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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."
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of but whose language had been a mystery for 1,400 years (despite being common for the 3,500 years before being superseded).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."
If we don't fight for ourselves no one will.
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.
"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."
Consider:
Wellcome
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to Toms Harware where we
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Discuss the new anti copying
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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
Moneyed corporations, non-working 'poor' and criminal prisoners are turning productive citizens into tax-slaves.
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]