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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 ?
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.)
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?
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.
--man those were the days..-
that was even before the C64 came out..Anyone remember the commodore PET ?
perl -e 'printf("%x!\n",49153)'
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.
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?
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
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.
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.
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."
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
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..
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
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
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!?
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.
Demos for new games just won't fit in 10 MB. The demo for UT2003 had reduced-quality textures included to get the size down to 100 MB. When a full game these days is usually at least a full CD's worth of data, you're not going to be able to cram even a playable portion of it into that small a fraction of the space.
How can we continue to believe in a just universe and freedom to eat crackers if we have no ale?
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 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!!!
Yeah it's me. Who are you? Address is andy at meejahor dot com if you want to drop me a line.
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.
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!
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 -- remember, the demo is supposed to look as cool as possible.
How can we continue to believe in a just universe and freedom to eat crackers if we have no ale?
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.
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.
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.
Imagine if Microsoft made people insert an original Office CD every time they wanted to open a Word document.
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
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
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.
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.
Reminds me of the old Plextor 4Plex I had with a Caddy. Personally, I liked caddies, but I haven't seen a driver with a caddy in 6 years.
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.
They've actually come out and admitted that most of the money they're making is going towards supporting their own infrastructure - paying for offices, heat, employees, legal fees, etc.
Very little (if any) is actually getting to ANY artist, composer or performer.
It's a big scam.
Import your CD-R media from the US and you won't pay any levy on it - Canada customs doesn't collect levies.
"Nothing strengthens authority so much as silence." - Charles de Gaulle
They'll do that now - the replacement disk IS free... They just charge you $20 for shipping and handling...
"Nothing strengthens authority so much as silence." - Charles de Gaulle
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.
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.
Yes, but you're just picking that number of one-half out of the air. I would bet that the number of textures that can be reasonably generated algorithmically is less than that. (And it still wouldn't get it down to 10 MB, by a long shot ...)
How can we continue to believe in a just universe and freedom to eat crackers if we have no ale?
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 ?
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.
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.