Hey we are back

[heavenly.talker]

Hi girls and guys

Mack and I have arrived safely back from the South Island.
Great trip, great riding and plently left to cover next time!!!

I hope you had a great holiday season too.

Look forward to catching up on all the gos over the next couple of weeks.

Cheers
Kim

[crashe]

Welcome back....

And so where are the pic's of the trip....

[heavenly.talker]

Welcome back....

And so where are the pic's of the trip....

I'll get them up as soon as I find my dongle
Hope you are well Crashe

Cheers
Kim

[Sniper]

Welcome back.

[Colapop]

Wahoo!! Someone went on a trip had a marvellous time and didn't bin a bike! Good to see you back HT and co.

[crashe]

I'll get them up as soon as I find my dongle
Hope you are well Crashe

Cheers
Kim

Ok I'll bite. What is a Dongle?

Yep I fine mate...
Having heaps of fun...out riding almost everyday....

[Colapop]

It's a coded plug that enables you to use certain pieces of equipment/software.

[crashe]

It's a coded plug that enables you to use certain pieces of equipment/software.

awwww cheers... ya learn something new everyday.....

[Colapop]

An' I don't know it coz I'm cleva - I have to use one at work (between 3 of us) that's a pain in the

OOoo can't wait for another trip report! I live vicariously through you lot who've got bikes.

[Sniper]

Cause I can, and if you learn something, learn it well.

Dongle


In the computer industry, the word dongle can refer to a small hardware device that connects to a computer to act as authentication for some piece of software. This was its primary meaning in the 1980s and 1990s. When the dongle is not present, the software runs in a restricted mode or refuses to run. Dongles are used by some proprietary vendors as a form of copy prevention or digital rights management because it is much harder to copy the dongle than to copy the software it authenticates.


A PCMCIA network card dongleDongle can also refer to something that plugs into a computer, especially something with wires that "hang" (dangle) from a laptop computer. For example:

A jack wired to a small edge connector on a Type I or II PCMCIA card, typically an RJ45 or RJ11 jack for an Ethernet or telephone cable. This type of dongle has no copy prevention purpose. PCMCIA card dongles are notoriously fragile and unreliable. They are falling out of favour as more laptops include built-in Ethernet and modem sockets.
USB adapters, such as for memory cards.
Other USB devices, primarily flash memory "drives", used only for data storage (as opposed to USB Hardware Token Devices).
The word has also been applied to Bluetooth antennas.
Software protection dongles are typically used with very expensive packages and vertical market software, such as CAD/CAM software, Digital Audio Workstation applications and some translation memory packages. Efforts to introduce dongle copy prevention in the mainstream software market were generally met with stiff resistance from users. Despite being hardware, dongles are not a complete solution to the trusted client problem.

Vendors of software protection dongles (and dongle-controlled software) often use terms such as hardware key, hardware token, or security device in their written literature. In day-to-day use however, the jargon word "dongle" is much more commonly used.

History

Chained parallel port copy prevention dongles.The word dongle has been used as a placeholder name since the 1970s. Its origin is unknown. The American Heritage Dictionary, 4th edition, says it is "probably [an] arbitrary coinage." Claims that it was derived from the name "Don Gall" are an urban myth popularized by a 1992 advertisement for Rainbow Technologies, a dongle vendor.

Dongle as the name of a device was used well before 1980 within the telecoms industry to refer to BNC cable joiners of either sex (such as the RG58 cable used on 10 meg Ethernet).

WORDCRAFT was the first program to use a software protection dongle, in 1980. Its dongle was a simple passive device that supplied data to the pins of a cassette port in a pre-determined manner. That first dongle was invented and named by Graham Heggie in the UK.

The two cubic inch (33 cm³) resin-potted first generation devices were called "dongles" by the inventor as there was no other suitable term to hand on the day. The device increased WORDCRAFT sales significantly. The distributor, Dataview Ltd., then based in Colchester, UK, then went on to produce a derivative dongle which became their core business.

Dongles rapidly evolved into active devices that contained a serial transceiver (UART) and even a microprocessor to handle transactions with the host. Later versions adopted the USB interface in preference to the serial or parallel interface.

According to a contributor claiming to be "Paul Handover, founder and managing director of Dataview Ltd.":

Although I can't remember the precise date, I well remember the conversation that I was having with Graham Heggie when he used the term 'dongle' and my immediate response that we couldn't use it as a term as it seemed vaguely vulgar. But we did and it became the generic term for a software protection key. In fact our sales of Wordcraft didn't rise anything like "eight-fold" much more like a steady doubling of sales over about a 6 month period. The biggest rise in sales were from larger organisations who had only purchased a single copy of Wordcraft. One large organisation in East Anglia, a single user of Wordcraft, turned out to have the product installed on over 200 Commodore PCs.

The other small amendment is that it didn't "make millionaires" of those involved. Certainly Peter Dowson, the author of Wordcraft, made a very good living out of the sales of Wordcraft for a number of years. But this was much more down to his commitment to a constant development of Wordcraft than the impact of the dongle.

Finally, the idea of the 'dongle' came out of a visit that I had made to our Canadian distributors, Canadian Micro Distributors (just slightly unsure if I recall the name correctly), in Milton, Ontario. They had developed a software key in conjunction with their local university and I saw this cube-like device stuck on the cassette port on the back of the Commodore. They avoided my questions about what it was doing but I guessed it was a software key. Upon my return to the UK, I rang Graham and explained what I had seen. It took him only a few days to deduce what it was doing and make a prototype. So, ultimately, we have our Canadian friends to thank for the idea of the Dongle.


Problems with software protection dongles

Implementation problems
There is the potential for weaknesses in the implementation of the protocol between the dongle and the copy-controlled software. It requires considerable cunning to implement this in a fashion that is not easy to crack. For example, naïve implementations might simply define a function to check for the dongle, returning "true" or "false" accordingly, reducing the prevention scheme to a single bit value at one point in the program.

Modern dongles include built-in strong encryption and use fabrication techniques designed to thwart reverse engineering. Typical dongles also now contain non-volatile memory — key parts of the software may actually be stored on the dongle.

However, security researchers warn that dongles still do not solve the trusted client problem: that if you give a user the cryptographic ciphertext, the algorithm and the key, your cipher is likely to be breakable, even with the algorithm and key encoded in hardware. (Grand, 2000)

User problems
Dongles tie up a port on the host machine. This has been ameliorated to some extent by the adoption of USB, but is still a serious drawback. To get around this, most practical dongles include a replacement port, so as to become an inline device.

In fields where dongle-controlled software is common, users often need more than one such application installed on a given computer. Manufacturers claim that multiple dongles can be successfully stacked or daisy-chained, but operational problems with stacked dongles are common. The number of dongles can also become physically problematic.

There is the obvious problem of losing the dongle, rendering the copy-controlled software useless until a replacement can be obtained. This is particularly likely if one needs to swap dongles for different applications.

The trend of electronic distribution of software has also contributed to the decline use of dongles with new software.

This article is based in part on the Jargon File, which is in the public domain.

Dongles in pop culture
Some unlicensed titles for game consoles used dongles to connect officially licensed cartridges to circumvent authentication chips embedded in the console that give restrictions on what software will run.

On Terminator 2: Judgement Day, John Connor used an ATM card with a dongle and used a laptop computer to circumvent security on the ATM when making his transaction for arcade money.

[Colapop]

Umm yeah... shit. I think what I said was clearer. You having a slow day Stu?

[crashe]

awwww gee thanks for all that information....

That was a fair bit of reading mate..



I will admit that I had never heard the term DONGLE before.. until today.

[heavenly.talker]

I'll post more about the trip once all the chores are done! lol
We are having a bike wash at our place from around 2 if anyone has nothing better to do (insert tui slogan here).
lol

[Colapop]

Hey no probs I'll just dash up there!

[Macktheknife]

JEEZ SNIPER....
You really need to get out more man!
I will post some photo's as they become available, It was a great trip only marred by the unfortunate introduction of the 'KFC diet'; I know some of you may not have heard of it so I will explain...... Eat some KFC, (any branch will do but this one was from Timaru) notice shortly afterwards a peculiar "rumbling/gurgling" feeling, spend the next 4 1/2 days able to shit thru the eye of a needle at 20 paces, lose weight rapidly, spend about 15 minutes of every hour in the bathroom.
DO NOT ATTEMPT TO FART AT ANY STAGE!!!!
Add the optional vomitting, special fever and shivers for 24 hrs per day and you have the famous KFC diet.
Highly effective but not very sociable, also makes riding difficult if not impossible.