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Re:Why 111-1111111 is a valid Windows 95 key by stevekemp on Sunday February 26, 2023 @12:22PM (#34947286)
Very true, there are a lot of sites out there back in the day that a lot of oldtimers would remember.

My personal favourite was astalavista, named in relation to the legit search-site altavista I guess.

Actually I take that back, my favourite site was +fravia's reverse engineering pages. Mostly because the legitimate crack-sites were safe, but there was always a risk of downloading something with a virus, or a trojan instead. So it was more rewarding to read up on the reversing techniques and do the job myself.

Happy days using Numega's soft-ice (kernel mode debugger) to remove the protection it shipped with.

When I switched to Linux one of the first "problems" was that there were few commercial binaries which required a license key, so there were fewer reasons to actual get into reverse engineering / decompiling & patching linux binaries.

Re:Why 111-1111111 is a valid Windows 95 key by strictnein on Sunday February 26, 2023 @04:11PM (#34949491)
Wow astalavista brings back some great memories. Hadn't thought about that site for a long, long time.
Re:Why 111-1111111 is a valid Windows 95 key by girvo on Sunday February 26, 2023 @06:19PM (#34950788)
> astalavista

Phew that takes me back. And it's huge list of cracks and other things is what got me started looking into reverse engineering and security analysis haha

Re:Why 111-1111111 is a valid Windows 95 key by dools on Sunday February 26, 2023 @06:25PM (#34950846)
> My personal favourite was astalavista, named in relation to the legit search-site altavista I guess.

That name contains two very iconic pop culture references from the 90s: altavista and the terminator

Re:Why 111-1111111 is a valid Windows 95 key by stevekemp on Monday February 27, 2023 @05:06AM (#34954728)
I noticed the terminator connection, but I wasn't too sure of the timescale - which came first.

Anyway it's a definitely a nice memory!

Re:Why 111-1111111 is a valid Windows 95 key by selcuka on Sunday February 26, 2023 @06:43PM (#34951021)
> My personal favourite was astalavista, named in relation to the legit search-site altavista I guess.

The domain box.sk [1] hosted other interesting sites as well.

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20000229151347/http://www.box.sk...

Re:Why 111-1111111 is a valid Windows 95 key by jcpham2 on Sunday February 26, 2023 @08:43PM (#34951961)
Also an astalavista.box.sk user (typo)
Re:Why 111-1111111 is a valid Windows 95 key by qurashee on Monday February 27, 2023 @02:34AM (#34953974)
Your post really brought back memories of softice and w32dasm. Incidentally one of the websites from that era (gamecopyworld) is still alive! Mind blown.
Re:Why 111-1111111 is a valid Windows 95 key by xtracto on Monday February 27, 2023 @10:16AM (#34957352)
Do you remember crackstore? That was my goto place to find software for cracking.
Re:Why 111-1111111 is a valid Windows 95 key by Borg3 on Monday February 27, 2023 @04:01PM (#34961798)
Ahh SoftIce (and later WinIce for Win9x).. Great RING0 debugger.. I used it quite a bit for crack some games myself :) Oh look, it still here on disk: siw405w9x.exe Why I keep it... ;)
Re:Why 111-1111111 is a valid Windows 95 key by egberts1 on Monday February 27, 2023 @04:06PM (#34961859)
Archive to Fravia’s website

Wow.

https://www.richardharrison.pro/fravia/