TransGaming Tagging Downloads to Combat Piracy

Posted by michael on Sunday August 15, 2004 @05:02PM 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."

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Re:easy workaround by pc486 · 2004-08-15 17:09 · Score: 5, Informative

From the article:

Bytes 0x10 through 0x23 in the tgz are the signature. They are unique in every download and are probably recorded by transgaming to know who downloaded what archive. Also, all hopes of using md5 or any other form of checksumming to verify valid files are out the window.

So there you have it. Gentoo is forced to download from Transgaming's website and they keep changing signatures. Unless you are installed a warezed copy of it, MD5 checksums arn't going to be of much use.