What is a dongle?
Generally a dongle is a rather geeky word for a gadget that plugs into a USB port – one of the thin, oblong-shaped holes in the side of a laptop. But the dongles currently taking mobile phone shops by storm, and which have almost overnight brought the word into common parlance, are chewing-gum packet-sized (or sometimes slightly bigger) gizmos that connect your laptop to broadband-speed internet wirelessly, via the mobile phone network. Dongles aren’t particularly blinding in techie terms, but they work well and could transform your internet use. You don’t have to be a business executive in a hurry to benefit from the dongle revolution, although they are exceptionally handy if you are on a train and need to see some vital presentation or spreadsheet. You can equally enjoy dongling (not a real word but it would be fun to try to insinuate it into the language) if, for example, you have a second home, holiday unit or caravan where you don’t have a phone line.
A dongle is a piece of hardware that attaches to a computer in order to make a piece of secured software run. A dongle in this sense is used as a high-end form of security to prevent the unauthorized copying of software, since making a copy of the hardware itself is much more difficult than simply copying the software. The fairly absurd word seems to have been chosen more or less at random as a placeholder to describe the device when it was first used, and over time it was adopted as the actual name. The primary use of a dongle today is in very expensive software, usually aimed at a small core market. Very expensive rendering and audio mixing software, for example, often makes use of a dongle to ensure that people don’t pirate the programs – which may cost many thousands of dollars for a single license. Computer Assisted Design (CAD) software is another area in which the use of a dongle is not uncommon.
A dongle is an external hardware security device. The dongle must be plugged into your computer before attempting to start the Harlequin RIP and whenever the Harlequin RIP is running. The dongle needs to be plugged into your parallel or USB port depending on which dongle you have received. The Harlequin RIP will not run if the dongle is not connected to your computer. Neither will any of its Product Options. Global Graphics uses Sentinel Security Products that are available as Universal Serial Bus (USB dongles) or 5-pin parallel port dongles.
A dongle is a hardware-based security device that attaches to the USB or parallel printer port of a computer. It is a hardware key that uses codes and passwords embedded inside the key to control access to software applications. A software program intergrated with a dongle will only run when that dongle is attached to the computer. Most dongles are fully transparent, which means a printer cable or other dongles can be attached together in a “daisy-chain”, without interfering with the dongles functionality or information exchange. Dongles can be used to protect valuable source codes, sensitive text information, and data files.
