click off
tomorrow.

~~~
JustSomeNobody
> Moves like what Autocad did to you are why large companies are using libre
> software

Ironically, this is also why some DON'T use libre software. They question what
happens when the maintainers stop.

~~~
vorotato
Someone should tell them, if you're worried about them stopping GIVE THEM
MONEY.

~~~
srssays
And if nobody else does? Pay their whole salary? Even AutoCAD isn't that
expensive.

~~~
abandonliberty
There is software where a single yearly license costs more than someone's
salary.

The problems with these servers though is typically isolated to hobby users
who don't have the money to hire people to keep the ancient software working
for them.

------
macca321
Reminds me of that ballroom dancing software program's page:

    
    
      what happens when the Douglasses are no longer around?*
    
      ...
    
      Here is how the plan works. Immediately upon learning of our deaths the executors of Dick's estate (his two highly computer literate kids) will post two files on our www.compmngr.com web site and will send out a broadcast email advising our customers how to download the files. The first file is a small standalone computer program called RegisterEvent.exe, which allows you to create your own registration files. So you won't have to register with Douglass Associates and you won't have to pay a registration fee. You can read more about RegisterEvent and how to use it below. The second file is a ZIP file containing all the source code for COMPMNGR and its supporting programs. This file will only be of interest to those few users who want to continue COMPMNGR development and who either know C++ programming or or willing to hire a C++ programmer.*
    

[http://www.douglassassociates.com/compmngr_history.htm](http://www.douglassassociates.com/compmngr_history.htm)

~~~
colanderman
Please don't indent quoted text. It shows up in a preformatted block with no
line-wrapping, making it difficult to read.

~~~
snerbles
Horizontal scrollbars are an immediate source of UI aggravation.

------
setra
Reddit response:

You guys know, it just dawned on me that beyond the practicalities of the
question, we're looking at something incredibly significant here. That is, if
this story is in fact genuine and not just a fictious commentary on
subscription models.

So first of all... a software activation model from the '80s? Twenty years
before Microsoft "invented" it? Back when even ARPANet was only a curiosity?
That's something incredibly awesome. Key disks, manual code entry, and serial
or parallel hardware keys were a thing - remote activation, now that's
something else entirely.

It's like finding an ancient Egyptian D&D-like rulebook and twenty sided dice
dating from the age of pharaoh Ramses. Not "impossible" as such, just
extremely remarkable and improbable.

Then, the other wonder here is not that the activation server stopped, it's
that it stopped in twenty-effing-seventeen. I'd have expected that BBS to have
been scrapped around '95 at the latest. Also, phone numbers - where I grew up,
phone number formats and area codes have changed three times since the '80s, a
BBS call coded in the '80s would have stopped working before '91.

Also, I cannot imagine the change-averseness of someone who keeps using a CAD
suite from the '80s (probably on some ancient XT or DEC or something weird and
irreplacable) well into the 2010s. I mean my dad is the image of
conservativeness, and yet even he migrated all his CAD work from the old DOS
tools over to Windows-based, modern stuff when Windows NT 4.0 came out...

I'm not saying "it's not true", just that if it is, this should probably be on
some Youtube computing history show as the curiosity of the year.

~~~
pjc50
Reddit response to that: the software started development in the 80s, but
gradually acquired features including remote authentication.

~~~
hippich
"remote authentication" feature :))

~~~
Karunamon
remote "authentication" "feature"

~~~
DiabloD3
"remote" "authentication" "feature"

~~~
Klover
Jesus Christ, what's happened to HN these last few days.

~~~
Karunamon
People grew a modicum of humor?

------
usernam
I had a similar situation for a company that purchased it's accounting
software way back in the first 90ies, which tied the software to an hw dongle.

In spite of the old system, the software works absolutely fine and there were
no reasons to upgrade or change. In fact, the hardware it was running on was
upgraded several times. Until one day, the dongle broke (a bump by the
cleaning staff cracked it apparently). The company behind the software went
bankrupt years ago, and there was no way to either obtain a new dongle or
extract the data from the software (custom db as well).

The software was easy to crack by just nop'ing a couple of bytes, but the
owner of the company was absolutely shocked by the experience as they reverted
to paper archives for about a week with no easy way out.

I was quite young at the time and it served me as a life lesson. Since then I
never used or considered anything with DRM, remote licensing or SaaS for
exactly that reason. I never had trouble finding alternatives either.

~~~
type0
> Until one day, the dongle broke (a bump by the cleaning staff cracked it
> apparently). The company behind the software went bankrupt years ago, and
> there was no way to either obtain a new dongle or extract the data from the
> software (custom db as well).

I have seen similar things happen, some proprietary data analysis framework
from the 90s relying on hw dongle (from a company busted years ago) used in
research lab. Talk about reproducible results, when you wouldn't even be able
to reproduce it yourself when it breaks, I wonder how these people think. I
guess their cancer research isn't very important so...

------
pawadu
I am starting to use Kicad and FreeCAD in more and more projects for this very
reason: I want to be able to open my projects 30 years from now.

Sure, the commercial tools are slightly more competent and have a nicer
interface (although the FOSS tools are improving with every release). But
there is no guarantee AutoCAD doesn't go bankrupt next week or changes
business next year or is bought by Apple and becomes the next Logic.

~~~
rrmm
I have also been moving towards Kicad. (Amusingly enough, I was also bitten by
the Apple eMagic/Logic buyout).

Unfortunately, the way technology moves on, the only way to really ensure this
is to commit to it as an active process. Much like backing up your data, it
has to be an ongoing and active maintenance process. This takes time and
effort and incurs risk and disruption (changing formats and software).

I understand how the person in the original post got themselves into this
problem, and I don't blame them. But with the benefit of hindsight one can see
the lesson. For data to be durable over time, it has to be in the most
compatible formats or the most general formats which allow them to be
economically (wrt time/effort/money) moved to other systems.

With OSS and open formats you have a fighting chance, but even then the
ultimate cost can be having to maintain the software yourself which for most
people who are using design software isn't likely their main goal.

------
pasta
We once checked the activation of a peace of software which was very crappy
because the server was down a lot. Turned out in case of a valid code it was
returning a HTTP 200 OK.

The software never contacted it's home server again, but instead a hosts file
redirected the request to a random server.

------
makecheck
I have a strong policy of not using tools that prioritize themselves over me.
_Everyone’s_ time is valuable, and I have better things to do than sit on the
phone screwing with activation problems or being forced to discontinue my work
because I lack an Internet connection.

First thing your app does is present a login screen instead of creating a
usable window? Won’t work without an Internet connection? Error messages that
default to “accusing me” instead of “helping me”? Upgrades that mysteriously
fail to support older file formats? If so then sorry, I am completely
reworking my environment to never use your stuff again.

------
zepolen
When I was younger there was a similar problem with an online game that had
the official servers shut down after a few years of operation. The community
at the time resorted to using a Kali Net hack to play. Luckily the server
software was written by Dan Kegel and was open source
[http://kegel.com/anet/](http://kegel.com/anet/)

After a little coaxing to get it running on 64 bit I managed to get it running
and the community could finally play for another few years..until that server
died and this time it was me who didn't have the time/interest to fix it
again. Then it sort of died for good.

I wonder if there is an opportunity to provide a service/servers for legacy
games so that every time the nostalgia hits a gamer he can come play online.

~~~
louhike
>I wonder if there is an opportunity to provide a service/servers for legacy
games so that every time the nostalgia hits a gamer he can come play online.

I think it is what GameRanger does. I played Age Of Empires games and Rise Of
Nations with it, it works quite well.

------
josteink
This is the perfect response to the question of why being permissive about DRM
is a bad thing, something which is being asked in this other thread about
Google Chrome:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13684779](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13684779)

------
steinuil
This reminds me of a text editor I've seen linked here a while ago; it was
written by one guy, and he'd been selling it and maintaining it for something
like 30 years (and he still got new customers!). I don't remember the name of
the program or the website.

Also, Bob Staake, a New Yorker illustrator, has been doing all his work in
Photoshop 3.0 until 2008, and he's probably still using it. He was running it
in the Classic environment on a PPC mac in 2008, I remember reading that he
switched to a VM recently but can't find any info on it.

[http://www.bobstaake.com/pixfix/index2.shtml](http://www.bobstaake.com/pixfix/index2.shtml)

~~~
_pmf_
> This reminds me of a text editor I've seen linked here a while ago; it was
> written by one guy, and he'd been selling it and maintaining it for
> something like 30 years (and he still got new customers!). I don't remember
> the name of the program or the website.

Probably this: [http://www.lugaru.com/](http://www.lugaru.com/)

~~~
petepete
Ah Epsilon. A colleague used to swear by it and had used it for decades, never
saw anyone else use or reference it once (until now!)

------
cyborgx7
DRM is a cancer on this industry, and any other "intellectual property"
industry.

------
m3adow
My father has a very similar problem. He's using a CAD software which cost a
couple thousand bucks decades ago (I don't know how old exactly it is, but I
think mid 80s). It's using a LPT-dongle. LPT ports are hard to find nowadays,
but all of the USB to LPT adapters I tested didn't work with this dongle. For
his PC I settled with a PCIe LPT extension card, but now he got himself a
Laptop and I'm back to field one.

~~~
datenwolf
These old dongles are a joke. The Sentinel Rainbow parallel port dongle for
example is merely a "secure" key store that is unlocked using a key with a
whooping length of 16 bits and it uses the "ultra secure" XOR encryption
algorithm. The advertised code encryption essentially boils down to having
parts of the binary being XOR-ed with some key and to decrypt it, that part of
the program would be sent to the dongle and the decrypted text sent back and
the program image in memory modified. To make things more difficult the same
memory region would be re-used for different texts (who needs re-entrancy
anyway).

Long story short: This thing does XOR and all caveats of XOR apply. Like XOR-
ing the ciphertext with the plaintext will yield the key. So cracking these
things boils down to extracting the key and either emulating the dongle or
decrypting the "protected" parts of the program and placing them in the binary
in the clear.

I'd be surprised if your fathers program used something more sophisticated
than that.

------
braythwayt
"Coming soon to a furnace, security system, lock, water heater, and car near
you."

------
tudorw
I think this thread is a fascinating living example of how short term 'our'
digital world can be viewed, a mistake in my belief, infrastructure projects
can easily take 25 years from beginning to end, I don't imagine that
organisation would be keen to switch platforms many times during that period.
Are we really all working on digital artefacts confident that they will expire
their usefulness in such a short time frame?

Perhaps that is worth considering, compare tidying a room every day instead of
putting up some storage...

------
scandox
I'm kind of inspired by this story. I love hearing about software with a
really long lifespan. It makes you feel like it's worth building something
decent.

Admittedly the DRM aspect is a bit naff, but it's hardly evil empire at that
scale.

~~~
averagewall
I work on CAE software that started in the 90's but some of our biggest
competitors started in the 70's or even 60's. It's actually a bit depressing
how little has changed in all that time. Things move very slowly, perhaps
because the software is so enormously complicated and has thousands of
important features that are all vital to somebody. It's hard to abstract that
into something smoother for the user without breaking many well established
use cases or wasting computer resources (It's CPU and memory hungry, and no
amount of Moore's law has made a dent in that). Now there are startups doing
cloud based versions, which is great, but it's still basically the same thing
except in the cloud. It's still a steep learning curve. It's still trivially
easy for users to get things wrong without even knowing they're wrong. You
still pretty much need a university course as training on how to use the
software safely.

But, you're right, it's satisfying knowing that it's like building a house.
You can put a lot of effort into designing it solidly with a long future in
mind.

------
mod
Does anyone have any idea how this might have "called home" in the early '80s?

I mean, that doesn't seem possible.

My best guess is that some later version of the software was updated to
include phoning home.

~~~
subinsebastien
The OP explains in a later comment that, he used a floppy-disk based licensing
system in the early days of this software.

------
dpkonofa
I really would love to learn how to crack an old piece of software like this.
Any ideas on where to start if you don't know much about the software side of
things? I know JS and a little bit of C#, but I've never found a great path to
learn stuff like this.

~~~
stevekemp
Look around for mirrors of the old Fravia content - that was the place for
reversing and cracking back in the day.

For example:

[http://www.darkridge.com/~jpr5/mirror/fravia.org/](http://www.darkridge.com/~jpr5/mirror/fravia.org/)

~~~
userbinator
Fravia is a name that brings back lots of good memories... him, +ORC, and the
+HCU tried to popularise the idea of "cracking tutorials" that were more than
"just change these bytes", and were actually quite detailed essays on the
various protections around at the time.

~~~
stevekemp
As the content was largely user-submitted there was a lot of variation in
quality and style. But there were some excellent essays and introductions out
there:

[http://www.darkridge.com/~jpr5/mirror/fravia.org/academy.htm](http://www.darkridge.com/~jpr5/mirror/fravia.org/academy.htm)

I was definitely moved when I heard of his death, which is coming up for ten
years:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fravia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fravia)

(It was only years later I realized that +ORC was almost certainly +fravia in
disguise. At the time I first read all the posts I was more trusting ..)

------
pleasecalllater
"My CAD software" \- yea, this is your mistake, this software is not yours.
You are just paying to be allowed to use it for a while.

------
pmlnr
If you have this tight finance why not go with opencad or freecad?

I'm fairly certain importing correctly from a 35 years old format is not
impossible, though there could be surprises for sure.

I understand the familiarity vs productivity issue and that learning something
new is always painful, but if you want to avoid sw calling home, go for open
source.

(I'm impressed by the way that something this old gets not just replies to
questions but living servers to answer. I wonder if the answering machine is
also from the 80.)

~~~
shultays

      If you have this tight finance why not go with opencad or freecad?
    

because it is not about the finance.

    
    
      I am still using it some 35 years later, because, once you learn one CAD system and create 1000's of library parts, why switch?

~~~
VLM
I've worked with a lot of small business people and the HN group just doesn't
culturally get what the guy is saying...

Say you're not going for billion dollar unicorn or broke, but for a life long
small business. You always have non-main line of business systems that are
technically obsolete but it doesn't matter to 99.9% of day to day operations
because it works and when it doesn't work its only 0.1% of the time you spend
anyway. To replace it when it completely breaks, its fully depreciated so to
speak, you could pay $5K today or $5K next year, you certainly have $5K, but
how exactly do you benefit by throwing down the cash today? I guess you get
the tax deduction today rather than in 5 years but who cares? There's no way
0.1% of your day to day operation can have a significant bottom line effect no
matter how much the new technology improves things in its little 0.1% corner
of operations.

Even worse, when you forklift upgrade its going to be a hit to your
productivity for "awhile" and you're busy today so you simply can't afford it.
But sometime in the next five years there is certain to be a recession and
then you already have the money and then you'll have the spare time to
convert. Just not today. Its only 0.1% of your business and you don't want to
turn away paying customers today to min/max that last 0.1% today. Play games
with new toys when there's 10% unemployment and you have nothing to do for a
week. In fact during that future recession you'll get newer technology than
today plus it'll probably be cheaper if they're hurting for customers.

When its technology, 100% tech people are blinded by technophillia, but if it
was an obscure metalworking tool that only gets used once a year for a few
minutes, even tech people understand that when you're a busy one man shop,
once that tool is completely depreciated and obsolete, waiting for it to break
is the wisest possible choice.

~~~
HeyLaughingBoy
Absolutely. FFS, I sell RS232 devices. RS-frickin-232. In 2017.

There are businesses out there that make a living supporting devices that were
designed to run on 5.25" or 3.5" floppies. The machinery still works fine, but
now the owner can't load files because replacement drives can't be found, or
they can't buy floppies, or... So a business springs up to interface a thumb
drive to a DOS HDD controller.

Note to all: there's money to be made _everywhere_

Note to self: so why am I not making any :-(

------
shawnfratis
If you're looking for an AutoCAD alternative try Draftsight from Dassault
Systemes. There is a free personal version, but even the paid version isn't
that expensive and it works pretty well.

~~~
mmmpop
No experience with Draftsight but going from SolidWorks -> Dassault's Catia ->
Solidworks again was painful. Catia was (and I presume still is) an excellent
product.

------
Dolores12
While patching software you own is illegal in most jurisdictions, making your
own authentication server is legal. I am pretty sure that software is
vulnerable to replay attack and could be emulated using fiddler's auto-replay
feature.

~~~
mattmanser
How do you replay a response that no longer happens? The server is down.

~~~
seanp2k2

      DRM server
      the request goes unanswered
      one hand is clapping

------
gonzo41
I guess its something to do with quality. even expensive software is cheap so
support is short. I can still find after market parts for cars 20 years on.
And the dealer will always do the service. Software isn't like this.

------
tropo
The terrifying implication here is that your CAD files will need to reside on
an Internet-connected computer. You don't get an air gap to protect your
secrets.

------
slurple
I'm confused why they didn't even try to export any of the 1000s of parts to a
neutral format to try anything else in the 35 years since...

------
z3t4
if your old product is good enough you will end up competing with yorself.

------
jlebrech
have you looked for a cracked version of the app on abondonware site? (i'm not
advocating abandonware for software with living owners)

------
overcast
As much as I hate dealing with remote license servers. Not changing for 35
years just sounds ridiculous. I don't want to hear about all your old
libraries, and part catalogs. The engineers at the company I work for do this
all day, and we've upgraded probably seven major versions since I've started.
Every company we purchase, and incorporate, they move their competing product
libraries over to ours.

What kind of hardware could that guy possible be using to run that at this
point? There is being stuck in your ways, and then there is being STUCK in
your ways.

