Mysteries Of The CDRW and Backups Revealed

Talinom writes "Tom's Hardware has a story that details information regarding some of the new (and old) copy protection schemes out there, as well as results from several different CDRW drives. There are a lot of sites devoted to this topic, but Tom's is usually rather thorough."

Comments

Good old Uuencode

[Anonymous Coward]

Anyone who posts yEnc shit onto Usenet is an arsehole. Discuss.

And while we're at it, does anyone have any porn with Mae Ling Mak in it? I'm sure she's done something filthy.

Re:Good old Uuencode

[GafTheHorseInTears]

The really strange thing is that, using the newest version of Newsgrabber (which is supposed to support yenc), I can download and decode yenc MP3's just fine, but not yenc pr0n jpgs... it downloads, appears to decode, then writes a 0-byte file with the correct filename.

Anyone know what's going on with this?

Copy protection doesn't work.

[rice_burners_suck]

There are so many different copy protection schemes out there. Some are really simple, like throwing some file in an obscure directory on the user's hard disk. Others are really complicated, involving the detection of various debuggers that might be present and working around them in such ways that the software can't be broken.

When it comes down to it, copy protection is just like system security. In system security, as we all know, the programmers have to find security holes before the 1337z h4x0rz do, and close those holes. (Remembering to enjoy a Negra Modelo after each security hole is closed.) Similarly, copy protection is a war between the implementer and the hacker. The only difference between copy protection and security is that the roles are reversed: In security, the implementer is the good guy and the h4x0r is the bad guy. In copy protection, the implementer is the evil force and the h4x0r who breaks it is the good guy. That's a fact, and breaking of copy protection should be rewarded with large sums of money by the implementer. Call it a sort of fine on copy protection that doesn't work. In other words, anybody who implements copy protection will eventually go bankrupt because it will get broken eventually.

Re:Copy protection doesn't work.

[SystemFork]

Agreed wholeheartedly.

Crackers just disassemble the .exe file of most programs and remove the copy protection check on a assembly language level. It's quite clever how they go about it, sometimes. New schemes always seem to get defeated within days of release.

The only copy protection I've ever seen that actually worked was the CD-Key method for online games. If your game didn't have a valid CD-Key, then you were denied access to multiplayer, it was checked against the server so the checking routine was unassailable. Even a key generator didn't work because the producers of the game knew which keys they had released, and which ones they hadn't.

And they had your IP address if you tried war-dialing CD codes.

Clever as hell.

Re:Copy protection doesn't work.

[BrookHarty]

I personally use www.gamecopyworld.com to download nocd patches. Why would I put a cd in when the game is fully installed? To make the game company happy? Um, no.

BTW, Still have to buy the game to play online, which is really the point. So even if I use nocd patches, I couldnt play-online without a legal serial.

Re:Copy protection doesn't work.

[NanoGator]

"Crackers just disassemble the .exe file of most programs and remove the copy protection check on a assembly language level. It's quite clever how they go about it, sometimes. New schemes always seem to get defeated within days of release."

I read an article on 'Spyro the Dragon' in Game Developer Magazine. The company that made that game had an amusing protection scheme: They performed several checks in the game for copy protection code. If one of them changed, then one of the 'keys' that the main character (in the game...) had to find would disappear, preventing the player from progressing to the next level.

This meant that whoever was working on cracking the game had to play the game, level by level, and check for stuff that was missing. Heh.

It took them an entire month to get the game fully cracked. That's all the team really needed because that's about as long as a game lasts on the shelf. (I think it was for PC, not PSOne...) Any longer than that, and the copy protection wasn't really benefiting them a whole lot.

Personally, I find this story entertaining because I can imagine the crackers were tearing their hair out. Heh.

Security by Annoyance.

Re:Copy protection doesn't work.

[EvanED]

>>The only copy protection I've ever seen that actually worked was the CD-Key method for online games. If your game didn't have a valid CD-Key, then you were denied access to multiplayer, it was checked against the server so the checking routine was unassailable. Even a key generator didn't work because the producers of the game knew which keys they had released, and which ones they hadn't. And unless Blizzard gets their way (bnetd), even *that* won't work

Re:Copy protection doesn't work.

[duren686]

Ooga Booga for Dreamcast had something sortof like that, but easier to crack. See, if it detected that you were using a burned copy of the game, it would instead of starting, display a dancing pirate (one ofthe characters from the game) with the words "PIRACY DETECTED" over its head.

Needless to say, the DC group that cracked it (I can't remember if it was Echelon or someone else) left the pirate in, because it was absolutely hilarious, and made a bypass for it.

Re:Copy protection doesn't work.

[cpeterso]

And unless Blizzard gets their way (bnetd), even *that* won't work


One possible solution to that problem is public/private key cryptography. Every game client would be shipped with the company's public key "baked in". Client's would use the public key to encrypt all data sent to the official server and decrypt all data received from the official server. Only the official server would know the company's private key, so any open-source clones could not decrypt the clients' network data.

Of course, the clients could be hacked to NOT encrypt their network data. Then a clone server would not need to decrypt anything.. I guess that brings us full-circle. The clients can always be forged or cracked. At least, hacked clients would work with the clone servers, but NOT the official servers.

Re:Copy protection doesn't work.

[ergo98]

On a similar theme, the game Operation Flashpoint has a system they called "FADE", wherein a detected bootleg copy would lead to the player's weapons being much less effective. This is a brilliant strategy given how suggestive human beings are: Even for the times when a dupe is a 1:1 100% perfect copy, a less than skillful player will be sure that the real reason that they aren't hitting the enemy is because of FADE kicking in in the background.

Re:Copy protection doesn't work.

[ergo98]

People who break copy protection are "good guys"? Sorry, but as the kind of guy who goes down to EB every month or so to help support my fellow programmer for their efforts and ingenuity, I'm not going to be in line to give them a pat on the back, just as I'm not out there looking to give accolades to people cheating on welfare or collecting fraudulent compensation claims : Theft is theft.

Having said that, the comparison between security and copy protection is brutally flawed at the outset. Security is to avoid ANY intrusions, copy protection is to avoid MOST intrusions. This is a vast chasm of difference that many people with very juvenile thought processes fail to get on Slashdot. To put it into expanded form: Copy protection is meant to make it inconvenient for the casual "pirate", to the point that they're more likely to just buy a copy rather than screw with 20 different burning softwares, or downloading cracks from the warez sites (indeed, I would say that virus' and trojan horses have done software vendors more of a favour than they could ever imagine: I know a lot of former pirates who won't touch anything that isn't on a retail shelf anymore). Copy protection NEVER has to be absolute to be effective.

Re:Copy protection doesn't work.

[zootread]

Copy protection is annoying for people who buy the software, too. CD checks, doc checks, inability to make a backup, etc.

These companies waste time trying to inconvenience pirates who are just going to crack it anyways. And they inconvenience the people who are making them money, too.

Re:Copy protection doesn't work.

[Nameles]

Bullshit. Spyro was for PSOne, and I played through the game on a burned copy, and there were no missing keys. I made the copy myself from renting it and doing a 1:1 CD Copy.

Re:Copy protection doesn't work.

[NanoGator]

"Bullshit. Spyro was for PSOne, and I played through the game on a burned copy, and there were no missing keys. I made the copy myself from renting it and doing a 1:1 CD Copy. "

A.) 'Bullshit' is a very rude way to reply. Do you really need to invite challenge?

B.) Spyro the Dragon was also available on PC, and that is what I was referring to. (I wasn't very commital because I didn't feel like looking it up, but since you challenged me...)

C.) And when exactly did you make this copy? CD burners have gotten a whole lot more interesting since 1999, and the game came out late 1998. It wouldn't surprise me at all if you couldn't make that copy the day it came out.

In other words, you didn't prove me wrong, at all, whatsoever.

Re:Copy protection doesn't work.

[Anonymous Coward]

I buy individual copies of games for each of my computers. This totals somewhere in the range of $300 for each game that we play. Do you really think that because I want to make a LEGAL backup of my investment, that I am a thief? Personally, I think that the people that crack copy protection are the good guys, and people with your kind of attitude are self-righteous hypocrites.

Re:Copy protection doesn't work.

[ergo98]

How am I a hypocrite? Because I call the "I want to copy for `backups'" BS anti-copy protection line what it is: A cover? I have _never_ _ever_ _ever_ had a CD fail in any way, and I would say that at most times my care of them has been less than exemplary (I tend to have piles of CDs sitting atop each other, caseless). In other words I've never had the need to have a, err, backup. I find this excuse for anti-copy protection advocacy weak.

Re:Copy protection doesn't work.

[Anonymous Coward]

"Theft is theft"

Surprise.. Another black and white statement made by an opinionated, but uninformed slashdotter.

News for you buddy, making a working backup of a game I PAID for, and for my own personal use, is not "theft".

I'm sure you just loooove to point out how evil, corrupt, and immoral everyone else is, while you are the pinnacle of virtue. Nobody's buying your angle though, so fuck off.

Re:Copy protection doesn't work.

[ergo98]

I think you missed the point : If it's convenient enough, a good portion of average, ordinary people will commit "petty crimes", especially when they can convince themselves that it's harmless (such as what you see on Slashdot regularly : The whole "Software is free anyways, and I've deprived them of nothing" prehistoric thought process) : It's the prisoner's dilemma playing out on a grand scale. THESE are the people that copy protection is meant to thwart, not Jimmy the 13 year old that's willing to spend 40 hours to get a copy of a $59 game. Microsoft's activation key could easily be circumvented with a bit of social engineering (ignoring the volume copies out there), but Microsoft knows that most Mom and Pops aren't going to overtly commit a crime like that, and they're more likely to pony up for a copy.

Re:Copy protection doesn't work.

[unity666]

My ass. Just because most sys admins are too stupid, too lazy or work for a company that is too lazy/too stupid to implement security does not make the hacker the bad guy. I mean windoze nt and 2000 you can remotely dump the registry, and shares and so on and so forth, and password guess your way to administrator, and you freaks that use telnet without ssh, which sends your passwords, cleartext, I'll never understand you asses. Anyways, *nix is just one step above, you just have to hack from the command line which is tons funner then the damn gui(windoze). Hackers just find the holes that you code monkeys create. cya

Re:Copy protection doesn't work.

[ergo98]

Wow, looks like I really hit a sore spot. I find it most interesting that first you cover for yourself by claiming that it's for, err, backups (coughBULLSHITcough). Now generally if someone made an argument like that, they've taken the high road and have no need to defend their actions, but then right after that you blather out about how I think I'm a "pinnacle of virtue". Uh huh. Pick an argument Einstein.

Re:Copy protection doesn't work.

[Anonymous Coward]

As the kind guy who has been ripped of by buying garbage in the past, I have no problem admitting that on occasion, I will download a warezed game to try it out.

I was happy to spend the money on the Sims, Hitman, and Myriad other games because I know the companies put out good products, but since I wasted $50.00 on Tiberian Sun, I am quick to warez a copy of the next Westwood game that comes out before I spend my hard earned money on it.

Red Alert 2 is more than worth the money, but I had to be sure of it before I opened up my wallet.

Maybe you have money to burn, but I don't, and until every game has a demo that is as good as C&C Renegade, I'll continue to try things out before I buy them.

Re:Copy protection doesn't work.

[schon]

They performed several checks in the game for copy protection code. If one of them changed, then one of the 'keys' that the main character (in the game...) had to find would disappear, preventing the player from progressing to the next level.

NewTek did something similar with Lightwave3D.. Lightwave requres (required? - I haven't upgraded since 5.6) a hardware dongle to work.. if you didn't have a dongle, the program would quit..

To get around the inevitable "cracks", NewTek put additional dongle checks elsewhere in the program.. my favorite was in the load/save code; the program would work perfectly until you tried to work with complex objects.. once the polygon count exceeded a certain threshold, saving it would corrupt the file - the verticies would all be correct, but the polygons would be connected to them randomly.

This had two effects: First, you could use the cracked program to render objects and scenes made by other people (since it only screwed up the object when you saved) - to see what the software was capable of, and second: you could use the cracked program to learn how to build and render objects and scenes - but you couldn't use it to do "professional" work... almost like a "demo".

It was fun to read complaints about this on alt.software.lightwave, and read the replies from the lighwave authors (who did read Usenet.)

Re:Copy protection doesn't work.

[PaulBellini]

I read an article on 'Spyro the Dragon' in Game Developer Magazine. The company that made that game had an amusing protection scheme: They performed several checks in the game for copy protection code. If one of them changed, then one of the 'keys' that the main character (in the game...) had to find would disappear, preventing the player from progressing to the next level.

It's online here (free reg. required though)

Re:Copy protection doesn't work.

[PotatoHead]

That's funny! Hacking the psyche for copy prevention. Comes with a bonus though. Beat the game, then make a copy and beat it again!

Seriously though, this sort of thing is a whole lot better than all of the error-prone annoying hardware schemes.

Re:Copy protection doesn't work.

[Catbeller]

Yes, people who break CP are the good guys. They are trying to restore a basic fair use to the purchaser of a product.

I like the link between welfare cheaters, fraudulent insurance claims, and people trying to backup something they have purchased.

In the welfare cheat area, there have not been three or four orders of magnitude as much damage done to the taxpayer by giving $175/month to some liar, or ten thousand liars, in comparison to even a single company such as Enron or MS, which has been on welfare to the tune of billions of dollars a year. Why? They don't pay income taxes. Our subsidy of Bill has sucked billions more out of the Treasury than the bogeywomen of black urban welfare queens, which are mostly suburban myths anyway.

In the insurance fraud vein, insurance companies are the wealthiest, most profitable operations in the world. Most of their profit is shunted off the books, so that the true extent of their rapacity can only be estimated. But I do know people on the inside of claim investigations. There is a ongoing effort to improve the already obscene profits of these companies by denying benefits by means of delaying payment through dragging settlement out for years, so the financially exhausted claimants will surrender. And they do. And the HMO system has been a colossal success in siphoning tens of billions (at least!) away from health care and into investors' pockets.

In no way can fraudulent claims (somehow actually paid!) can match the tens of billions of dollars the insurance companies have stolen from their customers in endless ways.

There is theft, and there is theft, indeed.

Now, having responded to that, copy protection. CDs were distributed for years without CP. And software makers raked in billions, BILLIONS of dollars. Remember also that this scenario happened before, in the 80's. I remember CP on Apple II diskettes that attempted to destroy the diskette drives. For years they tried to destroy "pirates". They failed.

Then they relaxed, and stopped trying to squeeze the last drop of blood from their customers' stones, as it were, and the misery ended. Sales still exploded, and much money was made, huzzah.

What we have here is raw greed, firstly. The second thing we see here is the ongoing attempt to redefine a product as something metaphysical, not tangible such as a CD. The new greedheads sense victory in their PR attempts to redefine property as a spiritual concept. These people are capitalist radicals. They want software on a CD to belong to them, not the purchaser.

I and others disagree, and we can be defined as the conservatives. I am a conservative capitalist. I am arguing for the continuation of centuries of law, in that *I* own the box, the CD, and the right to make a copy of it, reverse-engineer it, set it on fire, or use it as jewelry. It is MY PROPERTY.

To give the radicals what they want will require a police state that is enpowered to reach into a citizen's home and catalog what happens there, ie net checks, software audits, PC's reporting to software tracking databases, ISP's digging into logs for whatever reason, etc. The new rules Bush wants are going to dump everything into a giant warrantless data warehouse that anyone can search -- except customers or defendants, I'd bet.

Now, to address the point of the difference between security and CP. I disagee. The only reason security is absolute and CP is not is because they haven't figured out *how* to make it so. If they do, they will. At first they wanted to discourage casual copiers, but observation shows that a little is never enough when control is the issue.

This is about a new corporate order, not about theft.

Re:Copy protection doesn't work.

[zootread]

You might have a point. Though I think you underestimate the ability of "ordinary people" to find cracked software. Isn't it ordinary people who are using Kazaa and other P2P file sharing? People who are determined to pirate will be able to do so, regardless of their computer knowledge. And then there's the pirates who supply their friends/family with software. I knew people who didn't even own computers but had a modded playstation and a huge collection of pirated games. Though I don't have any statistics to back this up, its my impression that copy protection does little to prevent piracy (though admittedly, it does that little amount). I suppose this is a never-ending debate.

btw I consider things like serial number verification totally acceptable since its just a one-time thing, and doesn't prevent you from making backups and doesn't annoy you any further after you've installed your software. Unless you lose your serial number, doh!

Quoting your original message:
People who break copy protection are "good guys"?

They become good guys to the legitimate software buyers when they remove the annoyance of copy protection. Read some of the messages in this thread and you'll find this to be true. Pirates also become good guys when your original copy gets corrupted and you're stuck without a backup.

Incidentally, I cracked some software I bought back in the early 90's (so I obviously have a bias). I did it merely for the challenge (and in some cases to get rid of doc checks), though I did anonymously distribute many of them. Good times.

Re:Copy protection doesn't work.

[Catbeller]

Then, if we send in a broken or scratched CD to a company that company should send us a new one. Period.

But they won't, will they. No question mark needed.

Copying personal software, books, video, and audio are protected by case law. To end this is an attempt to end-run current law and install the wish list of greedheads.

Re:Copy protection doesn't work.

[GSloop]

Wow, you think enough like me that it's scarey!

Cheers, and thanks for the thoughts.

PS. I thought GWB along with Herr Ashcroft would screw us over, but I never, in my wildest dreams (nightmares) thought it would be this bad. And we all thought that Repubs were supposed to be champions of the Gvmt respecting our civil rights and staying out of our business?! Sheesh!

Thanks man!

Cheers!

Re:Copy protection doesn't work.

[GSloop]

And so, because your are the "Gold" standard, we can extrapolate your experiences to the rest of humanity?

I have had CD's fail - I've left them places, I've lost them etc etc etc...

So, one of the first things I do, when I get a new program, is make a copy. 15 years from now, when I need Office 4.3, I'll still have it. It won't be original media, but I'll have it. Same with the Borland Pascal 6 compiler for Dos. Or MS Dos 5 etc.

I own that software, and like bloody hell you'll tell me what I can and can't do with it. This attitude just makes it MORE likely that I'll completely ignore your well-being and ENCOURAGE all my friends to rip your software and NEVER pay you a dime.

So, go ahead, abuse the customer. Perhaps they're sheep and don't care. But take heed, some do, and when you burn your last ounce of goodwill, don't come crying to me.

Cheers!

Re:Copy protection doesn't work.

[rice_burners_suck]

And I must add one small detail: Did you know that under Fair Use (which is being systematically eroded by megacorporations), you are legally allowed to reverse engineer any product? You have to do it a certain way, in order for it to be legal, but it's allowed.

Suppose a program requires a dongle to operate. And suppose that dongle prevents something else from working (like a printer that plugs into the same port, or an RS-232 cable or something). The software maker refuses to remove the dongle requirement from your copy of the software. So you're allowed to reverse engineer and crack the software (or hire someone to do it) for the purpose of circumventing the problem you're having.

There are plenty of other reasons that you'd crack a program. What if the software maker isn't around anymore? Or they don't support the program anymore? Or you've found a bug they refuse to fix? There are thousands of possibilities. When it comes down to it, copy protection simply causes inconvenience to customers, and gives pirates a nice challenge. All the more reason for them to pirate the stuff!

Re:Copy protection doesn't work.

[timberwolf124]

With most software you are granted a license and do not necessarily 'own' the software. Within the license agreement the grantor has the right to limit or refuse you the right to make a copy. So by breaking the license agreement you are also violating the DMCA.

Re:Copy protection doesn't work.

[timberwolf124]

What the hell does Bush have anything to do with copyright laws? As far as I remember the DMCA was signed during the Clinton Administration, making it even harder for people to leagally excerise Fair Use.

Re:Copy protection doesn't work.

[ObitMan]

excuse my french, but FUCK THAT NOISE.
If I purchased it I own it.
I have signed license agreements with vendors for some of the software used in my business. And those are just that. Signed Agreements, usually reviewed by my lawyer prior to acceptance.
Off the shelf purchases are just that, purchases just like a freakin hairdryer or toaster no matter what curves they try to throw at you. Now copyright law prevents me from changing or copying the software and distributing without the consent of the publisher. But when I've purchased my copy I can do what ever I want with it.

Re:Copy protection doesn't work.

[timberwolf124]

Believe or say what you want, but the fact remains that the courts have consistently upheld the DMCA and that the license agreements on purchased, off the shelf software is legal.

Re:Copy protection doesn't work.

[ObitMan]

But in those cases, feel free to cite some, has anyone been charged with doing anything that was protected under copyright law?
Maybe actually signing agreements with companies that provide professional software has allowed me to see where EULA's fall short.
For example, I purchased Word way back when off the shelf. and say i now decide that it's not meeting my needs and nothing currently in production meets the goals I need to accomplish. Now while foolish, nothing prevents me from hiring someone to mod that program to provide the functions I need. If I don't sell it or make it publically available or even go to MS for help with it, there is no punishable offense.
Most EULA's serve to absolve the publisher of all responsibility if there is a defect and to remind the user that it is thier fault they bought it.
Now when I sign with a software vendor to provide solutions there are certain guarantees in the contract. Namely the software will serve the purpose I purchased it for. Changes will be made on request. The rates for techsupport are set. I agree to use it on the number of computers specified in the contract, penalties for both parties are stated, etc.
There is a difference.

Re:Copy protection doesn't work.

[nzhavok]

Of course, the clients could be hacked to NOT encrypt their network data

Or a more elegant way may be to patch the client with new public keys, on the fly. It would be a bitch to packet sniff though.

Re:Copy protection doesn't work.

[Quiet Sound]

I treat my CD's quite well but recently, my Civ3 CD developed a flaw (ie. a crack) for no apparent reason. The flaw spread into the data area within a couple days and the CD is now of no use to me except as a coaster.

If I cared enough I'd try to find some stats on how common such damage is, but I don't so I won't.

Re:Copy protection doesn't work.

[Anonymous Coward]

In the good old days

I had er The Legacy on my 386, by Microprose

One of the seven disks stopped working.

I filled out my disk replacement form, added my £1.50 for postage and the defective disk.

3 days later a whole new set of seven disks arrived and I was a happy bunny.

Where is this service now?

Re:Copy protection doesn't work.

[IsoRashi]

Here is the article you were talking about, on Gamasutra. I'm not sure if it requires registration on that site, I registered at one point, I think to get access to the articles. It's an interesting read.

Re:Copy protection doesn't work.

[Mysticalfruit]

I took the other approach... I rented the game, played it and liked it. I then went to the store and bought the game because I wanted the game company to keep making good games...

Re:Copy protection doesn't work.

[ergo98]

Actually, almost every softare company that I'm aware of has an inexpensive media replacement program, though of course they want some verification that you're the actual owner. I'm sure there are insidious companies that won't, but overall I'd say the majority of software companies would be more than happy to replace media.

Re:Copy protection doesn't work.

[Catbeller]

Hm. Comparing people trying to defeat copy control to welfare cheats and insurance frauds is okay, but rebuttal is trolling.

Re:Copy protection doesn't work.

[Catbeller]

Well, the reason why Bush is slammed and Clinton is not (by me) is that Bush is president and Clinton is not.

Clinton embraced corporations and copy control, I have no problem admitting. He was in no way perfect.

I'd have to say for the record here that even if Clinton passed the DMCA, he has since said that the consequences were not what he expected.

The problem with Bush is that he has all the bad points of Clinton combined with a hatred of the press, an obsession with secrecy, a willingness to let very shady corporation appoint their own regulators, and most importantly believes in a justice system that so far has behaved in a dictatorial fashion, creating laws and precedent on the fly that enhance executive and corporate power, and marginalizes press coverage and consumer rights.

Re:Copy protection doesn't work.

[GSloop]

"Consistantly upheld the DMCA"

Hmmm...a few court cases, as far as I know, generally revolving around defeating circumvention devices.

Fair use, outside of a/the circumvention device isn't addressed in any of the court cases I know.

As far as license agreements...I don't know of many cases where the validity of license agreements have been tested - perhaps you could enlighten us.

Thus, I would counter that the "spirit of the law" in regards to fair use is clear. The effect of the DMCA and License agreements have not really been tested in court, and thus, it's as likely as not that the "right" to backup my software will be upheld by the courts.

Re:Copy protection doesn't work.

[WNight]

You downplay backups but in my experience they are fairly common. If someone downloads a game, it's been cracked, they don't need fancy burners and software to make a backup. It's only people who have a legitimate disc in front of them who have to go through these hoops.

You claim to have never lost a disc... I've never had a music CD die, but many game CDs have. I don't think it takes a lot before a protected CD can't be read properly, so while it may still be good enough for everything else, it fails the check. (I usually just go grab a crack.)

But I'll keep supporting those who break copy protection because of my experience with Diablo 2. I bought it and installed it, only to find out that it wouldn't play. It failed at the copy protection. The FAQ on Blizzard's site for this item said "buy a newer cd drive." Fuck that noise. I warned everyone I knew not to buy the game and told them where to get a warezed version. It was unforgivable that Blizzard was selling a product they knew to be broken on a large number of computers, but didn't care enough to help the users. The whole thing started to protect their pocket book, so I decided that was a good way to hurt them. They probably lost 10-20 sales (the group I LAN with tends to buy most games, except for the kiddies). It's also the last Blizzard game I'll ever buy, until they quit using copy protection.

Companies have an obligation to sell a working product. Not only is it dishonest not to, but you'll lose out big in the end when people who have no way of getting their money back try to sabotage you in any way possible.

Re:Copy protection doesn't work.

[Anonymous Coward]

"Security by Annoyance" is really nothing new. This technique has been used since the days of the Apple ][ (anyone remember the non-functioning soldering iron in bad cracks of The Learning Company's "Robot Odyssey" game? :-).

The Spyro crackers were being lazy. A few memory-read breakpoints on their patched code would have revealed the EXE's checksum routine.

Re:Copy protection doesn't work.

[Anonymous Coward]

Copy protection is meant to make it inconvenient for the casual "pirate",

And instead it makes it inconvenient for the legitimate user.

Annandale pledge: under no circumstances will I purchase software, audio or video recordings that employ technological means to intefere with my rights under the fair use and first sale doctrines.

Re:Copy protection doesn't work.

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry, I'm not a big enough geek to record when the hell I burn my games. Thanks for playing though.

--Nameles

Re:Copy protection doesn't work.

[NanoGator]

In other words, you don't want to provide the information that'll hang yourself. I understand totally.

Good day. :)

Ah, copy protection from hell

[Dr. Eric Peters]

Yes, I still remember with horror the "good old" copy protections some amiga games compaines made. Non-dos disks that made the entire amiga shake as the disk drive desperately tried to read the crypted disk. The sound resembled snoring and could be heard miles away.

I had a friend who couldn't play some games late at night because the drive woke up his parents! Some games could not even be loaded on older drives because of the "shaking". In addition the disks also came with a nonstandard bootblock making all anti-virus software go mad and easy for viruses to destroy the game.

My drive finally gave up the ghost after a few years playing with them copyprotected games. The same fate happened to all my amiga friends at one point. Some were lucky to still have the commodore warranty still valid. Others had to fork out a fair amount.I was one of the lucky.

I myself, being a flightsim nut, used to play Falcon. Unfortunately it came with such a nifty copy protection that not even X-copy could make a backup. As a result I lost the game one day when the disk, despite good care, became corrupted. Unable to find a pirate copy I was (and still am) without a good game I paid honest money for. Sadly, I also bought F16 Combat pilot and the same thing happend to that one. Backup could not be made. The disk became corrupted....

Fortunately a friend of mine had a cracked version... I have yet to see a pirate suffer from a protection that is impossible to crack. The only suffering has been done by the owners of originals ( I am refering strictly to the owners of amiga non-dos copy protected games that were so common in those days).

These problems persist into today. Another friend of mine lost a hard drive and blames SafeDisc copy protection on a recent game for it.

So, can anyone here, with hand on heart, really say those copy protections did more good than harm?

Re:Ah, copy protection from hell

[URoRRuRRR]

I think one of the worst was Jedi Knight, where you could burn it, but as soon as you made it to the final boss the game crashed (His file would be modified during buring I believe)

Re:Ah, copy protection from hell

[vsprintf]

Yes, I remember Falcon. The disks didn't just get corrupted by themselves. The instructions told you to make a copy of the diskette and only run from the copy because the program had to write game data to the diskette--and just in case it became corrupted, which it did with regularity.

After dealing with many corrupted disks, I spent weeks disassembling likely sections of code. (I was pissed and had plenty of free time :) )

Eventually I found a section of code that wrote three bytes into a block of data, modified a couple of bytes of code that had just executed and branched back on itself.

The self-modified code now jumped into the data, which, with the changes, was now valid code, and there it was, the code that hosed the floppy.

I never played the game after that. Knowing that they were deliberately destroying my data made it impossible to get into the game again.

Re:Ah, copy protection from hell

[Thurn und Taxis]

You think that's bad? Imagine doing tech support for the companies that wrote those games! I still have nightmares: Customer: My Lemmings won't go!
Me: Oh, you've hit the "paws" button, ha ha!
Customer: No, I click on the Lemmings and nothing happens!
Me: Hrm... what kind of sound card do you have?
Customer: I think it's a Cadillac.
Me: I see. Do you have the disk in the drive?
Customer: I don't know, this thing says it needs two Emm Bee of Arr Ay Emm, but I only have eight of my hard drive! And there's something about DOS, but I don't speak Spanish!
Me: Oh, are you running Windows?
Customer: No, I'm at work.
Me: What do you see on your screen right now?
Customer: It says "please insert disk 1 into your floppy drive."
Me: Ahh. Let's try inserting disk 1 into your floppy drive.
Customer: Hang on... [interminable pause] The computer doesn't like it.
Me: Doesn't like it?!?
Customer: It spit it back out.
Me: Hrm, sounds like a defective disk. What does it say on the label?
Customer: It says "Lemmings Disk 1."
Me: Aha! Turn the disk around 180 degrees, then stick it into your computer again.
Customer: Oooohhhh!
Me: So it's working now?
Customer: Yes! No, now it says it can't find disk 1. That's funny, 'cos it worked for my friend who I copied it from!
Me: Arrrrrrrgh!

And those were the *good* conversations. The bad ones involved many more expletives. The really bad ones involved expletives and tricky level 19 (for those of you still stuck there, buy my damn book!).

Re:Ah, copy protection from hell

[mericet]

I really think no copyright should be awarded to someone who releases an unbackupable format. It just defeats the whole idea of limited time monopoly.

Why don't you just go after the companies who sold those things (or whoever bought them)?

Re:Ah, copy protection from hell

[Anonymous Coward]

My personal favorite was the "Dial-A-Pirate" wheel that came with "The Secret of Monkey Island" for my Amiga 500. Later releases for the PC didn't include it. Sigh.

Re:Ah, copy protection from hell

[Anonymous Coward]

en: 'My drive finally GAVE UP THE GHOST'
de: 'Mein Laufwerk GAB letztendlich DEN GEIST AUF'
en: 'So, can anyone here, with HAND ON HEART, really say'
de: 'So, HAND AUF'S HERZ, kann irgendjemand hier wirklich sagen'

Du Kraut!

Idea of copying and protecting

[TibbonZero]

Just the idea of having something available easily, and fully usable- but not able to be copied is somewhat absurd. If something is readable, then it is copyable. I can't see any way to really stop people from copying things.

The most effective copy protections that I have seen, dealt having to be online to use the product effectively (Halflife) and having an individual serial # for it. Of course, it doesn't always work, but it's better than most.

The other good protections that I have seen dealt with having to enter in words from the pages of the instruction manual (which could be defeated by copying the whole manual...) but most people didn't go and copy a 100 page manual.

Overall, i think it's an uphill battle. Any protection will be cracked quickly. Perhaps they should try better (128 bit) encryption instead of weak ones, a la CSS. Who knows... perhaps it should just be open source ...

Re:Idea of copying and protecting

[MayorDefacto]

I was just remembering those old C64 game manuals that had a code word at the bottom of each page that you had to enter every time you started the program. I seem to remember that a couple even had some sort of mylar overlay that would "decode" a hidden code word on the page (this was copy protection of the copy protection, in order to prevent photocopying!) That sort of thing would be so easily defeated with the internet now. A text file of page numbers and corresponding code words would be all you need... in fact, I think that some of these were traded on BBS's for the oldschool games, come to think of it...

Re:Idea of copying and protecting

[moonbender]

If something is readable, then it is copyable. I can't see any way to really stop people from copying things.

Well, there are two things that need to be possible to copy stuff - reading you mentioned, but obviously you also need to be able to write the stuff you read. That's the approach many protections take, including the Amiga disk rattling protection someone else mentioned as well as the modern SafeDisk et al protections which are only possible to copy using certain writers, or - as always - using a crack. The latter, indeed, is practically always possible, as long as don't have to rely on other people (as is the case with multiplayer key protections).

The other good protections that I have seen dealt with having to enter in words from the pages of the instruction manual (which could be defeated by copying the whole manual...) but most people didn't go and copy a 100 page manual.

Err ... that doesn't help at all. Cracking that kind of a protection (without any further means) isn't a problem even for an assembly novice, or even someone clueless with the help of a tutorial.
The fact that this kind of protection is easy to defeat even for people without access to cracks, by simply copying a manual or writing down the relevant keywords doesn't exactly speak for it.

Perhaps they should try better (128 bit) encryption instead of weak ones, a la CSS. Who knows... perhaps it should just be open source ...

Content encryption a la CSS used on DVDs isn't the same as the copy protection of games ... maybe similar concepts apply, but I doubt it.

Re:Idea of copying and protecting

[Qrlx]

The other good protections that I have seen dealt with having to enter in words from the pages of the instruction manual (which could be defeated by copying the whole manual...) but most people didn't go and copy a 100 page manual.

No, those aren't so good. I hacked around one of those in an old D&D-style game on Macintosh II Cx owned by a guy down the hall back in college.

The "copy protection" was like this: Every time you wanted to cross a bridge, you had to answer a question, 'ere the other side you see. (No flying into the chasm if you got it wrong, though. You just couldn't cross) Well, it had a list of words, paired up with Page 37 word 5 and such. There were maybe 200 choices. What the program did was to look at what you typed in, and then look up the right answer based on page (x) word (y).

My simple hack was to populate the field where you type in the word with the answer the program looks up one line later to see if you got it right. It worked AND you got to see what the word was, which I think was useful somewhere else in the game.

I think I did this using (pirated) Norton DiskDoctor and MacsBug, but there might have been some other coding apps involved. It was *really* easy, a fun project for a few hours spread out over a few nights.

That mac (and his roommate's mac, and playing Oids, and Spectre over appletalk) is why my GPA plummeted from 3.3 to 1.6 in my second semester. I only wish I'd stayed with coding, now I can't code hello world unless it's in HTML. Such is the life of the Microsoft Certified Professional.

I wish terrorism would hurry up and surrender.

Re:Idea of copying and protecting

[Zendar]

Railroad Tycoon comes to mind. Where you had to identify the locomotive from the picture. After playing a dozen times or so, you'd be familiar with them and wouldn't need the manual.

Then there was the games that required a word from a randomly chosen page/paragraph. Now _that_ was fun!

/Zendar

Re:Idea of copying and protecting

[TibbonZero]

You should see the world of a Novell CNA... :)

Re:Idea of copying and protecting

[Anonymous Coward]

The best copy protection is no copy protection.

I mean, honestly, how much does it really cost a company to implement copy protection? You've got to pay for the R&D for it, as well as the cost of lost sales by pissing off all your customers. The "protection" just gives pirates something to do, and helps make them look good.

Now that I can afford to buy games, I do. If the games are copy protected, I would vote with my dollars and not buy them.

Part of the fun of playing games on the old apple IIe in college was to break the protection with locksmith or other programs. When the cp was discontinued, pirating became less interesting.

Re:Idea of copying and protecting

[tkdack]

The other good protections that I have seen dealt with having to enter in words from the pages of the instruction manual (which could be defeated by copying the whole manual...) but most people didn't go and copy a 100 page manual.


I had one of these for my a few C-64 games and a few early PC games. The best one was one that had the code sheet printed in dark blue on a dark red background. Copying it with a traditional B&W photocopier resulted in a black page :). Now you'd just scan it and print it in colour, but it was effective when colour printers cost $1000 or more.

Another popular method was a "code wheel" that came with the app, but again, these days it would just be scanned and then an industrious person could print it out and cut the appropriate holes out.

Re:Idea of copying and protecting

[kistel]

The other good protections that I have seen dealt with having to enter in words from the pages of the instruction manual (which could be defeated by copying the whole manual...) but most people didn't go and copy a 100 page manual. These weren't any more sophisticated than the other schemes: crackers only needed to tweak the 'is-this-the-good-answer' condition to true (and there had to be an if like this).

*Whoosh*

[decipher_saint]

Scientists are baffled by the seemingly improbable disappearance of Tom's Hardware from reality.

The RIAA is quoted as saying:"There is no spoon"

the only way to...

[TweeKinDaBahx]

keep copies protected is to not give them out.

Maybe these companies should stop selling the programs entirely. That would stop the piracy.

Re:the only way to...

[Richard_at_work]

Would it? How many times have we seen copies of Applications or Games out there before their official releae date? Hell, i was being offered WindowsXPpro 2 months before it was officially released.

CD's and CRWS, and "Backing UP"

[puto]

I agree that they should take off the protection in case we want to make back ups or the ability for the cd rom to read it in my box. But then again, lotsa people burn em and give em away to friends. Even my parents...(i trained em well, the never question why my 2400 baud apple modem burned out every 3 months or my collection of 500 f 1/4 floppies with software). I have been looking around alot and with all my computerphile colleagues and friends in and out of the industry(and it is a broad spectrun indeed) is one common scenario. phone rings" Dude, wazzzup?" "Wazzup?" "You got the new(insert music or software" "No man, been meaning to check it out." "Dont sweat it, I'll burn it bro" Happens all the time, and more frequently with everyone I know in our beloved industry. We all do it. We all vehemently deny it. Cuz I know after this post there will be ten posts vehemently denying it. What can we do?

Copy Protection Rules

[RAMMS EIN]

Especially the ones that you can defeat with Post-It (tm) or a permanent marker (German). Brings back memories of the Old Times when phreakers hacked phone lines by whistling connection tones...

Re:Copy Protection Rules

[RAMMS EIN]

That should have included a link to http://www.chip.de/praxis_wissen/praxis_wissen_872 5919.html (German)...strange that /. would eat text between angle brackets even if I post as Plain Old Text. :-( Think I'll just post as HTML in the future...

Re:Copy Protection Rules

[MayorDefacto]

Actually, it reminds me of back when you could use a hole punch to make a single-sided 5 1/4 in. floppy double-sided. Try that with your fancy-pants CD-R...

Re:Copy Protection Rules

[RAMMS EIN]

Don't know about CD-Rs, but I have heard about double-sided DVD-Rs, and, indeed, they do have holes in them.

Re:Copy Protection Rules

[slashhot]

The hole allowed you not to make double sided from single sided, but high density from low density.

Re:Copy Protection Rules

[Bill Currie]

going from low to high density was very late in the game. Long before high density drives were heard of, there were single sided floppies. By punchin a hole in the side opposite to the write-protect notch, you could flip your floppy over and get a two sided flippy (not a typo: a floppy you flipped was a flippy:)

Dang it

[URoRRuRRR]

The article was written without trying to promote illegal duplication. Dang it! I was going to copy my friend's CDs until I read that.

Re:CD's and CRWS, and "Backing UP"

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't do that!
There are 7 days in a week.

One of those statements is true.

Tom's Hardware

[Sivar]

"Tom's is usually rather thorough."

Yes, Tom's Hardware is usually thorough, but it is also usually thoroughly wrong--at least, the reviews written by other than Tom. Read through them. Look at the numbers shown on, say, the CPU articles and see if they have anything to do with the conclusion. I'm serious--not trolling (at least, not intentionally :)

Re:Tom's Hardware

[Lumpy]

Agreed fully, I stopped reading completely when I got to the FUD campain about software Pirates (ARRGGH!) and the poor record compaines and their huge decline in sales..

Sorry, but any site that repeats those lies loses any and all credibility.... as if Tom's hardware had any credibility to begin with...

In today's day and age, I expect to read about hardware, not political opinions (as if anyone believe's anything that is spewed forth from any corperation today anyways...)

Re:Tom's Hardware

[darc]

Tom's is usually thoroughly long, but that doesn't mean correct. I agree, alot of the information is irrelevant, and thus don't really matter.

I think that it's -> Next
There -> Next
To allow -> Next
More of those -> Next
Damn ads.

Re:Tom's Hardware

[Anonymous Coward]

Agreed. Frequently (and not just with the CPU statistics) they'll come to conclusions about products that don't align with their data.

But then Tom's Hardware lost its credibility back in the nVidia/3dfx AMD/Intel days of old. It's just getting worse.

Moot Point

[echucker]

99% of the people who want copies of software don't have to worry about copy protection- someone else has broken it for them.

They merely need to use their P2P client of choice to download a cracked image of the CDs.

Re:Moot Point

[SETIGuy]

99% of the people who want copies of software don't have to worry about copy protection- someone else has broken it for them.

They merely need to use their P2P client of choice to download a cracked image of the CDs.

99% of the people who want copies of software want backup copies of software they already own. Copy protection, aside from being rather pointless, attempts to restrict fair-use while not really hampering piracy.

A Few Words Knowing Voices

[Real World Stuff]

Remember last April when Andreessen said "If a computer can see it, display it and play it -- it can copy it,..."

Article found here.

As Dan Briklin says "With ever changing technology, in order to preserve many works we will need to constantly move them ahead, copying them to each new media form before the previous one becomes obsolete. Also, as we create new media, we need to preserve the knowledge of the methods of converting from one media to another, so we can still access the old works that have not yet been moved ahead. This is crucial. Without this information, even preserved works could be unreadable.

The most famous example of that type of translation information was an inscribed slab of rock from 196 BC found in 1799. It contained a decree written in Greek that was also written in two forms of Egyptian. It's called the Rosetta Stone. It let scholars finally read ancient works in hieroglyphics that they had physical possession of but whose language had been a mystery for 1,400 years (despite being common for the 3,500 years before being superseded). Cuneiform, a form of writing used by many ancient civilizations, was similarly opaque to scholars until they found a text in multiple languages carved into a cliff -- the Behistun inscription."

Re:A Few Words Knowing Voices

[crimoid]

The duplication of information isn't at stake here. What is at stake is HOW we are allowed to copy information.

What copy protection attempts to do is to limit HOW you are able to copy data. Copy protection attempts to limit you in such a way that any duplication would be too costly, too time consuming or too laborious to be attempted on a large scale. It is the copyright owner's attempt to prevent redistribution that would cause financial losses to their property.

I personally don't like the idea of draconian copy protection. I think that a lot of people are downright horrified that their livelyhood is in jeopardy and new copy protection schemes are the result of this fear. It is complete overreaction on behalf of the media industry.

At the same time, I'm not too worried though. Where there is a will, theres a way. If I want to copy data and I'm willing to spend the time/money/energy to do so, there is no 100% way to stop me.

Re:A Few Words Knowing Voices

[Neon Spiral Injector]

What copy protection attempts to do is to limit HOW you are able to copy data. Copy protection attempts to limit you in such a way that any duplication would be too costly, too time consuming or too laborious to be attempted on a large scale.

But that isn't what usually happens. What it does, is prevent the home user from making a copy of CD to use in the car, but those wanting to make copies on a large scale have the resources to find away around the protection.

Tom's? "thorough"?

[Namarrgon]

"...Tom's is usually rather thorough."

So you say, but I certainly haven't seen any evidence of this, not in the last 3 years.

Before then, THG was one of the better sites on the web (that I knew about at least). Now I will only go there if I'm really bored or looking for a laugh. www.tech-report.com, www.aceshardware.com or www.realworldtech.com are SO much more informed.

gronk

[Skuld-Chan]

You're talking about the gronk noise - its got its own entry in the jargon file.

gronk

I think it has more to do with the fact more Amiga's used Chinon floppy drives which are noisy as it is, but also most amigas don't have that sringly door flap on them - which just makes them noisier.

Re:gronk

[Arielholic]

not only that, but the amiga also used to seek the drive to see if there was a disk in it, then read the label. this seeking made de grink/gronk noise mentioned in the dictionary.

What I really don't understand...

[Suicide]

Is why companies even try these days... All "copy protection" even accomplishes these days is to punish the legitimate customers, preventing honest people from making personal backups.

Need to copy a game? GameCopy World to the rescue. Just use a modified executable, and presto, no problems with using a copy.

Those of us that do "pirate" (I want an eye-patch and a cutlass if I get this title) software easily find a way around the protections. Except my mother, who somehow manages to keep damaging her game cds, is unable to make a personal backup because of the crazy restrictions. I honestly want to know if these companies realize that they are only punishing honest customers, and no one else.

review flawed - safedisk 2.51 beatable in hardware

[Indy1]

In tom's review, clonecd was not able to handle the safedisk 2.51 (the disk2 cd) copy protection. If you check the clone cd compatibility page ( http://elby.ch/english/products/clone_cd/writers/ L.html ), you'll notice a "correct efm encoding" heading. Any burner that has two stars (well actually sheep) under this heading can handle safedisk 2.51 with no problems WITHOUT the use of clonecd's amplify weak sector feature, as the burner itself handles this at a hardware level. I have personally tested this on my computer, backing up Medal of Honor, using a liteon 163-dvd drive as the source drive and a liteon 24102b as the writer. I used Clone Cd 4.013. Tom's also used a liteon 24102b and was unable to copy safedisk 2.51 . I am not sure what they did wrong, but i suspect the source drive might of been the problem.

Plextor and CloneCD

[dlur]

My Plextor CDRW drives coupled up with CloneCD has yet to fail me in making "personal backups" of any Audio of Game CD that I've purchased.

CDRW

[Anonymous Coward]

But does it really *matter*, Commander Taco?

Please ask yourself this question before posting any more news stories today.

Warning Label

[SquireCD]

Hell yeah there should be a warning label. The gore family already decided that if there is "unacceptable" lanauage on an album then it should have a warning label. I think anyone who buys a copy-protected CD, when they find out it's protected will scream "SHIT!!" and that is worthy of a label of it's own.

Re:CD's and CRWS, and "Backing UP"

[MayorDefacto]

It always cracks me up how everyone here takes the moral high ground and denies that they've ever Kazaa'd Photoshop for their own personal home use. It's kinda like the guys that used to take a couple of days off from work to go see a Dead or Phish show, then came back on Monday morning and tried to act like they didn't puff the magic dragon over the weekend. Riiiight...

But systems get updated...

[mekkab]

The other difference is that once a hole is found in a system, it can be patched.

Once you've shipped some physical object and the security on it has been breached, you are up a creek!

One of the best scheme's I've heard of is one where there was a way of spoofing certain keys. The implementer knew this and when one of these hacked keys were entered it turned on the "RANDOM BUG" boolean, which would drop things mid process, panic your machine, etc. etc. He was quite smug when he thought of this.

I don't think he could get a patent on it. I think the BSOD is an example of prior art!

Re:But systems get updated...

[fishebulb]

3D studio max had a similar implementation. They had the dongle pci card protection that the software communicated with to make sure it was legit. Well the crackers just started removing the references to that hardware. 3.0 (i believe) was released and cracked shortly after. About 3-4 weeks after the pirated release on the internet. Hundreds of users started showing up on the 3d forums asking about degrading models. They missed a portion of the copy protection that would end up slowly destorying the models. a few polygons here and there. Kind of a funny and a really impressive solution (technologically and creative wise)

Re:But systems get updated...

[Big Jason]

Many people have accused Golden Hawk Technology of implementing that "feature" in CDRWIN, a popular cd-r tool for Windows.

Re:But systems get updated...

[Anonymous Coward]

This just seems like a bad idea, seeing as i like other people mainly pirate software as a way of testing it out, with the intention of buying it in the future.

My reaction would be, "Wow.. this program sure is a buggy piece of crap. I'm glad i didn't buy it!"

Re:But systems get updated...

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't think he could get a patent on it. I think the BSOD is an example of prior art!


Ya know, I've been running a warez'd XP pro corp for a month or so now, and have gotten an insane number of bsod's...

Re:CD's and CRWS, and "Backing UP"

[Anonymous Coward]

Friends don't give friends proprietary software.

I only distribute Free Software to my friends.

CLONY DL

[Patrick13]

http://people.freenet.de/Clony.eng/ClonyXLFinal_en g.zip

enjoy

i'd really like to know...

[farfolen]

...what CD has TAGES on it.

Re:i'd really like to know...

[Fantanicity]

Moto Racer 3.

Re:CD's and CRWS, and "Backing UP"

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, and its been happening for 30 years too.

Or in the date/time settings.

[Nate Enderle]

Last time I used it, (and it may have changed) all you had to do was change your location to some other country in the same time zone. The weak sector amplification worked if you weren't in the USA.

Re:review flawed - safedisk 2.51 beatable in hardw

[Jester998]

I also managed to copy CD2 of MoHAA with no problems... Can't remember if I used my CD-ROM drive (some cheapy brand... maybe Delta) or my Plextor 8432T burner as the source, and obviously I used the Plextor to burn the image.

Forget which version of CloneCD I used, too... my system's been through a format & reinstall since then. Point is, I had no problems copying the CD either...

- Jester

Tom's Hardware could be improved a bit.

[rice_burners_suck]

I know this may seem just a tad off topic, but I've read a ton of articles at Tom's Hardware, and I think I must mention something about the format of his web site. I don't particularly like that articles are split into a number of pages, and you have to wait for each one to load. Why can't the whole article be on the same page. Download it once, and read the whole thing from beginning to end. I believe that is the better way to do it, as it reduces the number of requests to the web server, and allows you to save an entire article for later reading, when you're possibly disconnected from the network.

As far as this particular article is concerned, I think it's quite detailed, and I like that. It's all about reading about the old technologies that made the computing industry what it is today. Makes me want to have a Negra Modelo.

Re:Tom's Hardware could be improved a bit.

[SquadBoy]

It also reduces his page views which is of course the way he gets paid for ads. And that is of course why he does it that way. :)

Re:Tom's Hardware could be improved a bit.

[atrowe]

The articles are split into multiple pages so good ol' Tom can get more banner impressions. And yes, it is annoying.

Monkey Island Copy Protection

[eg0n]

Anyone remember the original monkey island copy protection with the pirate wheel? of course i just copied each stage of the wheel, but at least it was creative.

Re:Monkey Island Copy Protection

[Anonymous Coward]

monkey island.... good times, good times

Re:Monkey Island Copy Protection

[ctrif]

I can't remember if it was Monkey Island or Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis game.

I was wondering how I was going to make a copy of the wheel until I worked out that if you hold down the enter key as the game starts the wheel always finishes on the same symbols!

No joke, I only had to remember one symbol :)

Let's figure out what the test titles are. I got 2

[voisine]

disk #1: Safedisk 2, playstation logo showing...
anyone know what this is?

disk #2: Safedisk 2.51, game, no idea

disk #3: Tages, game, design reminds me of star wars

disk #4: cactus, audio cd, obviously the fast and
the furious sound track.

All 8 GB?

[yerricde]

Why would I put a cd in when the game is fully installed?

Do you really want to copy all 8 GB of full-motion-video cut scenes of a DVD-ROM game to your hard disk?

Re:All 8 GB?

[MemRaven]

Possibly, but it should be my choice. As an example, if I want to play a game on a laptop on a plane, my only choice is to pack my CD drive with me to do it, even if all the program does is periodically ping the CD drive to make sure the CD is in the drive. Well, that may not seem like a problem, except that it wastes battery life, and more importantly keeps me from plugging in the second battery, so I have to play complete games to get multiple batteries of life going (usually by exiting and restarting the program, which seems okay until you're in the middle of an AoE II game and don't want to exit!

Also, I always play with the game sound turned off. I hate the music that comes with the games. Why can't I then use my CD drive for other things simultaneously on a game that doesn't have a real requirement for that kind of disk space?

I guess the bigger thing is that really, I want it to be my choice, because there are situations like this where I really just don't want to have to deal with having the CD in the drive.

Re:All 8 GB?

[BrookHarty]

Why not make a divx file? Its a laptop screen anyways? I like to watch futurama or simpsons in divx on my laptop, perfectly legal since I recorded it off my paid for dss service.

Re:All 8 GB?

[silicon_synapse]

Do you really want to copy all 8 GB of full-motion-video cut scenes of a DVD-ROM game to your hard disk?

Well sure. What else am I going to do with a quarter-terabyte of hard drive space? I don't have that much porn.

Re:All 8 GB?

[Jonny 290]

I highly doubt that he has any DVD-ROM games. If he does, he probably doesn't mind doing it for that.

I'm sure that he does mind having to find and swap out one of 30 CD's each time he wants to switch games, wait for the system to start responding thirty seconds after he puts the CD in, closing the autorun popup 'install' screen, starting the game, waiting for it to spin up the 52x so that it can read three sectors off of it, and praying that some hairline scratch on the surface doesn't cover one of those three sectors.

If you're a short-attention-span gamer like me, it's a lot more convenient to pick up a commodity 60gb drive, run cd-image-spoofing software or no-cd cracks than it is to set up a pile of CDROM drives so you can play your games at a whim.

Re:All 8 GB?

[shannara256]

>> Do you really want to copy all 8 GB of full-motion-video cut scenes of a DVD-ROM game to your hard disk?

> Well sure. What else am I going to do with a quarter-terabyte of hard drive space? I don't have that much porn.

Wait, so what's the DVD-ROM game you're copying?

Re:All 8 GB?

[nzhavok]

Hmmm, I haven't flown in a while but I'm pretty sure every plane I've ever been on forbids CD drives anyway? Mabye I'm imagining it...

Re:All 8 GB?

[Zathrus]

Imagining it.

FAA regulations prohibit the use of electronic devices only during takeoff and landing. The captain may require additional restrictions if he thinks it's warranted.

During flight you can use just about anything except a cell phone or walkie talkie.

Article Summary

[Mark4ST]

Tom's Piracy Guide had some good stuff to say about the new ASUS "Skull & Crossbones" CRW-1610A, and the new kid on the block, the Lite-On "Prepare to be boarded, Billy!" LTR-24102B. With a little hacked firmware, you're in ready to load up the trunk of your car and head to China town.

The Plextor and the Phillips drives seem to be caught in the duldrums; pirates hate duldrums.

Re:Let's figure out what the test titles are. I go

[manly_15]

Disk 1 is one of the NHL series from Electronic Arts. Probably NHL 2002. If you look closely, you can see the NHLPA logo.

Re:Let's figure out what the test titles are. I go

[Dr. Ion]

The only known Tages-protected game is "Moto Racer 3". Does anyone have one to compare the artwork to Disk 3?

Tom Pabst = William Shatner?

[zulux]

Consider:

Wellcome
Next Page-->
to Toms Harware where we
Next Page -->
Discuss the new anti copying
Next Page -->
schemes that affect your CD-R

VS

Spock I never (pause) wanted (pause) you to dress (pause) like a (pause) tribble (pause) and tracktor beam (pause) me from behind (pause) you burning hulk (pause) of Vulcan (pause) man meat

Re:Tom Pabst = William Shatner?

[Random Data]

>Spock I never #snip#
Now I know why it's called Slashdot ...

Re:Tom Pabst = William Shatner?

[Anonymous Coward]

moneyed corporations? really? mind explaining that one to me?

Re:Tom Pabst = William Shatner?

[zulux]

moneyed corporations? really? mind explaining that one to me?

A monyed corporation is diferent than others in that they are for profit. You local Red Cross is a corportation, but not a moneyed one. The phrase also features promently in the writings of Thomas Jefferson.

Re:CD's and CRWS, and "Backing UP"

[fishebulb]

the animation people (ILM, Disney etc) all pirate software. lately that really high end stuff has been becoming affordable for the noncommercial user. But they had no option in the past. they needed to learn and become better, and not pay more than their car cost for a program. There companies obvisousely had legit copies

This makes me feel nostalgic for the old days.....

[Dr_Marvin_Monroe]

Remember "CIA", "Disk Assassin" and even "Copy II+".....wow, that cool new color copy program on Tom's sure takes me back....all those cool things...like modified TOC's....Half tracks....Modified sector headers....having to use the nibble editor.....

[salty sea pirate mode]
....there beeeen pirates in these waters since there was waters.....
[/salty sea pirate mode]

Re:CD's and CRWS, and "Backing UP"

[unicron]

I completely agree. Somewhere out there is a 15 year old kid that could be a god at Maya or 3D Studio Max or Renderman but he obviously can't afford those programs, so he pirates them. And the thing is, and I've said it before, "A 15 year old kid with a net worth of 30 dollars that pirates a $5000 dollar software program has cost that company nothing."

Plextor is better with new firmware

[Anonymous Coward]

I rarely find Tom's Hardware to be particularly thorough.
Although they mention there are many reviews of the Plextor drive, they neglect to mention that most of those review point out that the plextor sucks with 1.02 firmware and rocks with 1.03 firmware.
I can copy cloneCD with the new firmware, too bad Tom didn't even try...

Re:Plextor is better with new firmware

[Anonymous Coward]

The new firmware is 1.04, and it sucks just as much as 1.02. I use 1.03 on my 24x and it works with everything i throw at it.

Re:Let's figure out what the test titles are. I go

[PimpNasty]

To me it appears that disk 1 might be NHL 2003.

Clone CD Images and Daemontools are the way to go

[Aexia]

Ever since I got an 80 gig hard drive. I just burn CloneCD images of games I buy and use Daemontools to create a near foolproof virtual CD drive with which to run the game. I don't look around for CDs anymore, I just select the image from the menu and off I go.

The downside is that it takes about twice the space because the install program usually installs the whole kit and kaboodle and then you've got the CD image.

It works over great over LANs too. We put images of commonly used network games(starcraft, red alert 2) on a simple fileserver(my old P-75 w/6 gig HD). Whenever my roommates and I want to play a game, we all point to the same CD image on a network drive and off we go. No digging up CDs or anything. Most times, the games just check the image on startup and never look at it again so the server doesn't get overworked or anything.

Tom's...? Please...!

[Anonymous Coward]

[...] Tom's is usually rather thorough.

Since when is "thorough" a synonym for "incompetent"...?

THG - the "News of the World" of IT

[Rui del-Negro]

When the headlines and the photos take up more space than the article itself, something is clearly not quite right.

When I go there I'm always half-expecting to see a half-naked girl holding a CPU (ATHLON 2300+ HOTTER THAN HOT - WE PROVE HOW AMD'S NEW CPU CAN SET FIRE TO YOUR HOUSE - DOWNLOAD OUR 745 MB VIDEO).

P.S. - To your list of reliable sites I'd add Anandtech. Yes, the articles are 20 pages long and each page only has about 5 sentences, but they are usually objective and well-written.

RMN
~~~

Re:THG - the "News of the World" of IT

[inquisitor]

The difference being that with Anandtech you can just hit the "Print Article" link and you get the complete article onscreen... a handy tip that one.

Re:THG - the "News of the World" of IT

[WNight]

Yeah, Anandtech is pretty good.

If you want to read the whole article on one page you can either use the "print the article" option, where it removes the ads and concatenates it, or modify the URL...

http://www.anandtech.com/guides/showdoc.html?i=1 63 8
becomes
http://www.anandtech.com/printarticle. html?i=1638

Change "showdoc" into "printarticle" and remove the directory, if there is one. You can also trim the ?page=xx if you wish, but that's optional.

I suggest...

[linuxpng]

Using an Apple. Since Apple will not allow copy restricting software into their machines. Good or bad, you can at least make legit copies of your software with zero issues.

Re:I suggest...

[Anonymous Coward]

When did they start this? I remember a LOT of copy protected titles back in the ProDOS days of Apple II's..

Re:I suggest...

[Snocone]

It's not that they won't allow copy protection as such, it's that with the Macintosh Apple has always refused to support direct hardware access of ANY sort after System/driver/hardware upgrades.

After a few rounds of hardware-dependent protection methods breaking with no warning and Apple saying tough luck kids, software publishers generally got the hint.

Re:I suggest...

[C A S S I E L]

Rubbish. In the ten or fifteen years I've been using audio software on the Mac, practically all of it has been copy-protected. The protection used to be all floppy-disk-based, with special bad sectors to indicate the keys, and this only went out of vogue when Macs ceased to have floppy drives, and then only under protest from the vendors (some of whom, until relatively recently, instructed users to buy USB external floppy drives to authorise their software).

These days, vendors use machine-specific licence keys generated via a challenge/response system. So, you can backup your software against distribution media failure, but you're potentially screwed if you lose the hard disk because any replacement disk will have a different protection key, and you'll need to convince the vendor that, yes, your disk is dead (or that you've upgraded your machine) rather than wanting to give the software to a friend.

Re:Let's figure out what the test titles are. I go

[von Prufer]

Looked like disc 4 was Fast and the Furious.

Sim City

[Triv]

Anyone else remember the dark red code sheets that came with the original Simcity? They were dark red to prevent photocopying. You had to match the symbols with the population and give them the name of the city (I think).

My Grandfather had a copy of the game that we both wanted so my grandmother and I spend an afternoon copying the damn sheet out onto graph paper. It was like a game then (I was...12?). I wouldn't be caught dead doing that now.

I find it interesting that when Maxis rereleased the game on CD they killed the protection. I almost would've liked them to include it for the history of it. Almost.

Triv

Re:Sim City

[E-Rock]

Ah, memories. Funny thing is that this only worked on black and white copies. They came out solid black. But a color copy worked just fine, and only $5 a sheet back in the day.

As long as we're on memory lane, I remember tweaking my city to the hilt until I had to go to sleep, then checking in the morning to make sure it survived the night alone and then after school revamping and expanding the place with all the money and population it racked up while it was running all day.

Re:Sim City

[Analog Penguin]

Hey, yeah! Those things were awesome! My dad threatened my brother and me with death if we lost it (as we were apt to do with lots of things). I acutally uncovered it a couple days ago while rooting through his drawer to find some driver disk--funny that he still has that but probably lost the disk before the computer it was on died.

Re:Sim City

[Herr_Nightingale]

man i have no idea what you talkin.. i photocopied that sheet just fine. No tweaking of photocopier, it all came out legible (or at least as much as the original). Also I installed the crack when it came to Mike's BBS :) Remember hex-editing the game to crank up your money?

Re:Sim City

[(trb001)]

By far the most annoying (and probably best) copy protections were for Empire and Bard's Tale III. Empire had you look up words in the manual (120+ pages) and enter the xth word on line y.

Bard's Tale III had a code wheel...with three wheels and around 20 entries per, with cutouts that showed through...truly annoying, but the best part was that they didn't ask you for it until, like, 5 hours into the game, so you could be playing for awhile and then start cursing them.

--trb

Did You Use Protection???

[Anonymous Coward]

Everyone knows that no form of protection is infallible (except abstinence).

googlize and this appears

http://www.cdmediaworld.com/hardware/cdrom/cd_pr ot ections_tages.shtml which convieniently also gives a solution to the copy problem.

This looks like a case of the cathederal and the Bazzar again.

You have N people trying to protect stuff, and n +n^lots trying to unprotect it. Who do you think is statistically going to come out on top?

just as an aside, what happens if you write a program to read a CD so that you don't get the EULA that software companies are so fond of? What are your rights?

Backup TO multiple CD-RWs from multiple systems.

[crovira]

Frankly, I'm disappointed in the misleading title of this bit/article.

Making a bit copy, complete with the copy protection tracks, is NOT a problem. It NEVER has been. You don't even WANT a PC to do it. You just need one or more writing drives slaved to a read drive and the two are going in synch with each other and bits are flowing from source to destination.

This is a no brainer. This whole pirate off a PC crap is pointless. There's no fuckin' way you can get the volumes you need to do it for real and make a buck off of it. A dedicated device is much better suited to repro and would cost a lot less, like $200 + $cheap / CR-R drive.

I was hoping that somebody had a lead on some open-source software that would let me back-up my LAN multi-host multiple gigabytes of content off my systems' drives.

I KNOW Veritas NetBackup for Linux would do it but it's just my stuff. Its not industrial strength crap.

I was HOPING that somebody somebody out there had a solution for this CR-RW spanning, multi-system (1 linux box & 3 Macs, [2 OS-9 & OS X]) LAN-back up problem.

What a gyp.

Macintosh, about 1987...

[symbolic]

I purchased a product called the Opcode Sequencer (some early MIDI fans might recognize this). It had one of the most obnoxious schemes I've seen. First, it limited you to two installs. After that, either the master floppy had to be in the drive, or you weren't going to be using the software. I think Performer used something similar for a while (and it still may). I was never one for actively trying to circumvent copy protection for the purpose of using software without paying for it, but it really ticked me off that companies made it overly difficult to use the software that you HAD paid for. In this light, I was glad to see that someone had hacked thorugh this particular scheme. Legitimate owners should not have to worry about this kind of nonsense.

Plextor has the lowest BLER

[Rui del-Negro]

Same here (Plexwriter 10/12/32A).

The great thing about Plextors insn't the reading, though, it's the writing. I've never seen a CD burned in a Plextor fail anywhere. Which is more than I can say for a lot of other drives I've tried (Philips, HP, Sony, etc.), regardless of the CD-R brand.

Here's a table comparing the BLER (block error) ratio of several CD writers:

http://www.digit-life.com/articles/cdrw5/

RMN
~~~

Re:Plextor has the lowest BLER

[DudemanX]

I have the same drive and while I agree that it'll write solidly everytime(even with web browser and TV card going). In my experience though it's pretty picky about it's media. While I've yet to have a failure using Memorex Black CD-R's, it has never liked generic media of any kind that I've fed it. Even a few brand names that I can't remember since it's been so long since I figured out that it LOVES Memorex discs. How has your experience been media-wise?

Re:Plextor has the lowest BLER

[Rui del-Negro]

Well, I usually buy Memorex because I get it terribly cheap from an importer. But I've used Princo, Mitsai (both CD-R and CD-RW), Mitsumi, Sony, Verbatim and a couple of weird brands and, except for one disc that was obvioulsy damaged (I noticed it before burning but decided to try it anyway), all have worked fine.

A couple of months ago there was a slight mix-up with the importer and they sent me 300 discs (I had asked for 30), so now I think I have enough Memorexes to last me for the next 5 or 6 years. :-)

Here's a nice article about different kinds of CD-R media.

RMN
~~~

Re:Plextor has the lowest BLER

[WNight]

Mine worked with everything I threw at it, even Gigastore (the cheapest I could find that still had a name) at their rated speed, and usually at 24x, until I found some really cheap ones...

The cardboard packaging said Verbatim, but when I popped the top off they were unbranded white ones, with no identifying marks. The manufacturer data (as reported by the drive) says "CMC Magnetics" and they burn just fine, but nobody else can read them properly. (My wife's new DVD drive will, but it's very slow, nobody else can actually read them at all.)

I haven't found a brand that works better than anything else, but I certainly won't buy the extra-cheap ones anymore.

One spindle I bought unmarked turned out to be CDs branded as IBM. I dunno if that's the real IBM, or some clone company, but they worked really well and were dirt cheap. Anyone else ever run into this "brand"?

Re:This makes me feel nostalgic for the old days..

[Anonymous Coward]

don't forget Nibbles Away and Locksmith

Re:Sim City memories

[turbosk]

and how about the days when you'd bag school entirely to continue tweaking the city until the wee hours of the *next* night? or mebbe that was just me....

relatively on-topic, i'm concerned about another maxis product called "the sims" which relies heavily on having the CD in the drive at all times, reading from it constantly, absolutely *killing* my drive. can't they just put the whole thing on my gigantic HD? c'mon, we're way past the days of having to run the OS from the 5.25" floppy. or mebbe that's just me again.

fred

Re: Link to article discussed above

[cafeman]

Not much to say really, but if anyone is interested, here's the link to the article about Spyro - it's a great read. Here it is.

Re:This makes me feel nostalgic for the old days..

[Anonymous Coward]

Lest we forget: Advanced Demuffin.

Not to mention the reliable

*B943: 18

All your D5 AA 96 belong to us!

stop calling it "copy protection"

[RelliK]

I can't stand the expression "copy protection". It is the propaganda slogan dreamed up by the RIAA/MPAA. You see, the so-called "copy protection" does not atually "protect" anything -- it prevents you from copying. The proper term, then, is copy control. Of course the word "control" doesn't have nice ring to it. RIAA/MPAA much prefers the word "protection", just like mafia likes to call their racket and extortion a "protection".

I personally call it copy prevention since it describes the technology in question and has the same acronym. Every time I read the term "copy protection", I cringe. Just count the number of times it's been used in the article...

Re:stop calling it "copy protection"

[rebelcool]

funny how i remember 'copy protection' from back in the 80s, well before riaa/mpaa even would have considered computers.

I'm sure the phrase has been around even longer than that.

The space is the thing ...

[Buran]

It's the principle of the thing. If a program wants to copy everything to my hard drive, it had damned well better earn that disk space it's taking up. There is no legitimate reason why software that does this should require the CD. If you want the CD to be in the drive, you'd better have a tiny HD footprint. If you want a big one, then you'd damned well better not demand a CD.

take it apart

[Anonymous Coward]

every stage of the wheel?

I just took it apart, made a copy of the disks and put the original back together.

original civilization

[rebelcool]

The original civilization game had you go look up a symbol from the pages of the manual (which was pretty thick..it would've cost an arm and a leg to copy) every once in awhile

Back in the early 90s alot of games used the 'look on page so-and-so in the manual and complete the phrase' method of protection.

Re:original civilization

[bedessen]

Circa 1995 I bought a PC game, I think it was Alone in the Dark. It came with a stack of these special cards. They were about the same size and material as playing cards, but they had rows and columns of abstract symbols in various colors. Each card also had a few holes punched out in random locations, and each card was numbered. The game would ask you to put card X on top of card Y and then enter the symbol that was visible at a certain row and column location. I can't remember how elaborate the procedure was but I do remember that it was not too cumbersome.

This certainly falls in the category of "certainly not impossible to duplicate but would be a real pain in the ass."

I also remember buying the game Serf City (around 95-96) and it came with a page full of symbols, and when you ran the game it displayed a palette of these glyphs and you had to enter the proper sequence from the specified location on the sheet of paper. The funny thing was that the game came with this sheet of codes as a PDF file on the CD! The game had been out for a while when I bought it, and it had apparently just been re-released on CD. (This was around the time when getting games on CD was still new.) I'm assuming the original packaging came with a manual that had these codes in a photocopier-unfriendly manner, but the game had been repackaged for the bargain bins as just a jewel case/CD, no manual. They didn't want to rewrite the game to remove the protection so they just included it as a PDF file on the CD.

Re:original civilization

[el_nino]

The symbols in Civilization were icons for different technology advances, and you were asked which earlier advances you need to research the advance the icon stood for. The funny thing is, after a while you knew what all the icons meant, and you knew what technology advances were needed, without looking in the manual.

Goddess, I must've spent thousands of hours playing that game.

they never did crack bleemcast, did they?

[SystemOfTheAnimal]

while i generally subscribe to the "if you build it, they will crax0r it" school of thought, as far as i know bleemcast (bleem for dreamcast) was never successfully cracked. i don't know all the details of it's protection scheme (i haven't kept track of "the scene" in a while), but as i remember it involved tons and tons of bad sectors that rendered it practically impossible to copy.
i'm sure someone else knows/will correct me if i'm wrong...

Re:they never did crack bleemcast, did they?

[Herr_Nightingale]

i thnk people just lost interest. what's a bleem? or dreamcast? sure it runs linux but i don't actually know anybody who has one anymore.

Re:they never did crack bleemcast, did they?

[Anonymous Coward]

well groups like kalisto and ech could have cracked the cd but out of respect they never did being that they could put the small company under by doing so

Pro-piracy: "Think of the children"

[catalina]

From the article: If you have children...."

Now that deleterious effects on children have been introcuded, it ought to be possible to stop these harmful anti-copy problems!!!

Re:review flawed - safedisk 2.51 beatable in hardw

[Bios_Hakr]

Maybe slightly OT, but how well does dd measure up to apps like clonecd? Any one tried to copy these disks in linux?

BTW, Even on disks I have purchaced, I have a habit of copying them to a custom cd I make along with the latest patches and game cracks under a /addons dir. In this way, 3 years from now when I want to play a game, I don't have to hunt down patches and the like. The only reason I have to put the crack in there is because the games won't play on my backup disks.

mkisofs?

[Anonymous Coward]

Does anyone know how good old mkisofs fares against these new copy _prevention_ schemes?

Cut Tom's some slack

[Latent Heat]

Don't you suppose all that jabber on Tom's Hardware is wolfbane to keep the werewolves and vampires away? Do you suppose for a minute they believe any of it? Can we allow that they are making the ritual incantation in, perhaps a vain, attempt to keep from getting a restraining order?

OT: (Kind of) About copy protection

[PotatoHead]

With regard to the review, it was ok, but really did little except sell the cheap sleeper drive over the more expensive ones....

I think we need copy prevention for games. Not so much with online ones though because you can do things at the server that discourage casual copies. (Flame suit on :)

However, I also demand the ability to make backups, or take advantage of the hardware I own. (Putting several games onto DVD, or HardDisk really should be possible.)

So given the cost reductions in media production today, why not offer people a choice?

If you purchase the game through your standard shrink wrap vendor, then you get to live with the copy prevention methods. Same battle different day.

If you purchase from the publishing house directly, or better yet the game developers, you get unencumbered media with a catch:

Your name and address becomes part of the game as they burn a copy for you on demand. You get to make any copies you want, and they get to know if you start distributing them irresponsibly.

I did this long ago with a utility program I wrote for CADKEY. (Ez-Shapes BTW.) I did put a lot of time into the program and wanted my return, but also did not want to invest a lot more into something that had very little to do with my program just to get that return. Why? Lets just say that copy prevention schemes have caused me enough grief in the past that I did not want to be associated with them.

Each copy went out with the buyers name on it. I figured that the incentive to keep ones name clean was as good as any to prevent copies without undue restrictions on the buyer. I never did encounter how I was going to handle transfers because it never came up, but that could be a concern.

Maybe a worthy tradeoff though. What if your media was damaged? Since they *know* you are supposed to have it, maybe they can just make another for a small fee.

Something to think about anyway.

Re:OT: (Kind of) About copy protection

[Nexx]

Or, perhaps some sort of a hybrid approach can be used.

You buy it from a shrinkwrap store, and you *register* the key. Then, when you ask for a copy, they send you a copyable media, with your information encrypted on it, plus key portions of the datafiles should be encrypted with your key as the encryption key. They can charge a certain fee for this if they want, too. What do you think?

Of course, the chances of this being implemented ever are slim to none....

Re:OT: (Kind of) About copy protection

[Anonymous Coward]

I think we need copy prevention for games. Not so much with online ones though because you can do things at the server that discourage casual copies.

Fair enough. But then you also want this:

However, I also demand the ability to make backups, or take advantage of the hardware I own. (Putting several games onto DVD, or HardDisk really should be possible.)

What do you really want? Just YOU to be able to copy? F*cking fake.

Re:OT: (Kind of) About copy protection

[PotatoHead]

Interesting variation. Seems ok to me. How about they just burn your copy at the store? This could be pretty cool actually. You can get your choice of interesting media to put your game on. (Different color media, labels etc...)

You get a free coffee or something while you wait, thumb through a couple game mags, or play your game while you wait for it.

You are probably right though about this sort of thing actually happening...

Re:OT: (Kind of) About copy protection

[-=Izzy=-]

I think we need copy prevention for games. Not so much with online ones though because you can do things at the server that discourage casual copies. (Flame suit on :)

you dont have children .. do you?

Re:OT: (Kind of) About copy protection

[PotatoHead]

Yes I do and yes they have ruined a game or two. (Pisses me off to no end!) My point really was that we need to allow people to make personal copies while discouraging them from distributing them.

I know this sounds like having cake and eating it too, but I used the terms 'copy prevention' and 'discouraging' carefully.

People are *going* to make copies if they can. The rest of my post really was a suggestion toward that end. Instead of crippling the technology to prevent copies, (Because it does not work and only harms the honest customers.) we use social norms to *discourage* copies.

Think about it, right now to make backups for the kids to use you have to go through some hoops. For console systems, this is often not possible. Implementing ideas along the lines I have outlined provide a way for all of us to protect our investments without undue hassle.

There are problems with what I said, but the concept is sound.

Instead of engaging in the technology power struggle at considerable expense to everyone, why not invest now in ways of doing business that help both sides get what they want?

I know a lot of people who want backup copies. Most of them would not object to a simple social copy prevention system if they gained the ability to make backups of expensive media.

Would you purchase an early copy of a hot game if it was customized with your contact information? Would getting your copy before it hits the stores matter?

Pre-orders, are a big part of the game business today that are just waiting for something like this. If you want to be anonymous, then your copy of the media will be hard to reproduce. If you are willing to step up and be recognized as one who has a legal copy, then you get extra benefit.

Low cost replacement media, no sales receipt or media return required. (Game console)

Where media formats permit, unencumbered media so you can handle your own backups. (PC CD-ROM or DVD-ROM.)

Discounts on continued advance purchases.

Some or all of the above might not be workable, but something along those lines *is*.

The first company to realise this, will get a *lot* of business, mine included.

Re:OT: (Kind of) About copy protection

[Nexx]

Oooh, I like that idea. Of course, we'll have to prevent the employees of stores selling shrinkwrap from releasing bootlegs, but that's ok, with encryption technologies and such, it shouldn't be too difficult. This way, distribution costs for games become trivial too. Maybe we should ask EA, Blizzard, et. al. for possibility of having this sort of thing happen? :-)

Re:This makes me feel nostalgic for the old days..

[Anonymous Coward]

*B943: 18

I think that's

*B942: 18

That's the checksum SEC/CLC thingie.

disc 4

[kennedy]

disc 4 is the soundtrack to "the fast and the furious"

aka "rice wars"

terms

[Alien Being]

s/copy protection/copy prevention/g

Re:Sim City memories

[dakoda]

i'm concerned about another maxis product called "the sims" which relies heavily on having the CD in the drive at all times, reading from it constantly, absolutely *killing* my drive. can't they just put the whole thing on my gigantic HD?

haven't you looked? each install takes up ~700MB. it _does_ copy the whole cd to the freaking harddrive. it's annoying to those of us without gigantic harddrives, having to free up 1.5GB so the children can play EA's bloated cash cow. (each expansion adds considerably more. ) additionally, each neighborhood, empty, takes up nearly 12MB(not too evil, but still obscene for what it contains (nothing)). and the web templates garbage was another 30 or so. it's really pathetic, when you look at it. maxis has lost my interest with these pieces of crap lately =(

Re:CD's and CRWS, and "Backing UP"

[Dun Malg]

I've become a master with Numega/Compuware's Driver Studio. It goes for $2500. The weird part is that other than a couple simple USB drivers I wrote, most of my Driver Studio experience has been cracking with SoftIce. The only guilt I feel is that I didn't pay for Driver Studio 2.6 and it really has proved itself a valuable cracking tool...

History repeats itsself...

[thepoolguy]

It amazes me that for all of our advances in technology over that past 20 years, we are still fighting some of the same battles with the same tactics.

The tactics I am referring to are, of course, copy protecting the distribution media of the software. 20 years ago it was apple ][ software on floppy disks. The apple ][ disk controller didn't really process the data. It fed the raw flux transitions to the disk operating system. The software for the DOS was contained in the boot sector of each disk. To make a disk difficult to copy, you tweak how the DOS functioned to include things like positioning the heads between tracks or working around intentional imperfections in the disk media. These imperfections would cause errors for the standard DOS read routines, but the modified DOS would know to just skip around certain sectors.

To combat these and other copy protection schemes, many disk copying programs appear on various BBSs. Over time people built up a list of which copy programs to use against which type of protection scheme.

In the end, bit by bit copiers could copy most everything that was out there. Over time software publishers went the route of tying software to something that was less easily copyable like a word or number from the paper manual. Just like the licensing schemes of today.

As time went on, the apple ][ (][+, //c, ...) were superceeded by Macs and PCs. I don't remember if the same issues appeared in software distributed on floppys for PCs; they may have learned something from the earlier apple ][ experience and tied their copy prevention system to something that was distributed in addition to the electronic media.

From my point of view, we are repeating those same old steps. The difference is that users will probably accept some sort of copy protection scheme for software, such as software activation keys (the shareware world lives on this model). While this model is quite workable for software, it fails miserably when it is applied to pure data such as CDs. CD copying will continue, because it is data and not an executable program which can check for some sort of authentication or activation model.

Audio CDs are data. I repeat this because that is what sets them apart from software. That is also what sets them apart in the mind of the public.

-tpg.

Re:Clone CD Images and Daemontools are the way to

[Poptarts]

Virtual CD is a much better program for things such as that, and in fact was made completely for that purpose. Although, it is demoware unless you buy it, but of course, you can just get a serial for it if you want. What, are they thinking people who pirate games will also be willing to buy the program. Seriously though, it is worth the money for those of you who actually do support programs you like. Buy it or not, your choice.

Re:review flawed - safedisk 2.51 beatable in hardw

[Wylfing]

If you check the clone cd compatibility page...

Actually, scan several of the pages of Elby's web site and notice how much text has found its way into Tom's article. Nice work, Tom.

Re:CD's and CRWS, and "Backing UP"

[Animats]

The animation people (ILM, Disney etc) all pirate software.

Actually, they don't. I've sold into that market, and piracy hasn't been a problem with the major studios. Since animation houses tend to want features added to the big animation packages, there are often people on-site from the vendor. This keeps piracy down. Some of the smaller effects houses have trouble coming up with a credit card number that won't bounce, though.

Falcon: Probably Long Gone...

[Chasing Amy]

A quick look on my favorite "Abandonware" sites shows no copy of the first Falcon game. Probably due to their method of intentional floppy corruption as copy protection...

However, take solace in your free copy of the third version of the series, Falcon 3.0:

http://www.the-underdogs.org/game.php?id=2128

Lame article. Ignored ATIP codes, & critical f

[Anonymous Coward]

That article did not explain why none of the TAGES copies worked on his DVD-ROM drive.

A DVD-ROM drive typically supports MEDIA TYPE info code (in this case its CDR on the copies) thus trivial for TAGES (or any code) to detect that its not the original.

Also, unless spoofing ASPI calls to thwart that, you need to spoof the ATIP data. The ATIP information is typically found in CDR media and identifies the vendor of the media, its an agreed upon convention for the total sector duration.

Again if he avoided using that stupid DVD-ROM drive of his he could have hidden ATIP info which is not visible on a standard CD-ROm drive.

he should have tried a 9 dollar chinese cd-rom drive. It would have read the copies fine.

Also that crappy report on Toms Hardware site ignored facts about EFM 14 bit to 8 bit mapping and how C1+C2 data is employed in Macrovision SD technologies and how its TRIVIAL to defeat with a silly littel tool that repairs the static image file before burning.

No Lite-On drive Needed!!! (If you use the hacking tool to twiddle the bits in the CloneCD/Blind Read image file. It was old news in the fall : BetaBlocker. (Beta2Sd2_251_English.zip was the first non German version on the net).

Also his article neglects to mention that TAGES was kracked in less than a day on its first title : The wuro version of MotoRacer 3. It was a 100% perfect total absolute forensic hack. No secrets left in TAGES. TAGES was a fraudulent european non-challenging piece of junk code.

The new way to defeat all these anyways is with miniport driver level emulation tools.

I was sadly dissapointed that noboby knows this stuff. Worse, that crappy article REFUSES to list the names of the titles and neglects the critical points I raised and countless others. I stopped reading that site and its fractured-multi-page slop months ago. Now I know not to bother going there anymore. Its for newbies and lamers I guess.

Its more depressing that this post will not archive because slashdot hates AC posts, no matter how highly modded up. It will probably not get modded up anyways.

TAGES

[Anonymous Coward]

Thomson-CSF has a patent application on a copy prevention system, which may be the same they sell as TAGES. Check the US patent application 20010024411.

(enter that to "Document number" field at
http://appft1.uspto.gov/netahtml/PTO/search-bo ol.h tml, the direct URL is l o n g)

Elite for C=64

[Anonymous Coward]

Anyone remember ELITE, the space trading vector game. I bought the original for the old Commodore 64, it had an actual prism that you would have to hold up to the monitor (ok the 13" tv) to decipher the code you had to punch in in order to play the game, I seem to remember that it was generated on the fly so it was always different.

Needless to say I downloaded a "cracked" version off a local bbs and threw out the prism.

A.C.

preach it brother!

[Herr_Nightingale]

You sing it to the masses, my man, I've been crusading for this nomenclature for years! It persists, yes, but only because people are sheep.
We need to re-establish "Copy Protection" as something you wrap your dink in before you boink.

Zaxxon on Commodore-64

[the bluebrain]

I remember a clever copy-control mechanism the comapany making Zaxxon for the C-64 ("GCS" or something?) used:
You could copy the disk, and even play the game, but all the graphics were degraded and semi-transparent. I guess it was supposed to aminate the copier to go purchase an original. Guess it worked, too, at least on me.

Re:Zaxxon on Commodore-64

[Anonymous Coward]

GCS (German Cracking Service) cracked Zaxxon. One interesting item to note was that GCS Zaxxon checked the name of the file of the game and if it wasn't named 'GCS ZAXXON" would stop loading the Game and display the message "Sorry, no Zaxxon." I never observed the dgraded graphics mode with GCS Zaxxon.

Re:Zaxxon on Commodore-64

[the bluebrain]

Hey - that's right! The GCS crack was available a while after the game first came out. But if you copied the original disk (even using all the tricks I've long forgotten), you got the degredation. But GCS got it right ... hmmm ... basically proving what everybody says: there's ain't no uncrackable copy inhibition system.

... now who actually made Zaxxon, I wonder?

THE UNCRACKABLE CD'S

[Anonymous Coward]

Even after a few years nobody has been able to clone the bleemcast cd's with any hardware. I found a link to a pic of the cd's, and I kinda see why.

http://www.fraps.com/bleem/bleemprot.jpg

Re:Clone CD Images and Daemontools are the way to

[ColaMan]

It doesn't come on CD does it?

Use virtual CD to make as virtual CD of virtual CD!

Oh, the *irony* !

:-)

Audio protection vs digital in/out

[kistel]

One thing that might be interesting when you have problems copying audio CDs is that most DVD players also have digital out channels. Also, most newer sound cards have digital in/out... I guess you don't need much more to make a 'copyable' copy (for yourself, of course :-)

Here's the article

[qurob]

Keeping the Pirates at Bay:
Implementing Crack Protection for Spyro: Year of the Dragon

X-Wing

[JediTrainer]

Ah I remember the days. Playing X-Wing on my old (386? 486?)...

That game had very stupid copy protection. The game would start, and would ask you a question by giving you a symbol that you had to find in the manual and type in its name.

Of course, one young teenager with a hex-editor (remember Norton DiskEdit?) was easily able to find all of the 'names' in one of the game's data files, and it was rather trivial to replace all of them with a single space. At the time it was all I knew how to do, because it was before my programming days.

It was quicker to do this than to try to find a crack on the BBSs out there. And yes, I have my own purchased copy of that game - I just hated having to keep flipping through the manual.

Re:X-Wing

[Xenophon Fenderson,]

IIRC, the X-Wing crack is easier than that. I remember inputting ASCII NULs to replace the strings, allowing one to just hit Enter to bypass the copy protection. But I've slept since then and may be recalling a different game.

I must say that about the only thing that makes me feel really elite is cracking software, even if it's just patching a list of strings somewhere. Isn't that sad?

How Did Linux Software Fare?

[dbretton]

If only Tom reviewed how well Linux cd recording software (cdrecord, et. al.) fared under the same circumstances...

Not everyone's primary box is a Windows machine, Taco...

Tom stole that info

[Anonymous Coward]

They stole a lot of that information.

Almost every bit in that article was retrieved from other websites specially reviewing writers , software and methods to bypass the copy protection without being illegal and/or disobey the EULA of the software on that cd-rom. (For instance www.cdfreaks.com)

Re:This makes me feel nostalgic for the old days..

[UnknownSoldier]

> Remember Copy II+"

What, no mention of COPYA, Muffin, Disk Muncher or Locksmith ? ;-)

I still remember how Copy ][+ had 1 BIG sector on tracks 2 and 3. The thing loaded *FAST*.

"Cracking Techniques" was a bunch of text files describing how to break each game protection. It even had a 'tut on Copy ][+. Copy the ROM over to the language card. Modify the RAM so that reset would enter the "monitor" (built in disassembler on the Apple), and then finally make the 16K language read only. Copy ][+ never checked for the language card, so voila, you had a memory image. Moving the memory down so that DOS 3.3 wouldn't clobber it, and then BSAVE COPY ][+, A$800,L$8E00 :) (Dos3.3 started at 0x9600)

> all those cool things...like modified TOC's....

Sad, that I still remember that the DOS3.3 TOC was on track 17 after all these years. I like how some games would embed control-chars in the filename.

{rant}
My 8-bit Apple had 20 character filenames. Who's the dumbass that limits filenames to 8.3 in CPM and MSDOS ?
{/rant}

> Half tracks....

The Apple drive was actually capable of 1/4 tracks. I believe Broderbund games made use of it. Write a small section on track 0. Increment to track 1/4, write another small section. Repeat. Normally, tracks were 4 quarter tracks apart, due to interference from data written on quarter tracks.

> Modified sector headers....

The thing that made Apple games disk so much fun to backup was that the drive couldn't write 2 consequetive zeros (aside from Sync Bytes, which was 0xFF, followed by two zero bits.) Ah, the days of 5+3 (13 sector tracks) and 6+2 encoding (16 sector tracks). For 6+2, you expand a sector of 256 bytes out to 384 bytes.)
Some interesting technical info here http://www.enteract.com/~enf/afc/apple2

Little bit of history here http://apple2history.org/history/ah15.html

Then someone figured out that you *could* write a few "illegal" bytes, such as C5.

> having to use the nibble editor

Copy ][+ had a ton of options for it's nibble editor. And if you still couldn't make a backup, there was always the option of boot tracing the program. Remember how the first sector had to be delimited by D5 AA 96 because thats what the Disk Prom checked for.

Some interesting cracking technique from yore:

Wildcard and Replay were 2 interesting products. They generated a NMI and let you enter the disassembler. I wanted one, but found out that I didn't really need one after I learnt about that language card trick.

The other trick to "stop" a game, was to search for 30 C0, since that was the address of the speaker! (I was *so* thankfull Copy ][+ ver 7 added a search bytes function!) Change a few bytes, and now the game will stop when it tries to play a sound. ;-)

Cheers

No PC did not learn from Apple.

[aepervius]

A lot of floppy were "protected" by many copy prevention scheme using bad sector or special sector. Guess what ? Ultima V using such a special sector with XORing the protection code was what bring me to learn assembly. And to crack it. Because I had spent my hard learned (I was 12) money on a software which afetr a while refused to work. So I did go into the code and elarnt what it meant (with debug), find a way to crack, and then saved my executable with the crack.

Btttom line : PC publisher did not learn from Apple II. And still did not learn as far as I can see the Laserlok copy rpevention schemes.

Re:CD's and CRWS, and "Backing UP"

[vegetablespork]

So your not being able to afford it means it's OK to steal it? Quite a change in attitude from your posts in the WC3 story.

Re:dern CDs on airplanes

[raresilk]

No, CD drives are allowed after takeoff is completed. I hate this problem too- the CD apparently reduces battery life by about 1/3 - also, I have to haul the CD drive around, even though the game is fully installed. In Civ III at least you can remove the CD drive after the game starts up - it doesn't continuously ping. But what a pain for travelers - there ought to be some way to play a game you bought legitimately without lugging a CD. All software companies are concerned about piracy, but if Office made you insert the CD every time you ran the program, don't you think people would stop buying it and choose something else to do office work? If the same alternative was available for games, I wouldn't buy the CD-dependent version either. I have no desire to rip software developers off, but I have seriously considered searching the web for a cracked version of CivIII that does not require a CD. If I am going to be forced to do this just to play the legitimate games I've purchased, why would I not eventually just say the-heck-with-purchasing? It is the same problem that crippled CDs have - if the music on them is so much less portable than a regular downloadable file, why would anyone choose to spend money on the CD rather than just search the web?

Re:CD's and CRWS, and "Backing UP"

[YrWrstNtmr]

Yes, he has cost the company nothing because he wouldn't have bought it anyway. But that 15 year old kid would be a god with a lesser tool as well. Maybe not a broadcast quality finished product at the same level as something done with 3DSMax or Maya, but up to the limits of the whatever tool s/he used.

Talent shows. His demo reel would display concepts like design, flow, use of color, etc. Not competence in a specific tool.

Just like a race car. Just because you're good at age 15 (even REALLY good), doesn't mean a high $ ride in NASCAR or F1. Show your stuff in gocarts and migets first. Then the boss will pick up the cost of the topline tool. Be it a Grand National car, or a $5000 software package.

Hardware dongles? Hah!

[qurob]

Here's more info on dongles

http://linux20368.dn.net/crackz/Dongles.htm

Juste Use Daemon Tools

[Murphy(c)]

There is one totaly legit way of doing the same thing without having to use a NoCD patch.

Juste install Daemon-Tools. It's a wonderfull little program that lets you mount an ISO file as if it was a standard CDDrive. It's free (as in beer), tiny ( ~400Kb), and works like a charme on Win2k/98/XP.
It can even emulate some form of copyprotection like Safedisc, SecureRom and LaserLock.

All you have to do to play your favorite game is create a RAW (1:1 image) copy of your original game CD, and then mount the image as a CD drive.

Really a brilliant little program.

Murphy

Codewheels are no problem neither

[Bitmanhome]

An old D&D game for the Commodore 64 had a code wheel. I just removed the rivet, copied the wheels, went 'round with an X-acto knife, and made a new code wheel.

Stupidity and Overestimation of Losses

[Oriumpor]

Because of the current revenue models involved in software sales copying software you COULD afford and WOULD purchase does cost a company money. The distribution of a hundred copies of a piece of software to 8 year olds without computers doesn't hurt their company at all. Neither does 500,000 copies to the same category of 8 year olds. But if one of those 8 year olds happens to have a computer, and enough money to afford that piece of software AND the inclination to actually purchase it, there still isn't a guarantee that 8 year old would even KNOW about the product unless it was given to them. (read advertising->target audience) Maybe that 8 year old would actually purchase that software AFTER he had already used a pirated copy of it. If so any of the "projected" losses have just become REAL gains. So the REAL loss on 500,100 copies of software is actually a gain! But, if you ask that company (and they know of the 500,100 copies) they would say that they lost 500,100 units worth of revenue. Who knows how much that same company saved in marketing for that kind of distribution.

EULAs not worth the paper they are printed on

[jmorris42]

A shrinkwrap/clickwrap EULA is all but worthless, regardless of what one judge on the loony coast of the USA said. If I buy it in WalMart it is a SALE. Back when Tandy made you sign a five part form to purchase anything in the computer dept, that was a LICENSE.

When you buy a game at Best Buy you are the owner of a copy of an item that is SOLD, not LICENSED therefore you are regulated by the copyright laws of your country and nothing else.

Re:dern CDs on airplanes

[nzhavok]

CIV3

I had to crack civ3 because it didn't work well with my DVD-rom :( They made a patch available but only to people in the us, not to mention you had to give your phone number and street address before you could donload the dame thing!

Not that I play it anymore, not until the multiplayer/scenario patch is out. But I bet we'll have to pay for it.

Re:CD's and CRWS, and "Backing UP"

[fishebulb]

I should have emphasised the employees more. At ILM its all 100% legit. but when those employees go home, that copy of Maya downloaded and installed from the internet is not legal.