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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 ?
Oct 8, 2002 - h4x0r j03 breaks secuROM
Oct 9, 2002 - secuROM announced
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.
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
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.
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?
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.
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
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.
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.
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?