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... ;)
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.