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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."
Or, as an alternative; fsck transgaming and use traditional WINE... or simply use the gentoo ebuild tools to generate a new MD5 hash based on the .tgz you downloaded... you *DO* trust transgaming's own binaries, dont you??? hmmm??? :)
If two people are found to have the same watermark, they will both be killed .
And I was going to the trouble of getting out my magic marker and drawing on the download!
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
So how about the leeches among us start supporting the rare breed of company that shows any interest in Linux on the desktop?
No joke - somebody mod this fellow up. TG is, by all evidence I've seen, a totally community oriented gig. They let you vote on future developments, send status updates containing at least a modicum of technical detail, provide packages in all sorts of formats, and have their devs man their message boards with reasonable regularity. What the hell more could you ask of a company?
If you rip off TG, you're ripping off the good guys. Don't even try to tell yourself otherwise.
Just imagine if they did something insane like making you call for permission to reinstall if you've changed some of your hardware.
Oh..
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
"For each instance of pirated software I find, I shall kill you!"
I honestly do not understand why they would want to do this. To protect against software piracy? Who would do such a thing? Surely the general population has enough respect for software developers that they would refrain from pirating software without copy protection schemes.
</sarcasm>
Mathematics is made of 50 percent formulas, 50 percent proofs, and 50 percent imagination.
I can assure you I was as surprised as anyone to be modded insightful or interesting... I expected a funny or two.
:)
For reference people; NEVER do what I suggested to manually change the expected MD5 hash. Kaseijin is dead right in suggesting that the cause of variance may indeed be due to l337 hax0rz pwnZing a server and modding the downloads to infect your system...
In fact, Kaseijins entire comment is informative, mine was a joke in VERY bad taste.
Hell, I dont recommend taking my advice at the best of times
err!
jak
Or maybe word 3 of paragraph 2 on page 6...
They must be new in town.
This is slashdot; you can't underestimate the intelligence of the mods.
insightful or interesting is mod-speak for "me no understand, but you sound smarts"
cp cedega-4.01.tgz cedega-4.01-backup.tgz &&
dd bs=1 seek=16 count=19 if=/dev/zero of=cedega-4.01.tgz &&
dd if=yay2.txtcedega-4.01-backupt.tgz of=cedega-4.01.tgz seek=36 bs=1
Linux is just like Windows! Linux is ready for the average user! Linux is easier than Windows!
Why do you want to repair transgaiming's hard drives? This difference in the checksum has nothing to do with a drive failure - it's a deliberate difference. Or am I not understanding what the fuck you mean when you say you can "fsck transgaming".
You obviously think you're quite a wit.
You're half right, anyway.
And so the race begins!!
Yes, here you can download cedega from www.evil-black-hat.com/trojans/cedega.tgz. /etc/passwd, they're necessary for the game to run.
Don't worry about the modifications it makes to
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
Hmm.. I'm trying this on our server at work, but the website seems broken :(
Mirror ?
Funny... I'm trying it on your server at work, too...
sig?
In this period of American dialogue, the term is "misunderestimate". Fit the speaker well, fits many mods well.
Human nature is the same everywhere; the modes only are different. -- Earl of Chesterfield