DongleFrom Wikipedia, the free encyclopediaJump to:
navigation,
search Chained parallel port copy prevention dongles.A
dongle is a small piece of
hardware that connects to a
laptop or
desktop computer.[1] It is a portable device and is often close to the appearance of a
USB flash drive. Although earlier use of dongles was to authenticate a piece of
software, the word dongle is now also widely used to refer to broadband wireless adapters [2][3] or in general to connectors that translate one type of port to another. The term dongle can also refer to
audio recording connectors.
Electrically, the authentication dongles mostly appear as two-interface security tokens with transient data flow that does not interfere with other dongle functions and a pull communication that reads security data from the dongle. These are used by some
proprietary vendors as a form of
copy protection or
digital rights management, because it is generally harder to replicate a dongle than to copy the software it authenticates. Without the dongle, the software may run only in a restricted mode, or not at all. Despite being a hardware device, dongles are not a complete solution to the
trusted client problem. When using a dongle, it is necessary to emphasize the importance of making sure there is enough
bandwidth to successfully run applications.
Contents[
hide]
1 History 2 Copy protection 2.1 Usage 2.2 Issues 3 Game consoles 4 Other hardware 5 Manufacturers 6 Popular culture 7 See also 8 References 9 External links