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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."
This is a real pain because it actually breaks the gentoo ebuilds!
unzip two copies, find any differences, produce a third copy with random garbage in place of whatever the watermark is.
Come on people, is it really THIS important to protect stuff?
...
Why not focus on a service-based business model, like the MMORPG setup?
One-off profits are nowhere near as lucrative as service contracts, after all.
Pshaw, software fingerprinting protection is just silly
How would one verify that an archive is correct, or packaged from a reliable source, if the md5sum differs?
In my opinion, the cons outweight the pros for doing so.
Sunset over the lake, cool mist over the bridge; A leave upon the ripples, the snow reflects its glow.
I guess it can be frustrating but as a gentoo user myself I have not run into this problem I just use point2play to install new versions no big deal.
Sorry was in bad mood when made account
Huge uproar? You mean like a frontpage story on Slashdot complaining about it? Or the sites out there with the 'boycott WineX' logos?
Well, on the bright side, it's nowhere near as obnoxious as the whole product activation thing in Microsoft products.
Oh, and the CVS version does not contain everything the purchased version does, e.g. the stuff to get around copy protection in games.
quote: "If Microsoft did this"
(they already have... Windows XP beta builds).
I remember when Transgaming was going to open source everything they wrote, if only they got enough subscribers. Well that pipe dream fell through.
Um... AFAIK, everything is in CVS apart from the copy protection code, which they have contracts not to release. What more can you ask for? If you want to play games with copy protection (that being basically all of them), what other choice do you see for them?
Except that it's a major PITA for those of us who do subscribe and do like the integration/installation ease of Gentoo.
Just like it's a major PITA to carry around all those double-danged game CDs despite the fact that I could install the full version on my laptop and not have to worry about tracking the original media and making sure it doesn't get lost/damaged/stolen. Does it hurt the pirates? No, they are just using a burned copy anyway; they can make a burned copy as a backup. Backups don't work for me, the legal user, but they sure work well for the pirates! Gee, thanks!
[BTW, a major thank you to Bioware and Unreal Tournament 2004: at least for the Linux native versions, no cd is required to play! Yaaaay!]
--
Given enough personal experience, all stereotypes are shallow.
Every time a company (usually Apple) does something even remotely questionable regarding YRO people say that if Microsoft did it there would be a huge uproar.
If it's something anticompetitive someone usually clamors about how Microsoft is a convicted monopolist. I wish people could come up with a new ways to attack Microsoft and a new ways to be Microsoft apologists. I suppose we should stop rewarding those who rehash old arguments (I swear I've read your comment before, word for word) with Karma.
Help I'm a rock.
Once upon a time, I was a Windows user in the habit of pirating (mainly because I was a kid with no money). Now that I've been on the Linux bandwagon for a some years, I use Free tools by default, and if there's an application that's useful and nice that costs money (VMWare, TransGaming, etc), I buy it.
I think Linux people may realize that the license is what ties us together, and that by pirating software we undermine our community as well as erode our major advantage over some of the evil closed source people.
And from my point of view, no, I'm not going to sign up again for a new subscription. I never used it much anyway, and if they're going to act like that they can take a flying leap.
I've been a bit suspicious ever since they split from Wine, but this is the point beyond the limit. If I can't check signatures, why should I trust them?
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
I don't know what the problem is, Transgaming already has the best copy protection system there is. Their product sucks ass. Why the hell would anyone want to copy this steaming pile? To find out that 2% of your games work, and most of those both work poorly and already have a native linux port.
You know what, I hope this works. I hope they shut everybody who was copying the software out of the picture so that maybe, just maybe, someone else will take a stab at making linux gaming better.
If anyone's going to get my pennies it'll be icculus.
What happened to being able to download the source to WineX (Or Cedega) and compiling it yourself? Are TransGaming violating the GPL by not providing the source, or are they claiming that the subscription is to cover distribution costs to get around the GPL?
Or, am I completely wrong, and does Transgaming provide the source on their website, just hidden somewhere?
I haven't thought this completely through, but something tells me there are a couple possible security problems opened up by this practice:
1) I get hold of a copy of your tarball. Maybe we're on the same system, or maybe I find it on a CD, or maybe I'm your ISP, or your proxy provider, or whoever. Now I can redistribute your file to as many people as possible, in order to get you in trouble with the company that is tracking the IDs. This must be a known issue with all watermarking schemes, I suppose.
2) If the company has to distribute a new MD5 with every file, and if I can get in the middle between their download site and the world, I can inject the ID and MD5 hash of my enemy's file into the outgoing streams. Same effect as number 1, the user pointed to by that ID gets in trouble.
I there a name for this kind of security problem? We could call it the let's-you-and-him-fight problem, maybe.
The short ansewr is, Yes.
To lengthen the answer: because without revenue, the product will cease to exist.
I mean, seriously. Come off it, you wankers. "It breaks gentoo's ebuild". BFD. It's still (relatively) simple to work around. Are you that much of an automatron that you can't deal with this miniscule inconvenience?
This presents a fairly striking point about the majority of Linux/"free software" people. They're also largely proprietors of warez and other forms of copyright violation/property 'theft'. It's no small wonder why commercial products are slow to come to Linux - there's no market for them, as most would be pirated by the geeks and there'd be miniscule revenue.
Sure, there's a place and probably a market for large commercial apps, but I'm talking about smaller things (such as the transgaming stuff). There are quite a few people that truly ascribe to the "free as in freedom" philosophy on a whole. Most people just want a free ride.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
- Step 1: download the file.
-
Step 2: Blank out the watermark, saving it elsewhere.
-
Step 3: MD5sum the watermark-free file.
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Step 4: Restore the watermark.
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Step 5: Act like nothing's wrong.
<flame>I've always held that Gentoo users are like Debian users, but with less ingenuity|/usr/games/fortune
Reading through the post, it is surprising that, after at least 10 downloads, he (she?) never suspected that the MD5 utility being used has either become corrupt, or has been cracked, causing it to not produce correct hash output.
After the third or fouth failure, you should start considering more unlikely causes - corrupt MD5 utility, OS bugs, memory errors, etc. Any one of those could have cause the problems being described.
The Internet's nature is peer to peer - 20050301_cs_profs.pdf
Pirating's not enough. I subscribed thinking that the winex code would all be given to the wine project when they had enough subscriptions (15000?). They lied to me and I think they should suffer for it. Breach of contract?
Samsung took back my unlocked bootloader because Google wants me to rent movies. They're both evil.
Not everything is in the CVS. They keep the CVS version outdated, just not too much so people can still contribute patches to make their favorite game work, improving the code for them for free, but enough to keep it crippled compared to the commercial version.
For instance, take VBO support. It has been disabled in the latest CVS for about three month. If you want to enable it in the cvs version, you have to fetch a couple of files in their previous version, and even then it doesn't work, you have to fix a very stupid bug for it to display anything correct.
Yet, if you grep the official binaries for the relevant strings, you can easily verify that VBO support is enabled.
Of course, users contributing to commercial open-source products is not unheard of, but transgaming seem to try very hard not to give anything back.
My copy is certainly protected by it because I fired it up on my Amiga the other week to show a friend of mine a cute bug in the program - he was also an Amiga user, had played FA-18 endlessly but didn't believe this bug existed. We had to dig out the codewheel to get into it.
Oh, by the way, the bug is worth seeing - while in the air, you could point the nose downwards but put the engines in reverse so that you could actually climb at the same time!
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
From the Transgaming Website...
...
Can I run my Windows version of The Sims in WineX?
No. Unfortunately to make The Sims run under Linux Transgaming Technologies had to make some substantial changes to the original source code. This change makes it impossible to run The Sims for Windows under WineX
They must think Linux users are stupid or something , just how does making substantial changes to the source code (to make a linux version) affect the retail windows version of The Sims? If they have a beleivable reason for this , eg, IP issues or something similar that meant they had to remove stuff from the distribution, or whatever. But as it stands that seems like a completely fabricated reason for lack of support (particularly if what you say is true and it worked with an earlier version) Does it work with the GPL Wine from sourceforge ?
Nick
Electronic Music Made Using Linux http://soundcloud.com/polyp
Not to mention the crap some people go through when they find out their CD Rom is no longer able to read the SafeDisc protection that a game has. For example, see Neverwinter Nights 1.32 patch. Bioware hated Atari for it, and you got the impression on the message board that there were a lot of bioware affiliates who were silently endorsing the idea of using Daemon Tools, or getting a noCD patch for your legit copy of the game if your CD drive didn't work.
~Will
sig?
. . . and I feel their pain . . .
. . . but I still don't agree.
There's a game called Gish. I played the demo. I loved it. I bought it and installed it. And still loved it!
So I brought it to a friend's house, and installed it there, and we played it, and she said "this game rocks!". And before I left I erased it. She said she'd probably buy it.
So I brought it to another friend's house, a few days later! Or I tried to. Because, see, I'd just been downloading it off their website, but their website locked me out because I'd downloaded it too many times. So I emailed them, and they said yes, they'd unlock it so I could download it again, but I was only allowed to install it three times. The verification system wouldn't let me install it more than that.
What the hell? They hadn't mentioned this before. Like, you know. When I paid them money for it.
So I complained, and they refused to do anything. It's to protect against piracy! It's for everyone's better good! If you need to install it more than three times, why not just buy another copy? It's not that expensive!
I'd been planning to install it on my second computer so I could play around with it when my main computer was doing computationally intensive stuff.
I'd been planning to reformat and rebuild my main computer in half a year or so, and obviously that would require reinstalling as well.
Three installs? What the hell? I paid good money for this game. I BOUGHT this game. Why am I being treated like a criminal?
Well, make the crime fit the punishment, I guess. I downloaded the crack. It took about a tenth as long as it had taken to argue with them about copy protection.
I installed it on my friend's computer. We played it. I didn't bother deleting it. He said he'd probably have bought it if it wasn't for that 3-install limit (he reformats often.)
I called up my first friend and told her the bad news. She thanked me for the warning, and said she'd changed her mind on buying it.
I now have the crack stored on a server of mine so I can install it wherever I want.
That sure helped them defend against piracy, didn't it?
If you want people to buy your software, there's one and only one way to do it. You can't force them. You can't tell them they must. You simply make them want to. This, however, doesn't make me want to - and therefore it's a failure. Any software developer who thinks they can get around this is living in a state of denial. Accept piracy - and embrace piracy, because it can be a fantastic word-of-mouth network. One percent of a million users is a hell of a lot more sales than one hundred percent of a thousand users.
Breaking Into the Industry - A development log about starting a game studio.
I would like Transgaming to rott and dissapear, if you don't, then take a look at this
Look at it this way. You're at a supermarket. At the meat counter, there is one of those machines with tags, so they can call a number to ask the next person to come to the counter, rather than making everyone wait in line.
Do you not use this system because it's a loss in privacy? They could link the tag number with the meat you're buying! And they could link the tag number with your face! So they'd know what meat you were buying...wait...nevermind.
Unless you redistribute the Transgaming binary, the only effect of this is upon Gentoo and the MD5 hash. There are no privacy ramifications whatsoever. The MD5 problem has already been resolved in one line of code, and thus is a non-issue. As to the Gentoo problem, it could be completely resolved by making a package which executed a script to install Transgaming after verifying the non-unique bytes of the tgz.