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TransGaming Tagging Downloads to Combat Piracy
SeanTobin writes "It seems that TransGaming is implementing a new watermarking system to combat piracy. For now it seems that every tgz of Cedega 4.0.1 is individually tagged, and this has been frustrating Gentoo users who (like many others) like to be sure their archives are unmodified. Is this the future of software downloads? Is this tiny loss of personal privacy worth the increase in TransGaming's security?" Update: 08/16 17:42 GMT by S : There's an official response on the TransGaming forums indicating: "We can confirm that Cedega 4.0.1 included some basic watermarking... The objective behind the watermarking was to deal with some peer-to-peer piracy issues that we've been seeing over the past several months... We have suspended the watermarking feature for now and Gentoo users no longer need to be concerned with work-arounds."
Firstly, as mentioned in the transgaming forum, the twat that got all worked up about this has been using Gentoo for a grand total of 13 days, and he still has the nerve to mobilise everyone..to comlain../. will publish anything these days!! .tgz on one machine, run an arbitrary crc or adler checksum on a portion of the file that does NOT include the signature. Then simply download on another machine and repeat.
This should give cynical people like you the reassurance you need. If both sums are the same you might be ok, of course you can have as many sum checks as you want..
Also, all hopes of using md5 or any other form of checksumming to verify valid files are out the window.
Wake up, even if the MD5's check off, there is no guarantee that it is safe. Also, please note that there are other hashing algorithms besides MD5!
Also, you can run arbitrary bit sums which would be ideal in this case. For exaple, the Java language has classes for this. You can download the
there have been a grand total of *0* applications that have had copy protection methods and not had those methods defeated
Wrong, And even if they are defeated you will find that the goal of this security method is to deter piracy, not to prevent it. I.e. If you are a cracker, you will circumvent the system. If you are a general user you won't know where to start. For example, the company I work for uses SecuROM CD protection which can be overcome without too much difficulty, but most customers don't know how to. Also, the methods like Transgamings (if they remain) in my opinion are better - ie no annoying need to swap CD's in and out of a drive!.