Security by obscurity would have made a lot more sense before global communications allowed people to share the results of poking around like this.
Even after the Internet was invented probably 99% or more of users would have no clue about digging into the systems.
I’ve mentioned this before, but on one of my early contracts I found an ‘encryption’ function with a keyspace of 32… values. I don’t mean 32-bit. The key was prepended as the first byte to the stream, and the decryption function could accept the full 8-bit range.
Fortunately that was replaced by real encryption some time before I left. But I’m pretty sure nobody actually cracked it before then, because I think nobody thought to try it.
I owned one of the nice Microsoft cable free Keyboards in the early 00s.
That is, until I threw it to the garbage, after some tinkerer had a look at the RF protocol and discovered that the entire encryption just consisted of XORing each keystroke with a fixed 8 bit value…
That’s true, and I should have been less absolute in my language. However all of those activities were niche and actively scary sounding to the ‘normies’ (and to a lesser extent still are)
I actually did find “warez” on BBSs before I had Internet access. But I really think even finding BBS numbers in the back of a magazine and trying them out put me outside most computer users of the time.
Security by obscurity would have made a lot more sense before global communications allowed people to share the results of poking around like this.
Even after the Internet was invented probably 99% or more of users would have no clue about digging into the systems.
I’ve mentioned this before, but on one of my early contracts I found an ‘encryption’ function with a keyspace of 32… values. I don’t mean 32-bit. The key was prepended as the first byte to the stream, and the decryption function could accept the full 8-bit range.
Fortunately that was replaced by real encryption some time before I left. But I’m pretty sure nobody actually cracked it before then, because I think nobody thought to try it.
I owned one of the nice Microsoft cable free Keyboards in the early 00s.
That is, until I threw it to the garbage, after some tinkerer had a look at the RF protocol and discovered that the entire encryption just consisted of XORing each keystroke with a fixed 8 bit value…
That somehow doesn’t surprise me
Bulletin boards existed. Hacker parties existed. You made contacts and kept in touch. You mailed discs to each other.
We communicated before the internet.
That’s true, and I should have been less absolute in my language. However all of those activities were niche and actively scary sounding to the ‘normies’ (and to a lesser extent still are)
I actually did find “warez” on BBSs before I had Internet access. But I really think even finding BBS numbers in the back of a magazine and trying them out put me outside most computer users of the time.