this post was submitted on 02 Feb 2026
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I think it was AutoCAD that had the most diabolical dongle of all. Some ancient version of the software would seemingly work without the dongle, leading cheap offices buying less licences than installs and plenty of architects installing them on their home computers. Everything seems to work fine, except every save a tiny fraction of a decimal far far away is off. Way too small for anyone to notice. Until they have been working for weeks and months on a project. And then and only then do they realize that all the lines have been slowly drifting apart.
Pure evil, and pure genius.
Must have been fun trying to explain that to tech support
I'd imagine they got a lot of furious calls that turned into embarassment fast.
That's atrocious. That would mean that even if you had the dongle, a bad connection would just wreck your project without telling you. Nice, Autodesk, how very pro-consumer of you.
Lol people believe anything. I would need an actual source before reacting to this story in anyway.
I sincerely hope that that the people who made emotional replies to your story are bots..
Welp, I heard the story back in the mid nineties from someone that worked in an architect office. One save or a few without a dongle makes basically no difference but systematic license abuse will make you have to spend man hours to redraw the entire thing before delivering it to the customer. Considering how absolutely hysterical some corporate anti piracy measures were at the time I would not say it is not unbelievable, this being very early internet era and all.
I recall some other corporate oriented software that would after some time only print blank pages without explanation if it detected a crack, there were a few console games that would corrupt your entire memory card with all your saves from everything, and music software and VSTs that would spread a cracked warez version to "the scene" that would have a trojan do other nasty things to your computer as a pre-emptive revenge.
But you do you and have all the smarts. Who knows, I'm probably AI too.
"Some tiny fraction of a decimal far far away is off".
"All of the lines are slowly drifting apart"
It sounds incredibly vague and not real.
That is me putting it in embellished words of amusement instead of saying that the software ran numbers through the dongle if it was present so that the logic on the dongle would correct it but if it was not present it would allow the run and save except the altered numbers would have a unnoticeably tiny miscalculation that would accumulate over the numerous edits and saves during the project duration.
Because I assumed that people would put it together themselves. Which apparently most people did. But some people still need everything spelled out for them. Ironically those that credit themselves more intelligent than everybody else.