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."

Comments

Breaks gentoo ebuilds

[ChronoWiz]

This is a real pain because it actually breaks the gentoo ebuilds!

easy workaround

[Sparr0]

unzip two copies, find any differences, produce a third copy with random garbage in place of whatever the watermark is.

Re:easy workaround

[Anonymous Coward]

If byte 0x10 through 0x23 are always going to be unknown then assume byte 0x0 to byte 0x23 are unknown.

Then publish the md5sum of bytes 0x23 and on. It wouldn't be very difficult to modify md5sum to start reading from a given byte offset.

Re:easy workaround

[Ryan Huddleston]

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

and later you can remove the backup.

For the not-quite-as-geeky-as-me crowd, that zeroes out the marked bytes. That took me maybe five minutes (due to OBO errors) when I am blearily tired at 3 am.

They're going to have to do better than that.

Different md5sum is a problem.

[nayigeta]

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.

Re:Microsoft has done this already...

[Trelane]

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!]

Re:It's not the best way to do it...

[ZorbaTHut]

. . . 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.