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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."
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?
"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
Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes. --E. W. Dijkstra
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.
Duris MUD - The best pkill MUD. Ever.
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!
In the future, I would want to not be isolated from my friends in the Space Station.
"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.
"Derp de derp."
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]
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.
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.
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.
Blogging because I can...
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.
//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.
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 ][ (][+,
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.
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"?