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TransGaming Tagging Downloads to Combat Piracy

Posted by michael on from the tag-you're-it dept.

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."

4 of 512 comments (clear)

  1. Re:easy workaround by riprjak · · Score: 5, Funny

    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??? :)

  2. Re:And who is to blame??? by cleverhandle · · Score: 5, Funny

    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.

  3. Re:easy workaround by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny
    It's trivially easy to do.
    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!

  4. Re:Breaks gentoo ebuilds by zerocool^ · · Score: 5, Funny


    Funny... I'm trying it on your server at work, too...

    --
    sig?