Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Domains

Domain: elby.de

Stories and comments across the archive that link to elby.de.

Comments · 12

  1. 321Studios? by TwistedSpring · · Score: 4, Interesting · on EA, Atari Sue Over Videogame Copying Software

    Who the hell are these guys? I'm glad the game publishing industry is so clued up on these things that nobody uses. If they were really serious they'd go after Alcohol Software or Elaborate Bytes, both of whom offer CD/DVD copying software with options to "break" copy protection. Of course they don't "break" the copy protection at all, they simply copy the copy protection.

    As Macrovision (creators of SafeDisc) have said in the past, their products are not so much copy protection as copy dissuasion: making it more of a pain in the ass to copy stuff. And it sure is. Copying a SafeDisced game takes hours in raw mode, as exactly duplicating the ECC/EDC data on the disc is a painfully slow process (probably because ECC/EDC checking has to be done in software for every block when it's disabled on the drive).

    Anyway, all the above is besides the point. 321Studios have made a critical error which I see as remarkably foolish: Marketing their product as "HAY GUYS, SOFTWAREZ TO KOPY UR GAMEZ!" Who in their right mind would do this and not expect their ass to be kicked severely by some legal body? You don't get any more obvious than calling it "GameXCopy" which is a name that doesn't even make sense anyway. What the hell is the X about? Other software remains legal because it sells itself on the fact you can create exact clones of any CD for back up purposes: not just games.

    It's not this kind of software they should be going after anyway. People don't copy games onto another CD anymore. People create images of a game and distribute it over the internet. It's considerably easier to create an image file, and from what I can tell GameXCopy doesn't let you do this. Furthermore, software such as Daemon Tools, Alcohol 120% and Virtual CloneDVD will let you mount ripped protected images in Windows as if they were a CD-ROM drive. Just download and mount. No burning. Surely this should be what they're worried about?

  2. Re:Distinction by slipgun · · Score: 1 · on Another Class Action Over Crippled Music Disks

    Copy Protection is OK (witness: video games).

    Yes, video games which don't let you make a backup copy (well, at least not in theory).

  3. Re:Heard on the radio tonite.... by Maditude · · Score: 1 · on Slashback: Drives, Errors, Copyright
    "You know the Panasonic or Yamaha CD burners you want to get this Christmas? Well, I've got news for you - save your money. After Christmas all new releases will be encoded and you won't be able to burn your own - and it's about time"
    Bah, CloneCD will do let you make copies without a hitch. What you won't be able to do, is rip the .wav files directly. But then, if you are interested in more than just a backup of the disk itself (ie, tunes for your portable mp3 player, or just reduced space on your hard disk), you can still, (and ALWAYS, I might add) go the old-fashioned route and record the meat-space analog sound-waves.
  4. the sneaks! by Maditude · · Score: 5, Interesting · on Record Companies Sued Over Charley Pride CD
    This suit should be interesting to follow...
    "A large part of the suit is that Fahrenheit discloses none of this information on the packaging."

    My wife just bought a cd (arg! I can't remember the artist name, Toby sumthin-or-other, your basic country crapola [metal rules, imho]). Anyways, there was NO indication anywhere on the cd that it was copy-protected, but it absolutely could not be backed-up with ezcd (she likes the security and convenience of having copied-cd's for use in the car, and leaving the original at the house). After a couple of tries, I moved on to attempting to just rip the tracks to .wav files, which I would burn later -- not all of the tracks could be ripped, and the ones that DID, were full of static noise. Luckily, CloneCD didn't have any trouble at all.

    My point (having wandered a bit away from the original topic), is that more than one record company seems to be trying to sneak this sort of crap past consumers.
  5. Your wait is over by eddy · · Score: 1 · on Felten & Co. Present SDMI Findings, Finally

    RSA and Eliptic Curve Cryptography is used for "copy protection" in a number of products. HIEW uses RSA for it's keyfile IIRC, and ECC is used by CloneCD, just to name two examples.

    Or were you thinking of something else?

  6. Re:Looks almost identical to Macrovision's scheme by Krellan · · Score: 1 · on Sony Sells Defective, Damaging CDs in Eastern Europe

    Some really good CD drives can simply return raw sectors. There are 2352 bytes of data and 96 bytes of control information per sector. At this level, there are no differences between data and audio!

    The CloneCD program is one of several that can make a good copy of a protected CD-ROM disc (usually for games and such). I'm sure the same techniques can be used for audio. To my knowledge, no audio ripper has this functionality yet.

    The question is, how to find these techniques? All good CD copiers I've seen are closed source and usually only for Windows. The authors of them have clearly spent a lot of time reverse engineering the low level programming of various CD-ROM drives. Now someone needs to reverse engineer their reverse-engineering :-)


    Super eurobeat from Avex and Konami unite in your DANCE!

  7. Re:Looks almost identical to Macrovision's scheme by Krellan · · Score: 1 · on Sony Sells Defective, Damaging CDs in Eastern Europe

    Some really good CD drives can simply return raw sectors. There are 2352 bytes of data and 96 bytes of control information per sector. At this level, there are no differences between data and audio!

    The CloneCD program is one of several that can make a good copy of a protected CD-ROM disc (usually for games and such). I'm sure the same techniques can be used for audio. To my knowledge, no audio ripper has this functionality yet.

    The question is, how to find these techniques? All good CD copiers I've seen are closed source and usually only for Windows. The authors of them have clearly spent a lot of time reverse engineering the low level programming of various CD-ROM drives. Now someone needs to reverse engineer their reverse-engineering :-)


    Super eurobeat from Avex and Konami unite in your DANCE!

  8. Buy Plextor and never worry again... by Kraphty · · Score: 1 · on Sony Sells Defective, Damaging CDs in Eastern Europe

    An article posted here suggests that Midbar's Cactus Data Shield may already be a moot technology. According to the article Plextor drives can read protected CD's (which normally cannot be read by CD-ROM drives). Also CloneCD can remove the Cactus protection.



  9. Re:Familiar by bravehamster · · Score: 2 · on Macrovision CD Protection Bypassed
    CloneCD makes a bit-by-bit image of a CD. It will still run into the errors that are introduced by some copy protection, but it'll skip right over them, and you can also make it copy the errors, which need to be there for some copy protection programs. I've used this to make Backup copies of Black & White and The Sims, which both use a copy protection that fools EZCD and Nero by introducing errors into the first 1000 blocks of data. Not sure if this is what you're looking for, but it sure helped me out.

  10. Not enough to make a keygen by Krellan · · Score: 1 · on Deciphering Windows Product Activation

    I don't think Microsoft will mind this information being posted -- by itself, it is not enough to make a keygen.

    Nowhere in the document does it say how to transform the activation code into the countercode that "registers" the program! This is what the registration process does on Microsoft's servers, and a keygen would need to duplicate this in order to come up with a valid countercode.

    This would be almost impossible to reverse engineer, considering the algorithm for this isn't performed locally. The most likely attack will be on the registration validation itself: just fool Windows into thinking any random countercode is valid. This is what will probably be done.

    The most that could be done with the information here is to make a program that spoofs the hardware information. It could somehow then force the Windows registration process to accept this spoofed information instead of actually querying your hardware for it. Then, you would be able to install Windows on an unlimited number of computers, by just re-entering the one registration countercode you got. Microsoft could detect this though, so you would probably need to copy someone else's Product ID. But then Microsoft would simply blacklist that PID after it's been used a few dozen times or so. The cycle continues. Maybe Microsoft could ask the author of CloneCD for ideas? (That program uses essentially the same idea, and it is still one of the most pirated programs on the net)

    IMO, this paper has done a valuable service by describing where exactly each bit of information in the activation code comes from. It will make people feel a little bit more comfortable, knowing what is in each digit they are sending. Microsoft should have made this public knowledge to begin with.

    Personally, I will never upgrade beyond Windows 98 Second Edition and Office 97. Microsoft is just getting too Orwellian with their latest products. When I'm not using Linux, I'll stick to the last known safe versions, thank you very much. I own a PII-450 (last Intel CPU made without Processor ID) for the same reason.

    Now watch the entire PC industry crash, as people stop buying upgrades and new components, for fear of triggering Product Activation and breaking their Windows installation.... Watch desperate PC component vendors offer "WPA insurance" when you buy their products....


    Super eurobeat from Avex and Konami unite in your DANCE!

  11. Re:Sales gimmick by UltraBot2K1 · · Score: 3 · on Coming Soon: Burn-Proof CDs
    Try using CloneCD to burn the disc. It's designed to bypass copy protection in CD-ROM discs, and it may also work for these audio discs. It's the only thing I've found that can sucessfully copy The Sims without any problems.

    The evaluation version is limited to burning at 2x, but I find it hard to argue any moral dillema against pirating a full version of software that is designed solely for the purpose of piracy.

  12. Re:The "too little, too late" department by Wraithlyn · · Score: 1 · on The Software Police vs. The CD Lawyers

    Software copy-protection hasn't died, it's merely switched to a less intrusive form. Most commercial software products (particularly computer games) have copy protection schemes designed to prevent you from making a workable copy of the CDs, such as SafeDisc, SecuROM, DiscGuard, etc. Most of these schemes revolve around putting weird stuff on a track that that standard CD burners can't duplicate. There are also other techniques like oversizing the CD, dummy files that "appear" to be hundreds and hundreds of MB, physical errors, etc.

    Of course, like any other copy-protection scheme, there are always ways around it, the software industry however, banks (and rightly so) on the fact that these circumventions are quite out of reach for the average user. Of course what happens nowadays is one group or another cracks the protection and releases a "copyable" version online anyway. Also of note are new CD burners than support burning Disk-At-Once in "raw" mode with special software, such as CloneCD which allows one to make an exact copy of a CD despite copy-protection schemes.

    Here's a good site which explains most of the copy-protection schemes out there.