[Shotimes] FordCDs.com ALLDATA CD/DVDs

[Jon Heese]

For those who don't know, I've been running the purely volunteer effort 
to provide free Ford Service Manual CD/DVDs at FordCDs.com for over a 
year now.

Well, yesterday, through my IT service company, I acquired a set of 
about 100 ALLDATA service CDs for all makes and models of cars from 1982 
to 2005.  I know a few of you out there use the ALLDATA discs personally 
as a source of technical information (TSBs, service info, specs, wiring 
diagrams, etc...) and you probably know that in order to run the ALLDATA 
program, you need a hardware dongle plugged into the machine (either a 
little USB key or a little adapter plugged into the parallel port).

Well, I got the old parallel dongle that the shop was going to throw 
away since they got the new USB key, and this allows me to run the 
program and view all of the data on the discs.  However, I'd really like 
to make these CDs available to the community, and the CDs are useless 
without the dongle.  The shop manager that gave me the discs and the 
dongle said that setting the system date back to pre-1972 killed the 
dongle check, but the BIOSes of the systems I tested the program on 
wouldn't allow me to go back further than 1980, so I wasn't able to 
really check this.

So here's my question:
Does anyone know if there's any way to defeat the dongle's security 
protection?  I've done some limited searching for a crack, but found 
nothing but shady business offers from people claiming to be able to 
make a copy of my "lost" dongle or sell me a "new" one for a discounted 
price.  Optimally, the solution would be entirely software based, work 
with ALLDATA v8.60, and be free.

TIA.

Regards,
Jon Heese