Slashdot Mirror
New SecuROM Ties Protection to Physical Structure
bernardos70 writes "I read a brief article describing how the new version of secuROM, which is already present in newer games, employs a new encryption method which 'tie[s] itself specifically to the physical structure and characteristics of each disk'. Apparently companies are even ordering specially designed media to implement this method. I think that all this will do is frustrate the average joe trying to make legit copies, as the various groups online distributing ISO's are sure to find a way to bypass yet this new technology."
sure sure. Yeah, I was backing this up, my friends keep it for safe storage.
Or how about you not buy them then?
If the companies are so horrible, so evil, so mean, represent all that you loath, how about you *not* give them money?
Duh....
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
This won't work any better than the anti-CD copying methods RIAA has tried, nor keep people from copying the games any more than putting a piece of tape on a cookie jar will keep a hungry teenager from gettting in.
With any encryption, any digital encoding method... if there is a way to play the game, there is a way to break the code. The question is who will be first? Wait and see.
--
"During times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act" -- George Orwell
The warez kiddies just hack up the code to remove the copy protection check. As soon as this is done (often within hours of release), the copy protection is worthless. The people behind Neverwinter Nights finally figured this out and disabled the check in one of the program updates.
which is already present in newer games...all this will do is frustrate the average joe trying to make legit copies
You know, the claims that some music CD user owner will want to make a legit rip/copy of some CD he bought is plausible. But how many game owners make backup copies of his game CDs ? And do people really want to argue that the majority of game CDs burned are for legitimate reasons ?
my and my dollars will go some place else. end of story.
Anyone care to post a mirror for those of us who cannot view the site thanks to workplace filters?
Nathan
Oct 8, 2002 - h4x0r j03 breaks secuROM
Oct 9, 2002 - secuROM announced
I don't understand this. How can the encryption be tied to the physical structure of the disk, be able to play in any cd rom drive, yet be uncopyable.
I understand that perhaps you could say well, sector X is going to be unreadable, and if it is readable, then it isn't a legit copy, but I don't see any other way that this is possible, yet still able to run in CD drives. (Of course, I don't specialize in hardware of this sort.)
When adding the nocd check to Morrowind, I noticed the game ran better. I checked it out and indeed it ran 10 fps better.
Most warez comes with cracks for SecuROM or whatever else already distributed with ISO, and whenever there's a patch, the patches are quickly cracked and distributed everywhere.
Even CD-Keys don't make much of a difference for not paying for the game -- servers are being cracked and emulated like crazy in everything from War3 to Battlefield to UT2k3 (just use buddy-lists).
There are a lot of people out there in the "scene" who are absolute Gods in disassembly and cracking, and nothing on Earth can stop them -- these people get the game and crack advanced protections on the way home on a laptop in a car.
this copy protection seems to be pretty good, how ever how long till someone will come up with another magic permanent marker fix to get rid off it?
and this bit of info:
"I was also told that No-CD hacks are not something these folks care much about. A couple of folks told me that No-CD hacks are pretty benign and if it keeps a loyal customer happy, they are ok with it. It is the copy and dissemination of the originals that seems to be what they are worried about."
semms to indicate that they are not worried about a casual copying of their media but rather want to prevent wide scale comercial copying by the "sham wham" industry giants out of Tiwan and China
If the companies are so horrible, so evil, so mean, represent all that you loath, how about you *not* give them money?
What games are available from companies that don't use copy protection that's so intrusive that it gives a false negative on a significant minority of computers and corrupts the error-correction so much that the slightest speck of dust will render the disc useless?
Will I retire or break 10K?
All IP laws will die. That said, there's no reason to outlaw this type of technology. The first crack will just spread all the way through, or more likely, the protected stuff will be ignored.
I think that they ought to tighten security, so that no one who purchases a game will ever be able to play it. Then you could put a copy of astroids 1000 times on a CD write "Unreal Tournament 2003" on the cover and no one would ever know! And if someone did manage to crack it, you could then tout the flawlessness of your new security measures as it tricked the pirates into making a thousand copies of asteriods!
THIS IS THE FUTURE OF GAMING!
GOD BLESS AMERICA!
SetupWeasel
this was kinda long, so I'm gonna link to the original and quote some choice passages...
there is some more ranting on the subject on the UT2k3 release day
"when I go out and buy your Goddamned game, and you proceed to rob me of my time and clock cycles with copy protection schemes you imagine secure your bottom line, please let me assure you with the utmost gravity that you are living in a fantasy world. You might as well be drinking fairy wine out of an acorn cap, discussing the finer points of Gryphon Husbandry with their comely queen. The only people these Goddamn mechanisms of yours screw are paying customers, because people who just want to steal your game have always had very easy time of it. You are credulous in the extreme if you perceive otherwise. Put it out of your mind. I said, put it out of your mind."
"There's a halfway house for retardeds like you right across the street from me, you'd love it. They just circle the block, singing songs and drinking Pepsi. Sometimes, they lay by the tree and drink the Pepsi. I never see anybody drinking anything else over there, maybe you get in trouble. It's either that, or Pepsi sponsors congenital defects."
Buttsex.
Actually, a "legit" copy can simply be a no-CD crack so you can keep the distribution CD safely in its jewel case rather than sitting in the drive. Of course, you are probably too young to remember the days of key disks (back in the days of 360K DSDD 5.25" floppies) and how big a pain in the butt they were then.
Updating the key disk copy protection scam does continue to do more to inconvenience legitimate users than it does to prevent piracy. It was that way in 1982 and it is still that way today. And of course the newest version of this particular snake oil scam does require that the publishers buy special media - just like it did back then except that the snake oil peddlers have had 20 more years to refine their paranoia inducing sales pitches.
So, the new snake oil costs more than the old snake oil, and the companies buying the stuff are now protected from "piracy". Pity they didn't think about protecting themselves from quackery.
You either believe in rational thought or you don't
consumers "on the bubble" between piracy and purchasing
Because it's apparently illegal to rent PC software, how is a casual game player behind a dial-up Internet connection (i.e. not a hardcore FPS addict) supposed to know if a game is fun before he or she pays upwards of $40 for a one-seat license?
Will I retire or break 10K?
Dear HardAss Publishers,
If you do this en-masse, you will force many honest people to hit P2P so they can avoid your draconian DRM and copy-restrictive, fair-use bashing tactics.
Regards,
Buying Public
Unreal Tournament 2003 was ripped, cracked, and distributed before it made it to most stores. This is the new SecuROM they're touting.
RFC73&3621%3 : Formalizaition of notation for the slashdot editors
Proposed: That the usual gang of idiots (tm) at slashdot be formally referred to as "teh editors"
--man those were the days..-
that was even before the C64 came out..Anyone remember the commodore PET ?
perl -e 'printf("%x!\n",49153)'
1) start program with original disk
2) attach debugging session
3) let the program run until it tries to run the decrypted code (shouldn't be to hard, since they have to do some kind of trick to run code which is in the data segment of the running program (the decryption program in this case))
4) save the block in the data segment (you have access, remember, you're running a debug session) to disk as whatever.exe
5) have another cup of coffee and go to sleep as it is early in the morning
Yes, there are people out there who make legit copies of software for backup reasons, especially if you need the CD in order to play the game. If you play the game a lot, just the motion of taking the CD in and out of the tray can scratch it up to the point where it is unusable. I have quite a few games that I can't play anymore because the CD is scratched beyond recovery. Why do you think EB makes a fortune selling devices to clean CD's and DVD's? Every time I go in to that store, I get hounded to buy one.
Right, copy protection. So let me guess, once again DVD-ROM owners will get shafted, right? Most "copy protected" CD's don't even work in DVD-ROM drives.
Look at UT2003 for example: a large number of people are having problems with the game, and it is all related to copy "protection". DVD-ROM users can't install. Others are having stability problems with the game crashing out randomly. Others still are experiencing severe performance degredation. And it is ALL because of SecureROM "protection".
Apparantly Infogrames support is TELLING callers to install the "nocd" crack. Well why in the FUCK did they put SecurROM on there in the first place?
Copy "protection" harms the consumer. I'm not talking about making backups, just USING this "protected" media is the problem.
It turned out to be futile. People just disabled whatever code depended on it. And if the locations of the holes were used as a cryptographic key, people would just recover the key and hack the executable to supply it.
On current operating systems, where applications can't talk directly to the hardware anyway, you can do something even simpler: you just emulate whatever that special track contains by recording it on the source disk and replaying it through the driver on the destination drive. And if the drivers ever were to become secure, a small FPGA inserted into the ATA cable between the CD-ROM and the controller would give you the same capability completely transparently.
But the biggest problem with these approaches turned out to be that consumers just didn't like them and preferred software that didn't have such annoying mechanisms built in.
Overall, copy protection is a losing battle. The cost software vendors suffer in usability and customer good will is apparently higher than the losses from piracy that they stop.
Securom has nothing to do with the physical media. Look it up on google if you want.
Does your writer: 1. read and write RAW DAO and sub-channel data?
Does your burning software of choice: 1. write in RAW mode 2. with sub-channel data?
End of story.
This doesn't even need to be cracked... It's below cracking...
Blearf. Blearf, I say.
Backing up the CD for games you buy is generally not necessary if you have access to high speed internet. Just go online and download it ... legally!
This is the "second copy misconception". In the United States, the backup law (17 USC 117) permits the owner of a legitimate copy of a computer program to make a backup of such a legit copy, and the backup becomes a legit copy. The Betamax decision (interpretation in Sony v. Universal of 17 USC 107) permits time- and format-shifting of such backups. But apparently, you have to make a backup from a legit copy; a copy made from an Internet piracy method is not a legit copy because the copyright owner has the exclusive right to the first redistribution of a copy.
Will I retire or break 10K?
This might actually be a step in the wrong direction as far as security is concerned. Now all one need do is reverse-engineer the program and/or driver that enables the OS to access the media. Crackers have been reverse-engineering programs for years; it's their area of expertise, for crying out loud. Wouldn't this new scheme just make it easier for them? Crack the reader, get the files, and crack out the code that looks for the security. Seems simple enough to me.
Let me state that I realise this is necessary and I approve of it because I'm anti-piracy and anti-pirate, but I do think it's sad.
A games publisher sees its product as just that, a "product". They ship it to stores, sell however many copies in month, sell a few more thousand over the next year, and that's it.
But games become a part of people's lives. There are some games that are an important and beautiful part of my life and history. If those special games such as Head Over Heels (15 years old?) and Quake (8 years old?) could only survive for the lifetime of their original physical storage medium, people like me would be losing something which is very special to them.
That all sounded kinda wussy and no I'm not some games junkie with no friends and no life, but occasionally a game comes along that has the little 'something' that sparks a fire in my soul. I'd like to know I can look back on that game in years to come, just as I look back on a photo album, and relive all of the memories. I'd hate to lose that because of an anti-piracy system and the pirates that it is intended to defeat.
Incidentally, spot the similarities?
http://www.securom.com
http://www.uncensored-news.com
Given that you can get 100 blank CD's for $4
In order for that to be true, you would have to make sure that no citizen or permanent resident of Canada is reading that comment. Canada takes a levy on all CD-R media (even "data" media that don't work in "stereo components") and gives it to songwriters, recording artists, and publishers who sign up to get royalties from the government.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Sure we make "backups" which we freely give away therefor they shouldn't be allowed to protect the things they've spent a few years and a good deal of $ on (we are talking 7 digit (that's 6 zeros) figures.) But read the fine print (last paragraph that you think you know will say):
..." or they should do some (non-lame) education of the people or simply all go mmorpg where the game cd won't do much without a subscription. (Although I guess illegit servers would keep popping up, but that's another story/problem.)
No-CD hacks are not something these folks care much about. A couple of folks told me that No-CD hacks are pretty benign and if it keeps a loyal customer happy, they are ok with it. It is the copy and dissemination of the originals that seems to be what they are worried about.
Wohaa, they do know that a No-Cd crack is made to make the game run without the cd, just the data which can be sniffed right from the IDE-bus or something like that. If they could make uncrackable software they would have had a chance, but they can't. So to the point. IMHO they should put their money elsewhere, give the users something for the money that they can't copy ("Buy X-game and get a free
Look a monkey!
Hahaha! Key Disks! I had totally forgotten those. That's exactly what these things are! As a footnote, I can guarantee that these games that they've "new SecuROMed" have already been cracked. Knock yourself out game publishers. You're just as lame as the CD people.
Netjak.com independent reviews of domestic & import video ga
With todays harddisks of 100gb+, why not keep copies of the cds on the harddisk? Less noise (48x reader has a distinct annoying pitch), no searching for the cd, no changing cd, and the cd-rom is free when I need it, no need to go looking for that cover to put the old cd in. Plus it keeps my originals in mint condition.
I don't *care* if they want to use my cd-rom as the modern-day dongle. It's a hassle, and I don't want it. It won't be the end of the world if I can't do that in the future, but don't pretend it's not useful and convienient.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
The oldest and easiest way to circumvent copy protection schemes is to use a JMP opcode. A debugger, and about 5 minutes of examination is all it takes. What in god's name are these people thinking? Copy protection has never worked, and it never will.
I'm looking to patent this new technology I thought of. The process consists of making music cd's that are scratched to hell, and therefore cannot to listened to, or copied. I'm proposing this idea, because, I know, and hope the RIAA realizes that the only way to have music you can't copy is if you can't hear it. If you can hear it, You can copy it. Damn, those RIAA guys are sooooo dumb...
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
Er, Demos? Like, those ones that almost every games company releases?
I can't stay online for eight hours straight just to download a 100 MB demo. And how do I know that the download acceleration programs (needed to get a reliable pause/resume function) will work before I buy them? (Shareware and adware uninstallers on Windows tend to leave stuff all over the system that kills stability.) Besides, some demos that I have seen are missing all playability: they're often just videos.
I'll admit that I haven't looked into the magazine scene.
If you want to pirate games, go for it.
I typically don't pirate games that have been published in the last seven years. Yes, I know the late Sonny Bono said ninety-five, but if Eldred wins, even though abandonware will still infringe, companies will be too busy revising their business models to pursue pirates of out-of-print software.
Will I retire or break 10K?
download a no-cd crack for the game instead?
"For a successful technology, honesty must take precedence over public relations for nature cannot be fooled." -Feynman
I think that all this will do is frustrate the average joe trying to make legit copies, as the various groups online distributing ISO's are sure to find a way to bypass yet this new technology."
This security software being used to thwart piracy of computer games has done nothing but force me to those sources in order to play the game at all.
Three times in the last year I've bought software only to find that the "security software" on the CD is incompatible with my drive.
I actually told the EA guy that the only thing this seemed to prevent was me from playing the game I bought legally. He said he was sorry and offered a refund but that still doesn't allow me to play the game.
So I go to the dark side, download the crack, and play the game.
My boxed copy sits on my bookshelf because I have to turn to the pirates to play a game that you want to keep out of the hands of pirates..oh the irony.
And those bastards still have my money. I'm such a sucker.
a new encryption method ties itself specifically to the physical structure and characteristics of each disk
This unique system will naturally allow you to damage your CD-RD to match the characteristics of the original perfectly. Once you are waiting for this product, why don't you brute force your ILLEGAL copies to get the same effect.
Hitman 2 employed this new securom protection and was released on the same day it was released. Granted it wasn't discovered that there was a new protection until later that day. Within a few more hours another group had re-released a working copy with the new securom protection defeated.
If game makers don't provide some way for people to try out a game with demos, etc., that's their problem if they want to lose money.
Are they right to expect all users to have broadband Internet access in order to get the demo? Why can't they make a demo in 10 MB? Farbrausch made one in 64 KB.
But that still doesn't give you the right to download the ISO freely off of Kazaa
I didn't claim that piracy was the answer. I just want some half-playable demos, please.
Will I retire or break 10K?
SecuROM is already out, one such game is Hitman 2. Being an unlucky sould who bought the game I was greeted with a ncie suprise. Buggy as HECK, crashes constantly, can't even make it past certainllevels. It IS hacked already thogh as there is a cracked .EXE on certain sites already. So "might make it harder" is moot, this "new" version is already DoA.
What's even MORE interesting is that the only way MANY of us have been able to get the game to work is to used the cracked .exe....turns out SecuROM is screwing up the game....
What fun! Certainly kept hackers at bay!
"The saddest words of mice and men, are not those which were, but should have been."
Quake is a little over 6 years old...
Is this the same andy smith that made some quake maps like The Elektra Complex?
Instead of doing lame ass physical security, try something like what the folks at Blizzard did with War Craft III.
Yes, it doesn't stop people from pirating the game, but checking CD keys and such to see how often they are used when playing online (what fun is a game if you can't play it online?) seems to be a fairly good way to keep your "average" kiddie pirate from stealing your software.
Besides, if you make your game/software good enough, people generally will want to support it. To all software companies: How about worrying more about the quality of your products and wasting less time figuring out how to prevent people from stealing them???
HallmarkOrnaments.Com
Friend of mine uses one of those, I don't have the hdd space for it really.
Copy protections such as this, do nothing more then piss the average user off.. A year or so back, an RTS called Emperor: Battle for Dune came out, and when I finally BOUGHT the game, I brought it home, only to find that the setup program wouldn't load, giving me some error about the cd being a copy. After screwing around with it for an hour or so, I called the game's tech support line.. (Which was long distance, naturally..) After waiting on hold for a good 20 minutes, they told me they were aware of my problem, and that it was caused by thier copy protection (SafeDisc 2), and told me that I would need to buy a new CD drive to play the game. Needless to say, I was pissed. I told 'em I'd be returning the game to the store, and downloading a copy of it off the internet, and hung up on 'em.
When are they going to learn, that they won't be able to stop the hardcore warez groups from releasing thier games a week before they show up in stores? I believe they should include basic protection, such as SafeDisc 1, and leave it at that. That'll stop Joe Newbie from coping the game, and giving it to all his friends, while at the same time, not screwing a small part of thier legitimate buyers..
RaGe
We're all just noise on the wires..
How do you know a football game is going to be any good
I'm sorry; I'm not getting your analogy. I don't play console games or PC games in the NFL2Kx, Madden, or FIFA series. Heck, I don't even watch much televised football (MLS or NFL).
You have to take risks for some rewards.
I have to lower my risk ratio because I live on a small fixed income, most of which goes to an education at a prestigious university.
Will I retire or break 10K?
If the physical structure can be determined by a CD reader, then surely that can be mimicked by a CD writer?
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
Custom media is used to allow physically writing encryption key onto it (in a form of media discrepancies, burnt-through bits or whatever). Then they use this spread-over-CD key to encrypt unaffected areas of CD and there ya go - CD wont work if it's just copied as media defects are not reliably or easily copyable.
Sure you will have an access to a decrypted content once you run the proggy, but now imagine that they use 1024 keys and encrypt data recursively or per-block or in some other non-trivial way.
Sure it's hackable, but at what cost ? There is a good chance that in order to recover raw bits of the file with 17th level map you would actually need to decrypt all previous 16 levels.
Sure you can use a trainer to fake CD defects, but somebody gotta write it first.
So, yeah, it's hackable, but does it worth the effort ? Or moreover - does it worth the wait?
3.243F6A8885A308D313
Its been in place for about 2 years AND NOT A SINGLE ARTS HAS SEEN A PENNY!!!!!!
Can you give any documentation that the member rights organizations of the CPCC don't pay songwriters? Or do you refer only to performers who do not compose?
Will I retire or break 10K?
Let me first state that Safedisk Securerom, et all simply make the casual pirate a savvy pirate, while frustrating paying customers with no intention of stealing their product. They are not in any way effective. That having been said...
I am frustrated reading the response here, with unplausable justifications about why these are bad, and justifications for copying disks in a legal sense.
I'm as slovenly with my CD's as your average bear, and as of today, my CD drive can read any disk I own, regardless of damage, including Sam'n max, and god knows that disk is jacked.
The main (99.44%) reason a person would make a copy of a disk, is not for archival, or any other such purpose, but to give/sell to a friend. Every high school in every city in this nation has a guy who sells burnt disks, and mods systems for a price. And I encourage that little entrepreneurial bastard. But do companies have every right to try and shut that kid down by protecting their media in whatever method they see fit? Yes. Is Secure-rom it? No. But apparently it's effective enough, because people are complaining.
"Inattention makes clowns of us all" -Bean
You know GTA3? My CD drive put a big, circular scratch on the Play disc. I knew I should have burned a copy, but I hadn't, so I was stuck for a week without my favorite game, until I could have a friend come over with his (legit) copy, and burn one for myself. It's totally legit.
I've since learned to burn backups. Once I get a dual-boot running (I switched from 98 to Mandrake 9.0, and miss my games), the first thing I'll do is burn a copy of MAFIA, a game I bought just one or two weeks before I killed Windows 98.
The thirty something group might remember that physical media protection failed once before. In the 80's many software companies "invested" heavily on physical media protection (spiral tracking anyone?) and ultimately the only thing they achieved was pissing off customers that just want to install software onto harddisk. By early 90's on-media protection had all but disappeared.
ELOI, ELOI, LAMA SABACHTHANI!?
Yeah you are right, I am too young to know what key disks are/were. Although a quick search on google revealed many ways to get around them. I gather that they stop you from copying 1.44mb floppies?
meh
I bought neverwinter nights.. Had a burner via usb2. The effing proggy never did it's $50 trick. Looked at the forums and saw it was a common occurrence. Regardless of the fault, I will never buy another game from those f***ers again. That's how it goes.
How much does it cost to make a copy protected CD and license the technology? 50 cents (per cd)? 1 dollar? 2 dollars?
Let's say it's 50 cents per cd. And a popular game is released and sells 1.5 million copies at $50 bucks a piece. The cost of copy protection there is $750,000? Let's guess that an average of 15,000 pirate games meaning a loss of $50x15000=$750,000. Does this means there wasting double the money? Are the piracy rates higher or lower? Lastly, has copy protection ever proven to do ANYTHING to reduce the losses from piracy? I doubt it has.
This is not even counting the copies still being printed and still on shelves. This doesn't even account all the manufactering costs or how much the publisher even gets back from the $50 retail value of the product (assuming they even sell this high -- many games drop in price real quick). This doesn't even account for a fraction of people who bought the game, but took it back because it didn't work on their machine. I wonder also, how much additional money they spend just because the copy protection technology has to come out with new stuff every few months (because it gets broken very fast), but how much additional money they charge in new licensing fees becuase of this.
Game manufacterers: Does copy protection actually save you money? Don't you think people that make copy protection are just playing on your fears and stealing more money from you?
Who the fuck is Cowboy Neal?
Who cares....games and gamers are worthless. Get a life/girlfriend/REAL major/job.
For those of you older folks, you may remember when Lotus123 came out with the first copy proof protection scheme in 1983? They burned a little hole in the disk with a laser beam. Let's see, that took about two days before it was cracked.
Blizzard uses SecuRom. Warcraft 3 has it, and it also has an older version of physical deformity copy protection. Try a plain copy of the disc and you'll see it.
Blizzard is no better than the rest of them. And if the CD-Keys actually worked (they did it in 98 starting with starcraft-- a horribly broken setup), they wouldn't have included SecuRom copy protection in D2 (2000).
The securerom screwed up so many people with Neverwinter Nights (I know people who HAD to make an ISO just to play it - it either crashed or didn't recognize the original CD as the original CD... We're even blaming it for the destruction of a partition!!!) that in later patches Atari removed it entirely. After it came out there were sooo many complaints about it.
Oh, and the ironic part? It was still no more difficult to copy the cd.
I gather that they stop you from copying 1.44mb floppies?
Of course not. The people selling them to the games industry sure claimed they would though, that's the point.
http://www.gameburnworld.com/securompatches.htm
(sorry i didnt read all the posts to see if this was sent already but take a look
)
Nice little tutorial:
http://www.crackstore.com/tutorz/securom.zip
To quote Tycho of Penny-Arcade fame http://www.penny-arcade.com/ I have no idea how your fruity SecuROM or whatever thwarts my computer. However, that is a matter quite apart from my ability to negate it. There are websites everyone knows that contain your mystical secrets, splayed sensuously for our delectation. And even if I exaggerated before - even if everyone doesn't know where to find this stuff - everybody knows someone like me. When you put out a patch, a patch minus your garbage comes out the same day. If you don't know this, I'm not surprised. If you do know this, why do you keep rolling that boulder up a hill? There's a halfway house for retardeds like you right across the street from me, you'd love it. If you want to read the rest of the article it's here http://www.penny-arcade.com/news.php3?date=2002-09 -20 He makes a great point.
Sure we wang, can.
Cd checks are always easily beatable, this has been said. What isn't easily beatable are auth servers that check your key whenever you play online. This works great for bf1942, sof2, rtcw, etc. It works great for games that are geared towards multiplayer, and has forced me to buy many games that I may not have purchased otherwise.
StickMan
www.rageagainst.net
I would hope that if some company does manage to develop an "unbreakable" copy protection scheme that there would be some guarantee that if the media is damaged you can send it back for a free replacement, and that this would be available for longer than the couple of months that seems to be the attention span of most companies these days.
You know... If you don't like the fact that certain vendors are using a certain type of protection, you could always not buy the game. I don't mean pirate it, I mean just plain old don't buy it, don't play it, don't do anything with it.
It's not like your rights are being infringed on by someone choosing to copy protect their game. You don't HAVE to buy it. You don't HAVE to be a consumer. You can CHOOSE for yourself to skip that product because you don't like some aspect of it. That is truely voting with your dollars and your feet.
they'll be just as annoyed and pissed off about not being able to make as easy of a buck. however they only have to figure a way around it once.
(+1) Informative!
1.44mb floppies?
;)
Waaay too young.
They might end up getting bullets in the head when we have a true corporate dictatorshiop.
And yes, similar copy protections just make it easier to crack.
The third point you made is quite true: just like with the drug war, all the government has to do is poison the drug supply to really, really mess with it. Virused cracks (or at least ones that install a SHITLOAD of spyware) would wreak havoc on the community.
Not too far from the truth. Quite a few UT2k3 owners have complained that they cannot run the game due to the copy protection. Only workaround for them is a CD crack (which is illegal, thanks to the DMCA).
STOP MISUSING APOSTROPHES, YOU MORONS!!!
Next time you buy a game, send the reciept (or a copy of the reciept) along with a protest against these copy protection schemes, and in favour of going back to value adding, (like better manuals etc).
This tells them you are a legit customer with legit concerns. If enough people do this they will get the hint.
If the game doesn't work due to copy protection (some do) take the game back, and send the 'returned' reciept to them with an explanation why thier copy protection is losing them customers.
I plan on doing it even if no-one else does.
If you pay a company money, and it won't work out of the box, get a refund. Then pirate it.
If their anti-piracy measures increase the amount of piracy, they will reconsider them. After all, if you want to pay them money, they should give you software that works.
I think a lot of the releases is the last year have started to cross the threshold between easy-copy-discouraging of casual warezing, towards the point where their attempts to stop the 10% who will always steal are forcing the 80% who might or might not steal will have to steal, and the 10% who never steal will find something else to do.
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
First off, this is not the first time someone's tried it -- the scheme I describe is also used in 'StarForce' and 'TIES' protections, which also have not been broken (other than via no-CD cracks, of course).
Basically, the system works by measuring the angle between certain sectors. How does it do it? By timing the seek time between these sectors. First, the disc will do several seeks of various sectors with known angles to 'calibrate' it, and then, it does seeks of various random sectors (to compensate for various drive speeds). If the timing of the sectors is not within a certain tolerance, that indicates that the physical geometry of the sectors is not the expected angle, and it knows it's not a real copy.
Because CD burners do NOT preserve angle geometry when copying a disc, and even successive burns on the same burner/media may result in different angles, this is so far a fool-proof way. On the other hand, since production CDs are made by pressing with a stamper, not burning, it's not an issue for them.
There's 10 types of people in this world, those who understand binary and those who don't.
then you can't upgrade it when they patch it.
Or if you can then you have to jump through a hoop in order to get it to work.
Like War3, they just released the new version 1.03 or whatever, and without doing anything my version autoupgraded itself when I went to go and play (lose) on battle.net.
If I had the no-cd crack installed, then that wouldn't work. And I couldn't play on bnet.
For single player games, the no-cd is awesome, but for multi-player games on the internet it's a real pain.
No, that means "cracking" the executable(s) in which case you're circumventing a protective device, hence you would be a criminal under the DMCA.
Making a 1:1 copy is different. You're not circumventing anything. You do not take efforts to circumvent anything either. You're simply reading a disc and writing to another. Distributing this disc to friends and family may however be illegal under the Copyright Act.
Why do gaming companies buy into this crap though? It isn't to rid itself from the real h4x0rz, but rather to prevent Joe Sixpack from making copies to his tightly knit band of friends. And it seems that the companies that make this encryption crap work are convincing the game publishers that they're making more money with this junk in place.
I personally return all games that I can't copy. Because in my opinion they're defective.
One producer of games who has gotten the picture is Lucasarts. Neither Jedi Knight II or Galactic Battlegrounds are copy protected.
My major is Astrophysics. What's yours?
SetupWeasel
you know about who's on the team, their past performance, and how they're likely to perform. but with a video game, a lot of times all the information you have is on the box...how do you tell if the game you're buying is the equivalent of, say, the bengals? (ok so maybe that's not so good, you do hear about the bad ones, like daikatana, maybe a better team would be the seahawks)
But that's not really why I posted this. I just wanted to badmouth cincinatti.
Your mind is squeezed by a blast of pain!
dreamcast used this sort of copy-protection (along w/ extra capacity gd-roms). then along came disk-juggler which could copy the physical structure and it was history.
I wonder how many cd-rom drives will be broken with this system.
If you mod me down the terrorists will have won
The demo for UT2003 had reduced-quality textures included to get the size down to 100 MB.
What about textures generated algorithmically by the installer?
Will I retire or break 10K?
They don't even need to install spyware (a la Gator), all they need to do is put in "cracked" codes that tell the program to call home and rat you out, or send you to "special" servers, or cripple your ping.
Boobies never hurt anyone. - Sherry Glaser.
Can we please fucking stop pretending that "Average Joe" ever makes "Legitimate Copies"?
Some do. The vast, overwhelming majority do not.
Clamoring for the defense of "Average Joe's" right to make "Legitimate Copies" is nothing more than misdirecting horseshit, very similar to what corporations and politicians (redundancy, yes) do when they're just trying to keep their hands in the cookie jar a little longer.
Fucking pukes.
So I don't see any worries about Blizzard losing revenue from casual copying...
CD-Key's mean you have to buy the game to play online. Side note: that's not quite true. A friend at work ran into someone else online using his CD-Key. He hadn't even taken his copy of the game home (our boss bought each of the engineers a copy of the game when it came out). Someone must have used a key-generator and tried several times until he manage to randomly get my friend's key. Blizzard of course didn't help at all. Finally, he returned it to Best Buy to exchange for another copy. Interesting how the legit customer gets screwed in all these schemes.
0x90
OMG you are clueless.
As I wrote above, Farbrausch pulled it off in .the .product.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Here's a portion of my (currently unhosted) website dedicated to users who have experienced similar problems with copy prevention schemes designed to rob us of fair use. (thanks to Slashdot for this intermediate hosting arrangement! three cheers and all that..)
BACKGROUND INFO - diatribe from which one could conceivably deduce a mission statement It is truly unfortunate that many software companies refuse to sell their programs in M300-compatible form. I commonly install programs from a network, as I have no CD-ROM drive built into my machine. Unfortunately, this means that in order to use some programs, I must be networked with the original CD (copy prevention included) in another machine's CD drive. I find this situation to be less than acceptable, since I like to use my M300 notebook computer even when I'm NOT at home or in sight of a free CD drive! I believe that M300 owners (OK, the rest of you ultra-portable owners too) should not be the victims of this heinous discrimination. When one pays for a program, one expects to get fair use of that program; fair use should not exclude those lacking the means to afford persistent access to an external CDROM drive - or those with no desire for one, should it be affordable in any case..
It truly is a pity that some manufacturers do not inform the user PRIOR TO PURCHASE that they will not be able to play their favorite games or other software on an M300 (or ANY machine without a CD-ROM drive) unless they have CONSTANT ACCESS to a CD-ROM drive. Instead, a CD drive is nominally listed under System Requirements - for the obvious purpose of installing the program, one would deduce. Hey! Guess what! I've found that a full install makes games run much more smoothly than an install that constantly reads from the CD. So - it would appear logically - that means I should be able to play my game from the hard drive. That sounds fair, eh?
I have also found that NOT A SINGLE PROGRAM I OWN really requires a CD drive beyond the initial install (or subsequent re-installs.. c'est la vie, nest-ce pas?). If a CD is constantly needed, then it would be fair to say that one is REQUIRED. However, if the CD is needed only at install time, then this REQUIREMENT is in fact NOT an actual requirement per se. I would like to see a warning on products that constantly demand CD access, and for which no crack is easily obtainable
From the purely functional standpoint, CD-check routines embedded in popular Safedisc and SecuROM copy prevention doodads make zero sense because they decrease performance, effectively cripple my favorite computer, and render my CD drive (if I even have one.. not bloody likely) useless while a CD-checking prog is run. What if I want to listen to my choice of music while playing a game? Most game music is offensive (sorry WarCraft 2) or drives me nuts... should I be denied the use of my own music collection when I'm running a dog-in-the-manger program?! No.
If you've read this far you probably deserve a break. Thank you for your patience. I get quite wound up sometimes when pondering the gaping a**holes who have ripped me off with their archaic "anti-piracy" routines. I have a few other thoughts on that, but I'll stow it for now... except for three brief spews:
Message for the perpetrators of the CD-CHECK and COPY-PREVENTION CRAP (AKA CCCC): IF YOU LIKE AND WANT TO USE A PROGRAM, BUY IT!!!* * Just make sure you don't get screwed by the jerks who force a cd-check on you. They can be awfully hard to spot, so be careful and have a site like mine handy! [editor's note - I had links to my favourite "M300 accessibility options" sites like Megagames.com and Gamecopyworld.com but in the interest of brevity I won't attempt to mirror the whole site here.... thanks for your understanding]
and one final MESSAGE for all you losers that think that SecuROM (or your copy prevention of choice) or any kind of CD-check IS a legitimate copy-protection scheme: This applies mainly to rented games and all that... For the bought games, the smart pirates know that it's better to crack a game and burn the cracked copy than an original with CD-crippleware intact. I won't get into online games that constantly demand updates because this was supposed to be a short rant and I've overstepped my griping boundaries already. Peace to all.
Preventing the copying of software media has been a goal of software distributors since the mainframe era, when all software was distributed as source code (note that this was long before the open source era, and ended because it proved impossible to support... but that's a different topic for another day). We have already been through at least one "copy-protection" cycle and appear to be heading into a new one. It could be educational to look at what happened the last time around.
I think we can all agree that the last coming of copy protection was not successful, if for no other reason than it vanished. It vanished because customers were constantly having problems caused by these copy protection schemes while "cracker" programs were abundant and in many cases easier to use than the copy-protection schemes themselves.
Given the past, will a new venture into copy-protection have the same problems?
I think that many of the problems of the old copy protection schemes that made it hard for users have not changed. Chaining down software to any specific piece of hardware introduces a single point of failure. Murphy's law continues to rule, so single points of failure fail. Maybe the physical media becomes unreadable. Or, the drive breaks with the media in it, or someone pours hot coffee on it and melts it, or leaves it laying on the heating coils, or... Additionally, I think the continuing problems with viruses demonstrates that cracker programs will once again become common place.
One last thought... has anyone else noticed that viruses, worms and relatives really stated appearing about the time the copy protection programs faded from sight? Maybe with the resurgence of copy protection, and thus cracker programs, the virus writers will get busy and write fewer infectious programs. One can only hope.
...CD-ROMs came in something called a 'caddy.' It was a protective enclosure, not unlike a 3.5" floppy or Minidisc casing, and it even let you remove the disc in the case that the caddy broke, or you received a cheap freebie in the mail.
A wonderful feat of engineering, it guaranteed that your important media would not become scratched.
"Waah!," you morons cried, "We hate caddies! They're big, and expensive! Just give us a regular tray, we swear we won't scratch them!"
What ye have sown, ye have reaped.
Even slotloaders beat trays- or they would, if they would do away with the grit-catching foam around the opening.
Modern games with their CD checks and copy protection have pissed me off to the point that I've stopped buying and playing them.
They take up hundreds of megabytes on your hard drive, and then they STILL force you to put in the CD every time. Dammit, if it is going to require the CD to play, there should be the option to run straight from the CD, using the hard drive for nothing more than the few kilobytes required to save options and the game state. Make me use my hard drive space or make me use the CD, but not both.
So I've stopped buying games. I still get lots of joy out of older games including the infinite levels of Doom that are available, especially now that I can play the Direct3D-enhanced JDoom. And JHeretic. And Quake. And the Tomb Raider series. And a whole bunch of other games from the mid to late 90s that I haven't played yet, which I can buy used (or new in a bargain bin) for $10 when I want and not have to worry about copy protection and CD checks.
When the game companies stop using up my hard drive like it's theirs while still requiring me to find the CD every time, then I'll think about giving the newer games a shot.
---------
There is inferior bacteria on the interior of your posterior.
Imagine if Microsoft made people insert an original Office CD every time they wanted to open a Word document.
Look at all the neat technology you silly gamers are paying for!
Go play Frisbee.
High-speed Road Trip (18.000KPH)
Everyone makes a copy of a game as soon as they install it, and people like myself don't like the idea of a CD being in a horribly heat-generating DVD-ROM like the one I have.
:-)
If you don't copy a game, you either don't play it, or it's a game from the stone-age that doesn't have the option to install to the hard drive.
Karma: It's all a bunch of tree-huggin' hippy crap!
If the protection is tied to some physical detail of the disc, then you will probably not be able to create working ISOs or CD copies. But most piracy is not based on CD images anyway; it's based on ripped and cracked version of the games, that are patched to completely ignore the presence of the disc. So software pirates couldn't care less.
As usual, the only people who will profit from this are SecuROM themselves. Software publishers (who just never learn) will have to pay a license, so they lose, and most users won't be able to backup their media, so they lose too.
I have a rule when buying software which is: the legit version has to be at least as good as the pirate version. When you look at games like Neverwinter Nights, and all the problems caused by the copy protection, you definitely start to wonder whether you should pay 50 for something that may or many not work, or simply download the cracked version that you know will work.
In the end I bougth the original, and it worked fine on my system. It did turn out to be a crap game, and I wish I'd tried the "shareware" version first (which was out about 2 days after the game), but I can't say the problem was in the copy protection.
Interestingly, Neverwinter Night's latest patch removed the disc check completely. How much money would they have saved (both in licensing and user support) if they hadn't used it in the first place? And how many customers did they lose because of it?
RMN
~~~
I used to copy a lot of games a few years ago as a student. I probably could have afforded to buy one or two, but I had essentials like beer to buy. I copied, I traded, I had great big caselogic wallets filled with hundreds of disks I'd never even loaded up. I had hacks, cracks, keygens, emulators, a chips on my Playstation - there was absolutely no piece of protection on any software that prevented me from running it.
One day I opened a jiffy bag that popped through my door and out slid a shiny GoldCD with Halflife written on it in thick black marker. I'd read about this, it was supposed to be good, definitely worth loading up. In the drive it went and as normal I fired up the keygen as it installed. Bingo, 10 minutes later I was on my monorail to work. God it was a good game, I actually started getting twinges of guilt for ripping it off, but seemed a little bit stupid to buy an identical copy in a pretty box. Next step was to rope in my housemate - but he wasn't too hot and the novelty of popping crossbow bolts between his eyes wore off. Next stop - online. Refreshed the server list, chose my games and *Scream* - it said I didn't have a valid id. Bastards! I hunted for new keygens, hacked servers - but no luck.
I relented and bought the game for a serial number.
99% of the games I had copies of I would never have paid for. 1% I would have, but I already had working copies so why go and buy a box I would never have to open. I wasn't going to start buying games before trying them as I was well aware the chances are I wouldn't love it.
Maybe the future of gaming is shareware? Flood the net with easily available copies of your game, let people try it. If they like it ask them for a medium sized payment to activate it fully - open the second half of it, allow connection to servers with over a certain number of players, allow you to have full range of vehicles in your RTS.
Basically people like to try things before they buy them, hear a couple of singles on the radio or on MP3 before they buy the album. Currently the best demos people can get are full warez releases - and once they have that demo they'll never buy the game.
My final suggestion would be a personised activation ID for all games. I apply for it free online, and then I pay to register it against certain games. People could look at my homepage and see what I played, how good I was, click to chat to me. If I'm away on work and want to play a game I've bought I log in to my account and download a copy of the code I'm entitled to and I'm away. Maybe we could even have trialware - $5 to play the game for a week refundable against it if I choose to activate it for life. Underground/Indy releases could have budget/free activation for the first 1000, allowing a community that would attract others to be built....sorry I'm rambling here - but I'm sure there's a good idea or two in there somewhere.
Once it's cracked, and that won't take long, a general purpose cracker will be written that will crack anything with this kind of protection. That has happened already for both SafeDisc v1 and v2, LaserLock, all prior version of SecureROM and so on. It's really not very hard for a skilled cracker to break these protections apparently, and one it's done, they can (and do) just write a utility that will break it.
I don't have 160GB of harddisk space for no reason. Among other reasons, I have it so I can install everything to my HD and not have to worry about grabbing CDs when I want to use software. I want ot do a full install, and then be done with it. Put the CDs in the box and leave them there. Well, all my application software seems to be perfectly happy to let me do this. Office, Vegas, Visio, and so on were all perfectly happy to be installed and then just run of the harddisk. However almost all my game seem to want their CD, despite the fact that they have all the files on the harddrive. All they do is a stupid copy protection check. This is really annoying. I don't want to sort through a stack of disks to find the one for the game I want to play when it's already on the drive.
It seems app makers are prefectly able to make money with out assinine copyprotections,. why are games so different?
I'm finding analogous parallels to my own work in this ever increasing torrent of copy protection schemes.
I am working on secure software registration. My coworkers have come up with as many ways to secure the software as the music industry has in proposing new laws to punish the innocent. But my common sense is at least two points higher than the RIAA: I fully realize that once the software leaves our hands, it is out of our control.
Security is the inverse of convenience, so that a perfectly secure system is also perfectly inconvenient. We've come up with some virtualy unbreakable schemes, but the impose severe inconveniences on the user. So we're not going to use them. If we lock down our system too tight our honest customers will be driven to our competitors, while our extremely few dishonest customers will break the system anyway. Sometimes trusting your customers is the best policy!
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
There was a software protection scheme use a long time ago on some Commodore 64 games that involved using a laser to 'burn' away or disrupt the oxide coating on a 5 1/4 floppy. When the disk was written with the software code it included a small routine to check for this 'bad spot' on the media when the game was loading.
Of cource any routine that looks for some condition, be it a unique feature of the media or some other condition can either be bypassed or simply fed the information it is looking for.
Did anyone enjoy the game "Raid over Moscow"?
The game they *sell* isn't the game you play, the *real* game is breaking the copy-protection... Sure it's kind of fun, but once you've played one form of copy protection a few time, it's not so much fun anymore. This is why they have to keep coming with new copy-protection schemes, umm I mean games, for us to play so we continue playing! :-)
So they are trying this tech again? Sheech Did this in the 80 to protect software I cooked up! It barelly worked back then!
Whats old is new again!
I am really dissapointed. I do buy games, and when I found Worms World Party I was extatic. The catch? Worms is 'protected' - you need to have the CD in the drive. It reads the damn cd every time a level loads.. and it ruined my cdrom (yes it is an acer.. one which spins up and down when it reads).
Oh, and the damn patch for it doesn't work. *sigh*
You have a sick, twisted mind. Please subscribe me to your newsletter.
Reading the Penny Arcade rant about copy protection inspired me to write my own rant, illustrating the economic absurdity of utilizing copy prevention technology. The link is here.
Nathan
Is is okay for me to copy my friend's (legit) working version
That's a bit unclear in theory. But in practice, nobody will come after you.
Will I retire or break 10K?
The average user who ends up being inconvenienced by it would only find out AFTER purchasing the product. Who in the world is going to go out and find out if a game that they want is or is not copy protected on the net, and then decide on buying it? That's such an ill thought out comment, nuxx - no offense to you
Doesn't copy-protection make it legal to crack and distribute copies of software. By law everyone is entitled to one backup copy of all software they purchase. It isn't really a backup if it can't be restored. That makes cracking it neccisary for the legal operation of software. Reverse engineering is legal for interoperability AFAIK. Then there is the distribution bit. If the average joe can't make his own backup copy, why would it be wrong to give joe a copy? Basically, if the only route to claim your right to a legal backup copy is for the public to crack it and put it on a warez site, then doesn't that constitute fair use?
The DMCA is in direct contradiction with legal precidence set up based upon another law. Before the DMCA, you could do that all day long without any legal issues. Is it even legal for them to implement copy protection in the first place? If not, then the DMCA is meaningless. If so, then it has to be legal to break copy protection in order to claim your right to a single backup, unless someone wants to overturn 50+ years of rulings.
Karma Clown
Then, when you want to make a backup, get one of the ISO's off the 'net and use that as your backup. If you get caught, tell 'em you invoked your right to "fair use" and to make one (1) backup copy for archival use only. And get that one Bronco driver's lawyer--you'll get off the hook for sure.
No need to buy one of those "CD-repair kits;" Brasso (yes, the metal polish) works better than any of them. See this comparison for some quantitative data. Plus, a whole can o' Brasso is something like US$2.67 at Sprawl-Mart... compare that to the roughly-1oz. packet that comes with commercial "CD-repair" kits.
Wrists killing you? Not in 2 weeks. Learn Dvorak.
Personally, one of my favorite games was also the easiest to put a no-cd crack onto. The original Jedi-Knight: Dark Forces II had a file on the disc (about 1 or 2k) that when copied to the folder where the game was, no cd was required. It was quite nice because at that time when I played it, I did not have a burner, but I had a 10base-T network. Install the game on the computers, copy the no-cd file, and Voila! Network game, with faster loads, less hassle, and only 1 cd for 3 computers.
Has anyone else had any similar experiences with games like Jedi Knight: Dark Forces II?
.noitacidem deen uoy siht daer nac uoy fI
The military sim Operation Flashpoint uses an interesting copy-protection technique called FADE, which cripples a pirated copy over time in subtle ways. For example, the player's shots can become wildly inaccurate at times, he/she can have wildly fluctuating health levels, etc. Basically the intent is to take enjoyment away from the game, and from what I've read on the forums, it seems to work better as a paranoia device- people buy legit copies because they've heard of "this FADE thing" and don't want to take the chance of a potentially crippled pirated copy. It's a great deterrent: Sure, that so-called "cracked" ISO *might* have all the FADE protection removed by expert crackers, but... hmm... are you SURE you lost that last mission because of your poor skills? Besides, cracking something "built-in" like FADE protection means the pirates must play the game over, and over, and over... good work Codemasters for developing such an innovative mechanism.
Wrists killing you? Not in 2 weeks. Learn Dvorak.
You can't make exact copies of protected audio "CDs" (the ones that use Cactus Data Shield), for example. You can read them and copy them (using the marker / tape trick), but the copy won't include the protection, so it's not an exact copy.
Now imagine you have a disc that has a similar "protection ring" but instead of being on the edge, it's in a random place on the disc. The actual program on the disc knows exactly where it is, and simply skips over it (by reading the disc sectors explicitly). But any program that actually tries to read it will basically "freeze" (which is what happens when you try to read a protected audio CD without doing the marker trick). To copy it, you would need to know exactly which sectors are covered by the protection. Eventually it could be determined, but since each disc could have the protection in a different place, it would mean everybody would have to waste time trying to determine those sectors for their disc.
This is just a thought; I don't know if this is how it actually works. Either way, as soon as someone cracks the protection code (ie, a "no-CD patch"), you can simply copy the files to a regular CD and make as many copies as you want. So, as usual, this is a complete waste of money that benefits no-one except SecuROM itself.
RMN
~~~
My 3 and 5 -year olds can't really be trusted to swap CD's frequently, so I've ripped all of their games into ISO format on their PC. I use a program like Daemon Tools to mount an ISO as a virtual CDROM drive. I then front-end it all with a home-made, kid-friendly GUI. They know that pressing on the picture of "Putt-Putt the car" will launch a certain game.
If their CD's were protected, I'd be out of luck. They've already destroyed 2 or 3 originals -- thank God for backups.
Slashdot: come for the pedantry, stay for the condescension.
I purchase games. It's just easier, especially now that most online games check your cd-key to make sure it's correct.
However, I will almost always crack all the games I buy because I don't want to put the damned CD in the drive to play the game! Recently I've been simply making CloneCD images of all the games that require CD Checks; it works very well in conjunction with Daemon Tools (just mount up the image in it's virtual CD Rom drive - and Daemon tools is free) to play games without the CD. It is a bit costly on space but drives are cheap.
So basically, I have to work harder as a legitimate owner of the software to make it run with less hassle. If I had just downloaded the game, I would just unzip, run, and play.
Anyone who thinks that their new copy protection schemes will work is diluting themselves. It's been 20 good years of companies creating new protection methods and I've yet to encounter an "uncrackable" software title. And they are usually cracked as soon as they hit the shelves.
Even complex on-line activation schemes are no trouble for the experienced cracker.
So why bother with this copy protection nonsense?
- It's not the Macs I hate. It's Digg users. -
I'm not too young, and the way I remember it, the big pain was how easily a floppy diskette is to damage.
CDs are a LOT harder to damage. They are much, much more convenient than diskettes were.
This is an arguement about the P-word (yes I know, the high seas and all that...) and as always people insist on cloaking it in different terms, because they have honest, legitimate reasons to need to make copies of the CD.
This technology seems rather silly in my noggin, and with that notion only one word comes to mind MAME.
MAME has succesfully ressurected many a dead hardware components and environments, and has enabled 1000's of software titles to feel right at home and execute perfectly as if they where actually running in thier intedended environment.
If you need a better example even go as far as the work done by the people at CPS2 Shock who was able to break the hardware encryption along with other oditites to enable CPS2 games to live much longer than intended.
And if you still don't buy what i am trying to say look at connectix, from when they made that playstation emulator so that a playstation game would feel right at home in a mac, or even still thier virtual pc software is real proof that something like this is silly if hardware can be simulated, as it is in emulation packages.
So my 2 cents is that this is fairly silly and probably won't be long before someone circumvents this since there are alot of bases to start from, such that your base will truly belong to you.
There's no way to currently prove this, but suppose a protected game sells an additional 10,000 copies because those 10,000 people can't make a copy for their band of friends but they all want to do multiplayer. If it only costs the company the profit on 5000 copies to pay for protecting all of them, the company comes out ahead. I'm guessing it costs very little to protect a game, and enough people, perhaps 5% are buying the game instead of copying it from someone else.
I got UT2K3 working with daemon-tools within 3 minutes of installation. Amusingly, you don't even break the rules by doing it, since the code that you run is legitimately installed with the copy that you bought (I would hope).
It's simple. Instead of running UT2003.exe (on windows), just run UDebugger.exe (in the ut2003/system directory). By running it through the debugger, it disables the SecureROM check, and works like a charm, 100% within the bounds of the installed software.
Cheers,
-----[0_o]-----
We are not amused.
I thinking you mean "deluding" (as in "delusion"), not "diluting".
Noticed in the cdfreaks forums that there's already a version of daemon tools able to simulate it. At the time I read it (about a week ago I guess) you still needed an extra lil program to extract the info, as no current image creator does it, but after that no worries mounting it as a virtual cd.
.exe and repackaged it.
That means it's no big deal for the pros to figure out what it does (if one's done it, more will/have), and it won't even delay a game a day longer than current protection does, before someone's ripped it out of the
Lets say someone decides to add 8Mb of cache to their CD-drive/burner - ooopps.
What if that was a network connected remote drive, or one day MS added an interrupt in a service patch, that randomly affected timings - like a NMI priority drm interrupt?. Big product recall - thats what.
You are a fool to rely on physical specs being constant - drive warms up, dust spec, bearings, ambient temperature, or altitude.
Special Media? failed 20 years ago.
In Australia, NZ and Great Britain consumer law 'fit for use' is statutory law with mandatory recall procedures. Bastardised CD formats will loose. Exceptions may be applied for, but not after the fact - hence why region free CD's are legal down here
Often cracking the protection on the game is a lot more interesting than playing the game anyway!
I also failed to copy diablo.
However i managed to copy it to my HD with 2 tools:
- clone cd
- daemon tools
just make an image with clone cd and mount that image with deamon tools in a virual cd-rom. If you have a big HD you can have a lot of cd's ready to play.
Don't enable "securom" emulation in daemon tools. deamon tools already delivers sub-data correctly and make it a good copy.
I made a couple of coasters trying to burn this image to cd.
Hmmm... This latest method that captures physical layout "unique to each CD"... it won't happen to use the same error correction as the standard audio or data, will it? I better find a way to back it up before scratches, thermal warping etc screw up the nice timing information that the game is checking. Also, I wonder how well will it work with my notebook's parallel port CD drive?
I guess someone will just write a "driver" that captures all the non-data requests and replies sent to the regular CD and later replay them with a copy, that has the log stuffed into the extra 50M of 700M CD-R. Like my TotalRecorder "audio driver" that helps me listen to those DRMed WMAs and LQTs under Linux...
And i just discovered that deamon tools support this new "physical properties" of the new securom with the use of MDS files. So you can copy also the new secucom cd's to HD and keep the orinal cd's in the safe.
I can't beleive there's been over 200 comments and nobody's actually mentioned...
Daemon Toolz does indeed have the capability to use images which contain the physical media information. The program used to create such images is called Fantom CD and is linked to from the Daemon Toolz website.
I've successfully backed up my Serious Sam 2 disc. The images are rather large though (>800MB for SS2).
That would explain it.
I bought the game "No One Lives Forever 2", and love it. What I didn't like was the idea of always needing the CD in the drive (not only do I have a LOT of games, and don't always want to look for the CD, but some copy protections actually slow the game down, as in "Morrowind").
So it took me all of five minutes to find a crack on the net, apply it (it was already for the 1.1 patch, too!), and shelf my CD.
So, what exactly is that new protection worth?
Free PC version of ChipWits at http://www.breueronline.de/klaus/chipwits/
I think you mean "nit pick nit pick," not "helpful."
And while we're nitpicking, the period goes inside the quotes. (see above)
- It's not the Macs I hate. It's Digg users. -
This game cd is the most anoying game I have ever bought in my life. Blizzard has lost me as a customer forever. Problems encountered. CD has to be in tray. Game Crashes on startup. Battlenet refuses to allow access. CD can't be backed up. What really pisses me off is that I hear the pirated version works better than the god damn version I bought from Cosco.
After paying $49.95 + tax for this game, and finding out how screwed up this game is. That is it. The last straw.
If you make games, you better not make them like WC3 or I will not buy your game.
Let me bite the bullet and offer a differnt view...
I work for a small SW company. We distribute our products (children edutainment multimedia programs) on CDs, and we use SecuROM protection on them. Basically, SecuROM is what keeps my company afloat.
You see, without it, every Joe Average with a CD burner could make a copy for his friends and relatives. And there's no doubt that he would do that, if he easily could (our past experiences clearly demonstrate that). And that is what hurts the sales. Sure, mostly everyone reading this will be able to circumvent the copy protection. But, SecuROM is enough protection for the general public. And that is just what we need, to contain the piracy to real pirates only (since they are vulnerable to legal action). Unfortunately, in the world we live, we do need it.
And, regarding the 'backup copy' argument: If at any time your CD becomes defective, you mail it back to us, and you receive a replacement, free of charge. Besides, how many times did the real, pressed, CD really die on you? It was an understandable argument in the times of the shoddy floppy discs, but nowadays... C'mon...
Thanks for the tip!
Software companies need to figure it out: they are selling a license but the end user is buying a product they can use. And customers spend a lot on on software, weather it's a $40 game, a $200 productivity application or a thousand dollar professional tool. Protecting an investment in software by making a backup in whatever form is appropriate be it an iso image or a cd rom or a stack of punch cards.
The industry has tried copy protection in several forms in the past, and at the end of the day three things happen:
* Customers crack the protection to avoid re-buying software (ever try to get new media for a game? good luck) if their media is damaged or to avoid the inconvenience of putting the key disk in the drive.
* Customers get shafted by software publishers when they need new media. Why pay $35 for new media for a program that cost $59? Because of this, I distinctly remember that "no copy protection" was listed as a feature on competing products to Lotus 1-2-3 and DBase back in the day.
* Software companies spend more money on copy protection than the cost of loss due to piricy, and even with the protection the pirates will pirate anyway (so cost goes up, but the piracy loss remains the same).
Sorry to my peers who sell copy protection tools... but I think you are the software equivelent to patent medicine or snake-liver oil salesmen...
-- $G
Actually, a similar method was used in the 80s. Manufacturers would send out disks that contained bad sectors. If the install successfully read from one of the predefined "bad" sectors, then the came thought of it self as pirated.
A previous method involved merely marking a good sector as bad in the FAT table, then writing stuff to it. This would prevent DISKCOPY from getting that sector and some other similar tools, but allowed the game to perform a raw read of the sector for its key data.
With the advent of utilities like COPYIIPC and others, these techniques became less worthwhile. This ushered in an era of "What is the fourth word of the second paragraph on the 23rd page of the user's manual?" protections. Manufacturers soon learned that people who bought their games had little command of the English language and could not identify such a thing. So the next advance involved code wheels, such as was used in SSI's original Pool of Radiance game. Manufacturers later learned that even that was too difficult for the general populace because now you need to read the manual just to understand how to get passed the copy protection. This resulted in many legitimate purchases getting cracked (the passwords for this game were trivially encrypted in the binary) to avoid the password. Shortly after that, they stopped doing it because it just encouraged even legitimate users to crack the protections.
And then, just like now.....crack software became available to patch the games to run anyways. Anyone remember the program copywrite?
I am of the firm opinion that any copy proection method that is software-based will always be eventually cracked. As long as the authentication system used ensure the program is the orginal copy is stored as data on the application media itself then there is the opportunity the some cracker with a good knowledge of application internals would be able to directly modify the auth module to always return a success flag. A type of authentication system is needed that is physical in nature that is not directly modifiable by anyone. As for a specific method, I do not know what could do this satisfactorily....and if I did, well...let's just say I'd be a lot wealthier than I am. 8)
In regards to the DRM aspects of such a device, there's no doubt that's a controversial approach to take. Personally I feel fair-use rights should not be infringed, and any copy protection measures must take this in mind. I'd be ok with a 'copy once' mechanism that allows only copies that are made from the original media. Any copies made from the copy would not be possible. It wouldn't wipe out software piracy completely, but it would be a large limiting factor on the 'copy-of-a-copy-of-a-copy' warez distribution systems.
Just my 2 cents. I leave it up to you if it's worth that much. 8)
Karma: Shagadelic (mostly affected by those tight knickers - yeah baby, yeah!)
muahaha, that is the best crack that i have ever heard of.
if that really works, the people that added the copy protection should be fired immediately.
And it increases bad will amongst gamers such that they do not provide the next title...
Just a Tuna in the Sea of Life
Not being able to try out a product before buying it is actuallt a most critical concept. For example: I would never ever buy a game that I hadn't played for a while and understood completly. The same (even more so) goes for music and movies. And movies is the best example! Who do you know buys a movie that they never seen before? First you go to the cinema, then you rent it, and then (if you still like it) you buy it. Being able to try out things (pirate copying), does not imply that companies lose money! Most likely they had the wrong expectations about the product in the first place. In contrary, educating ppl, ie helping them install free software, music etc will _create_ a more sophisticated marked. And there _will_ be ppl willing to pay for good products! Note: I don't say ppl should be able to lure money and time from developers, I just say that if ppl can't try out expensive and complicated products before the use it, they will decide not to use it (it is not worth the risk).
Still an anonymous coward,
but my email is n96kripe@midgard.liu.se
Kristofer Pettersson
For some textures that would be possible; however, it doesn't work in a general case (you're limited to whatever textures you actually can generate algorithmically.) Not a very good way to showcase your new game
But if you can generate half your textures algorithmically, then you cut down both the demo's size and the number of CDs that the full version needs.
Will I retire or break 10K?
we had our first real lan-parties back then...
:) - but he was kind enough to install the shareware-version on one pc. the sw-version was on the original cd and you know what's coming: while one of us kept the owner busy, installed and played the shareware for testing, i silently sat behind my pc, pretending to make something inconspicous while windows copied the original full version quake off the shared cd-rom. since quake had a long only-hd activity unpacking-setup, nobody noticed any slowdown in cd-access.
:)
2 cds in the package, equally usable for multiplayer, two of us had them, we were 4, so everyone was happy, we played till the mouses died. then the extra mission set came out, only one cd, allowing only the one with the cd in the drive to play the extra maps, units, music... but no one wanted to buy 4 cds at ~15$ each for a game that we already played in excess. cd burners weren't cheap or avail at that time (dunno), harddisk-space was limited (most had 560mb hd or smaller). so we shared the cd over the lan and used the network drive via game.exe -cd x:\ - that worked, but we had to start the game (not the actual match) at different times, so that the cdrom does not stutter back and forth trying to serve 4 concurrent read attempts. every game start loaded some small files and had to be in synch, so we were out of luck there, but albeit slow, it worked. then someone got his 1gig drive and could make a full backup. but the game was uninteresting quite before that time.
the best one we made was the drive-sharing trick used to get the quake full version. a friend of us had bought the game but wouldnt let us have a copy
no much hack, but when we were kids, we were happy like nothing.
I was actually helping the guy who obviously hadn't realised that he had the two words confused. Otherwise he'd never know the difference.
I mean, it's not like it's a trivial grammatical error. A word with a completely different meaning was substituted for one which sounded the same.
Incidentally, the reasoning behind placing the period outside of the quotes was because of coding habits. (it makes a lot more sense to do it that way from a straight logic point of view, imo)
CDs get scratched. A certain percentage of a gaming company's profits come from replacing scratched disks (same with music and videos). While there may exist a large group of individuals who copy games and other types of disks to steal the game instead of paying for it, the solutions also harm the public. I have scratched disks that I can no longer use. Others have kids that accidently scratch the disks, and then the kids have to get replacements. This is wrong. It is fundamentally unfair that a medium that is designed to have a short life (scratches) cannot be backed up. This is besides the fact that the disk must be in the drive (wearing out the drive) when the game is being played, especially with today's large disk drives. Also, I don't know now, but the one game that I own placed a file or key or whatever somewhere on my IBM GXP hard disk. This is before I knew that IBM GXP hard disks are a faulty product.
So I have IBM GXP hard disk drive failures, and now I have to hunt down the key to the Soldier of Fortune game, which is on the paper sleeve that I haven't seen in close to a year.
I've heard that it is possible to copy the CD to the hard drive, and play from the hard drive. While this can enable multiple sales of the same disk, this also enables one to continue playing the game with less worries about a scratched CD or hunting down a key on a paper sleeve which may be in a drawer or cabinet buried among thousands of other disk sleeves and other media/papers.
Fair use allows copying of copyrighted works for personal use, and other limited uses. This is based on intent. The same should apply for games. It should be possible and legal to back up or copy games from one media to another, and to different types of media, as long as the intent is legal.
The companies, by creating these different methods of copying restrictions, are trying to get paid for their creations. This is part of what makes the world go round. But they are also removing the ability to back up the games, which is wrong, and part of their motivation on doing this is also to create additional revenue from people (especially parents) buying new games to replace scratched disks. This is also wrong.
I therefore support any method that can be used to copy a game or other CD or DVD. And while I support the companies to make their profits on their work, I can no longer support these companies because of their work in this are.
I have one Soldier of Fortune CD, and will never buy another computer game (nor will I buy anything from Sony, IBM and other companies involved in restricting fair use, enabling drm, or selling faulty hardware)
was the last game I bought. I've DL'd ISO for several others but not found anything worth pursuing.
"Compared to the festering piles of crap that were Pool of Radiance and Ultima IX, it seems NWN is OK, but don't let that slow you down. I'm sure that there will be a bug or two in Doom III that will let you justify pirating it as well."
So if it is better comparatively it is ok ? I don't folow that logic, it is not a grade on the curve setup here, either tha game runs reliably or it doesn't, and I am not upset over shiny water issue's. I am pissed over numerous reproducable crashes that have been provided to Bioware that have still not been corrected, nor are the online servers dependable enough to even get a single game seesion in before they ICB or memory fragment so much they are unplayable. I think one of the best things for end users is going to be the inclusion of software in some real life threatening situations. What happens when your new BMW blue screens and accelerates at max rate ? Gonna be hard to claim no responsibility when software results in a death....
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
Come up with the best software check you possibly can... no matter how great the method is, I'll always be able to make copies... Always... that's because I dont need to engage in an arms race to trick security checks when I can just use a hex editor to disable them ;)
So waste your time, give the secuROM hustlers their money, in 3 hours I wont care wtf kind of security checks you use.
oh yeah, for the lazy, let someone else do it for you...
http://www.gamecopyworld.com
Well, if you look, I was the guy you were trying to "help." Although the words may have completely different meanings, you obviously understood what I meant, and it was just a common error!
The words do sound the same and I just tapped out the wrong one. It's not the end of the world and I don't see why you are having such a hard time with it.
Incidently, the reasoning behind the error was because of "it's just a message board so who cares." (it makes a lot more sense to think about it that way from a straight logic point of view, imo)
- It's not the Macs I hate. It's Digg users. -
It's also a British-ism, I think. I see it quite frequently in Canada.
Makes sense to me just from a common-sense point of view.
I wish we could get people to stop leaving off closing quotation marks at the end of a paragraph. It may be optional, but it's sloppy.
You can argue that a CD is harder to damage than a floppy - at least proximity to an old telphone won't wipe them when it rings, but they can still be damaged. And unlike a book for example, damage to a CD will generally leave it pretty useless. If a page in a book is torn the rest of the book is still readable.
As to convenience, installing the game and putting the CD back in the box is a heck of a lot more convenient than needing a key disk installed.
This is not really an argument about piracy. It is an argument about whether or not the software publishers are making irrational decisions based on the exagerrated claims of the people trying to sell them a particular brand of snake oil. Piracy happens - more than I find comfortable. However, the "piracy prevention methods" being sold are about as effective against piracy as snake oil is against cancer. The problem is that while the victim of the snake oil salesman is his customer, the victim of the key disk copy prevention method is the customer of the software manufacturer. Go pay a visit to some of the gaming newsgroups and you will get a feel for the problems that various copy protection methods cause.
My personal gripe is that I have a relatively noisey CD-ROM drive and when it spins up to check that I am playing a legit copy of a game it makes quite a racket. There is also the delay while the drive spins up and the data is read - it just screws over my "gaming experience"
What I would advise you to do is take a moment and really think about your attitude towards "honest, legitimate" reasons. Try to get your head around the concept that many people do have honest and legitimate reasons.
Now as for the damnable idiots who consider not wanting to pay a good reason for copying, the game publishers have to ask themselves:
1> How many more copies will I sell because I am paying an extra dollar per unit to have an "uncopyable" key disk copy protection scheme in place? (bearing in mind that the "warez d00dz" will have a cracked copy of the game up in a week or so.)
2> How many sales will I lose because of consumers will refuse to buy the copy protection? (some copy protection schemes break games so they will not run on hardware well within the "system requirements - and some people will refuse as a matter of principle)
3> How many sales will I lose because I passed the cost on to the consumers by jacking up the price of the product to cover the check I have to write to Snake Oil Unlimited? (a $1.00 increas in cost per unit might be a $5.00 increase in the MSRP)
You either believe in rational thought or you don't
Uh, I'm not having a hard time. You attacked me because I posted one line informing you of your mistake.
Talk about insecurity, sheesh.
It would certainly be difficult to read a conversation without that convention, for example:
See what I mean? With the current convention as I am aware, it's clear that Mildred is saying both the third and fourth paragraphs. Were there a trailing " on the third paragraph, it would imply that I was saying the fourth.Does that make sense?
Attacked? Haha! What are you, 10? I don't understand why you had to "inform me of my mistake" in the first place. It really had no significant bearing on the content of my post.
If it was so innocent and selfless you would have just sent me a personal message, not a message for everyone to see. It was not necessary and really arrogant.
If you have something further to say, take it somewhere else or just save it.
- It's not the Macs I hate. It's Digg users. -
That's the way it's supposed to be done, so yea, it makes perfect sense.
If you put closing quotes on the third line, you would be required to add another "said Mildred" somewhere in the fourth line or it would be assumed that you said it, not Mildred. Also, the fifth line would be implied to have been said by Mildred, not you.
English is somewhat confusing because of these nuances, but it does make sense. I believe it is this way to help the flow of a spoken conversation; it would be tedious to read (or write) "she added" and "he said" in every line of dialogue.
The only real difference between American English and Brittish (European) English (that I am aware of) is the spelling of some words, like color.
- It's not the Macs I hate. It's Digg users. -
I informed you of your mistake for your benefit. I don't use private messages.
Perhaps you might gain some sort of personal satisfaction from publicly correcting someone in a demeaning way, but I do not. My message was clear and concise, and free of any kind of emotional subtext.
Why don't you stop correcting everyone's mistakes on a web message board and do someting constructive? You're not the editor around here are you?
I am not a robot, and when some dumbass goes around commenting on my posts because of grammar or use of the wrong word - I get annoyed. When my entire post is trivialized because some smartass feels the need to publically correct a dumb mistake - I get annoyed.
Sorry, this is not free of any emotional subtext. Sorry if this is considered "demeaning" to you, but I felt that you correcting me for "my benefit" (your motives are questionable) was demeaning in itself.
I don't "gain some sort of personal satisfaction" from correcting someone in ANY way, because I won't publically correct someone for something that isn't relavent to the topic on hand.
If you won't use private messages, maybe you should just keep quiet - less your feelings be hurt again when someone else doesn't appreciate this kind of unconsctuctive help.
Whatever dude.
- It's not the Macs I hate. It's Digg users. -
When was the last time you saw a Slashdot editor correct anything?
It does, yes.
But I don't feel that it's an adequate way of indicating the speaker. When it's not clear by context there should be an explicit statement.
THE STORY OF CREATION
...
or
THE MYTH OF URK
In the beginning there was data. The data was without form and null, and
darkness was upon the face of the console; and the Spirit of IBM was moving
over the face of the market. And DEC said, "Let there be registers;" and
there were registers. And DEC saw that they carried; and DEC separated the
data from the instructions. DEC called the data Stack, and the instructions
they called Code. And there was evening and there was morning, one interrupt
-- Rico Tudor
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