Learning from Copy Protection

Just read a sweet article on how someone got past Math Blaster disk copy protection. Math Blaster apparently was some game or educational software for Apple computers back in the 1980s. Their disk would not copy using any of the standard techniques.

I got to give it to the author. They kept at the investigation for months it seems. Wow. I say you could learn a thing or two from the techniques Math Blaster employed. There were multiple levels of protection going on. Levels within levels to be exact. The encryption also seemed to take advantage of some bugs in the tools that crackers used to get past the copy protection.

Turns out the company made a decent bit of coin from selling Math Blaster. Maybe some of that was due to the copy protection preventing the program from getting out there too quickly. One weird thing I read about in the article was Advanced Demuffin. Who names these things?