This takes me back. I worked for a software company a long time ago that used these types of physical dongles and they would serve two purposes. One to prevent the software from running, and also to store data in one or more registers with more detailed license entitlements beyond just will it run. Like how many client connections are allowed, license expiry, etc. There was a switch to USB based dongles at some point and then software licenses often tied to physical attributes of the server that the software was running on.

Physical dongles remained popular with customers for longer than you would expect mostly in my often air gapped previous industry where the ability to rapidly deploy new hardware in the case of a failed server, transferring a dongle based license was a simple matter of plugging the existing dongle into the new server and you were up and running again. Many soft licenses required internet connectivity or required you to revoke the license from the old server and reassign on the new computer taking into account the new hardware identifiers for locking the license down to the specific server.

I can still hear them rattling about in my top work drawer as I opened and closed them.

Is there a reason they used an image of a phone with a screen smeared with what looks like rendered goose fat?

On the web UI they sneakily slide in the Gemini icon exactly where the settings icon is after about 2 seconds of loading the page which caught me out for the first account I was updating. Really annoying.

Microsoft announced a while back that the end of EWS is coming for exchange online which means M365 accounts. They will start blocking EWS requests from October next year and only support access via Graph API. I understand the Thunderbird team are also working on Graph API support.

EWS EOL

“What did you learn at school today champ?”

“D is for cookie, that’s good enough for me
Oh, cookie, cookie, cookie starts with D”

AI Education for American Youth

“All crime in America” should cover content theft by any other model creator.

Does that include the content theft used to train the AI models?

Ice Cube begs to differ.

“Did you say we will all benefit from an OpenOffice plan?”

An apple shaped hole in a CD? He just presented Trump with an A-Hole award.

They’ve done studies, you know. 30% of the time, it works every time.