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Atari Founder Proclaims the End of Gaming Piracy
OMGZombies writes "Speaking on a conference held yesterday in New York, the Atari founder Nolan Bushnell said that a new stealth encryption chip called TPM will 'absolutely stop piracy of gameplay'. The chip is apparently being embedded on most of the new computer motherboards and is said to be 'uncrackable by people on the internet and by giving away passwords' though it won't stop movie or music piracy, since 'if you can watch it and you can hear it, you can copy it.'"
said to be 'uncrackable by people on the internet and by giving away passwords'>
Sounds like a challenge!
No encryption scheme is 100%; some are just better than others. When will people learn!
Some days I get the sinking feeling Orwell was an optimist.
I wonder if game developers have ever even considered that some piracy occurs because the gamers cannot afford the games themselves. Adding a chip that prevents piracy wont result in any additional income from people who simply cannot afford the games to begin with. I for one prefer to spend my money on gas these days than games.
Why do overlook and oversee mean opposite things?
if you can play it, you can copy it.
c++;
"TPM will absolutely piracy of gameplay. Also, 640K ought to be enough for anybody."
Don't know how TPM works, but if it depends on some "check" being performed, its easy to disassemble the program and remove the offending instructions.
If its something more clever, such as an encryption scheme, the program can be decrypted by analyzing memory contents after the program is ran.
How many times has the industry claimed to have found the holy grail in anti-piracy measures only to be foiled and severely embarrassed soon afterward?
I dunno, those "people on the internet" are pretty resourceful lol. I hear they're good at removing and replacing chips on motherboards, or at least on gaming consoles. I think he forgot about those people in their homes that don't want some stupid overlord chip overruling basic tasks on their computer. But at least he knows enough that music and videos can't be controlled no matter how hard the MPAA and RIAA try just because of the basic nature of them. Quite the smart/dumb mix.
Google's Super Secret Search Algorithm: SELECT @search_results FROM internet WHERE @search_results = 'good'
cause we all know, if people on the internet say it, then it MUST be true :)
the preceding post was not spell checked... suck it.
when you can play those games on PC with emulation. I didnt even know that Atari was still in business.
They called me mad, and I called them mad, and damn them, they outvoted me. -Nathaniel Lee
Now if we could only figure out what it means.
This will definitely go over well with the people who were mad over even small things like the BioShock phonehome fiasco...what could possibly go wrong?
Base 13 FTW!
There goes my retirement plan!
Invenio via vel creo
There is no such thing as un-crackable. There is, however, a level where cracking becomes cost-inefficient.
I still doubt TPM will take us to that level, because it will have to have almost universal adoption and that will take many years. Software or hardware exploits will be found, and adoption/versioning issues will keep them from being fixed.
They should really stop fighting the wave, and put all their anti-piracy money into creative talent and developers.
"apparently embedded in most motherboards" -- not meaning to sound snide, but where the hell have you been for the last five years? Google things like TPM, Palladium, trustworthy computing, untrusted computing, Ross Anderson...
"None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free." -- Goethe
A TPM is great for keeping my keys from Nolan Bushnell. It is also great to let me be sure which image of code I'm running on my machine.
It is not great at letting Nolan Bushnell look into my machine and see what code I'm running.
He smoketh the crypto crack. He should read the TPM spec and see what it really does.
Evil people are out to get you.
That's how Engadget is describing it, and I'm inclinded to agree. Firstly, it's not a "stealth chip", they tend to be prominently listed as a feature because they're so bloomin' rare and you really need one if you want to be able to use Vista's disk encryption without a dongle. Secondly, nobody has even proposed using them as a DRM measure, presumably because of the aforementioned rarity. Thirdly, this is spectacularly old news - those who follow hardware developments have been chatting about the TPM and its implications since Two Thousand and FIVE.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
Your proposal advocates a
(X) technical ( ) legislative ( ) market-based ( ) vigilante
approach to fighting video game piracy. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)
( ) Video game pirates can easily use it to harvest gamer addresses
(X) Legitimate gamer uses would be affected
( ) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks
(X) It will stop video game piracy for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
(X) Users of gamer will not put up with it
( ) Microsoft will not put up with it
( ) The police will not put up with it
(X) Requires too much cooperation from video game pirates
( ) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
( ) Many gamers cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers
( ) Video game pirates don't care about invalid addresses in their lists
( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it
(X) Lack of centrally controlling authority for gamer
( ) Open relays in foreign countries
( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all gamer addresses
(X) Asshats
( ) Jurisdictional problems
( ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
( ) Huge existing software investment in SMTP
( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack
(X) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by gamer
( ) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
( ) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
( ) Extreme profitability of video game piracy
( ) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
( ) Technically illiterate politicians
( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with video game pirates
(X) Dishonesty on the part of video game pirates themselves
( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
( ) Outlook
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
(X) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever
been shown practical
( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation
( ) Blacklists suck
( ) Whitelists suck
( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored
( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks
( ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
( ) Playing games should be free
( ) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
(X) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses
( ) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
(X) Temporary/one-time gamer addresses are cumbersome
( ) I don't want the government playing my games
( ) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough
Furthermore, this is what I think about you:
(X) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
( ) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it.
( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your
house down!
Trusted Platform Module - not mentioned in the article. You can probably google it yourself, or wikipedia has an entry.
It's pretty much Palladium all over again. Remember that?
A hardware-based security module may have implications for game authentication. Whoopee. Not only is this nearly devoid of content, but the content that's there is essentially bullshit. The TPM is gaining a userbase, this is true - but they are FAR from ubiquitous. This isn't something you can easily install yourself either - to implement something like this would be a pretty impressive hardware hack (it's not just a chip you solder on). Making this a requirement for a PC game is just asking for failure. Either you're going to limit your market share to that of the TPM, or you're going to have to allow a workaround for the majority of PC's which will get cracked and circumvent the whole idea. Neither of these bodes well for this guy's point.
I'm disabling ads until because I choose not to reward redesigns that are less usable than "view source".
what exactly makes games so special that a chip like this could hinder piracy for games but not for movies?
Superb Hosting
Reasons why he's dead wrong (in no particular order and by no means comprehensive):
-TPM in and of itself won't protect against piracy at all if the implementation is botched.
-Tying purchased software or media to a specific hardware device p*sses people off when they repair, replace or upgrade and their DRMed stuff no longer works.
-Talk about opening up Asian markets, etc, is proceeding under the flawed assumption that those who acquire illegal copies of a game would even purchase a legit copy.
-Restricting your potential install base in this manner will reduce exposure, popularity, and ultimately sales of your game despite the opposite being your goal.
I was going to make a snazzy comment on how TPM was toyed with re: OSX and it doesn't seem to be making any trouble....then compare safedisc and securom and how it was so easy to modify executables to bypass the security....or how much more controlled-hardware environments like playstations and xboxes were no trouble at all to break....
Then I remembered someone claims the end of piracy every year and I should go back to my coffee.
What the heck is a 'sig'?
I own my computer. I bought the hardware. I should be able to do whatever I want with it. The reasons the concept of copyright has been created are not compelling enough to essentially force every computer to have a police chip in it to make sure we honor it.
Need a Python, C++, Unix, Linux develop
the Amiga," said Troy McClure, spokesman for Atari.
I agree... and coming from the man that decries the current crop of consoles as crap, and all games since he left the industry being nothing more than a "race to the bottom" (of the quality barrel), he needs to stick to remembering the good ol' days and apologize for Chuck E. Cheese. :)
It's the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man.
hmm ... let's see. It's embedded on the mainboard, and as I understand it, they use that to encrypt the game key or whatever.
What happens if I have to change the mobo? Do I have to buy the game again? Do I have to re-register with a newly generated key? That would mean that there is some confirmation coming from some site, which, sorry Nolan, means someone from the intertubes will certainly be able to fake it.
"DRM is like the Ford Pinto: it's a smooth ride, right up the point at which it explodes and ruins your day."-C.Doctorow
Umm so like they just woke up from a coma and heard about Trusted Computing? ROTFL! Mind you Atari had jack to do with this technology.
Trusted Computing uses the TPM module, it's in many but FAR from all computers. It's in this laptop, it can be ADDED to my desktop's motherboard. It's designed to store measures of critical OS and hardware components like the BIOS to prevent tampering. Modify a file who's hash is stored in the TPM and is checked by a critical process and the system won't boot. There's a random number generator in there and yeah probably a private keypair too. So what I can only EVER play my game on this one machine now? It's locked to this machine? Games upgrade their stuff more than anyone else and he thinks this is the great panacea? You could do this today with your own code much the way Vista does, has that helped adoption? The TPM might be a more effective way to do it but it won't guarantee sales.
There are several games on the market and coming to market that I have not nor will I purchase simply because the DRM is too intrusive. Games that require me to be connected to the 'net for "verification" to play standalone or that can only be purchased and downloaded via DRM'd mechanisms aren't of interest to me. I and others have voted with our wallets.
Want to KILL the commercial game industry? Implement this! This guy sounds like your typical PHB who has stumbled upon something in a trade rag, seized upon the idea, and is trumpeting to anyone in management that will listen what a great idea he's found. In short he's a fool. He also sounds like he believes that everyone who's pirating games now will suddenly be forced to start buying them, wow is he and the music industry going to be in for a shock when they finally figure out this isn't the case!
GL Atari, was nice knowing you.
Build it, Drive it, Improve it! Hybridz.org
This is from a company that once used bad sectors on floppies as an anti-piracy technique. It was "unstoppable" at the time. They thought that floppy drives sold to the consumer couldn't create bad sectors. Game would check to see if a certain sector on the floppy was indeed bad. No bad sector? Must be a copy.
However, a piece of scotch tape on the floppy, a "graphic" format utility, wait until that sector was being formatted, *tug* *tug* *tug* on the tape....
If it can be Encrypted it can be decrypted..
Then there are people that buy Copy Protection... "Ok.. if it Truly can't be copied.. Then how am I going to mass produce it." never seems to enter their minds.
There really needs to be some studies done on people that make these types of Claims.. Exactly how delusional are these people.. or is it a simple case of diminished mental capacity.. Or is it not the people that make the claims but the people that buy into the marketing Hype that have the issues that should be studied.
These types of Schemes should be rated in the number of Weeks from launch it will take for the technology to be Hacked/Cracked/Made Irrelevant by the "Internet People"..
Who needs WiFi when we can have Packet Over Sheep! http://datacomm.org/PoS-InternetDraft.txt
Why do people make bold and moronic statements like that when history regularly proves them wrong. You know, that adage of "where there's a will, there's a way?" Uh, yeah. That saying came about for a reason - when people put their mind to something, they will always succeed in the end. It kinda goes along with the "never say never" adage...
hahahah ! ... you're serious ... let me laugh even harder HAHAHAHAH !
oh wait
Yes, I'm left. You have a problem with that?
You want to know how to stop game piracy?
Simple...let's go back to the cartridges...
What is best in life? To crush your enemies, to see them driven before you and to hear the lamentations of their women.
Come on people, lets start using that tag where it is actually applicable. :-)
Ok, being a former hacker (ok I still do it but still), My unofficial Hackers Rule Book tells me that Mr. Bushnell is not that bright. Hackers Law #1, Always make backups. But #3 states if someone claims it's unbreakable... BREAK IT!.
Mr. Bushnell has opened the door for hackers across the globe to crack his unbreakable toy. Historically, every single company, person, and government that has made such claims, their technology was hacked in hours to weeks, and in rare cases months. Now granted some times this is on purposes so they "might" figure out how to patch that hole, but it's useless. In the hacker world, the locks can be picked, the encryption gets decrypted, and we sit back and say.. nice try. If you really piss us off bad enough, we release the code on how to do it.
Blueray/HDDVD said it would take what, 10 years to crack? It was initially cracked in what, a week? Then everyone knew how to do it in a month. How much more of an invite do these companies need to do to be shown up?
My best guess is if you really want something unhackable, DO NOT ADVERTISE THAT IT CAN'T BE HACKED!
Now if you want REAL security, hire a team of top notch hackers and give them what THEY want not what you want and you may very well get a seriously good product that will be hard to hack. But always remember Hackers Law #2, There will ALWAYS be someone better than yourself.
l8r
Long time paying customer here. Just a quick note to let you know that I would buy more games if your prices were lower (because you weren't pissing money away on stupid schemes like this) and you spent more time focusing on how to get money out of me (by offering value) rather than trying to get money out of people who have proven they are not able to/going to pay.
Anyway, thanks for letting me know about TPM. I'll be sure not to purchase hardware from vendors including it on their MBs, since I obviously cannot trust them.
Ha! What one man can devise another one can circumvent. Any guesses how long after this "unbreakable" copy protection scheme starts coming out before "cracks" start to appear?
What the article states about movies and music also holds true for game code. If a computer can read it, it can be copied.
I hate to to burst Mr Bushnells Bubble, but the TPM is neither a good solution to game piracy, nor particularly new. According to the Wikipedia article on Trusted Computing, the first systems with a TPM have been shipped since 2004.
Also, does someone remember Next-Generation Secure Computing Base from Microsoft? Do we really have to go through all of this again?
09-f9-11-02-9d-74-e3-5b-d8-41-56-c5-63-56-88-c0
If a game or program requires a downloaded component it is pretty easy to make it impossible to crack. If every sold product has a large unique key and that key is stored in a database on the server then you can check if a key isn't used from different locations or in parellel.
For normal games, you wouldn't want to make an internet connection a requirement though.
I would say the trend for games to require an online paid subscription will do a lot more to curb piracy than any TPM technology.
Hell, don't some companies just let you download the game for free now and get all their revenue from subscriptions? Or the variant of this, Steam.
From the article: "The TPM will, in fact, absolutely stop piracy of gameplay." I assume this TPM is a Trusted Platform Module. For example, Windows Vista Ultimate's BitLocker feature uses the TPM. But don't you need at least Windows Vista to run games for Windows that require the TPM?
Besides, is it even possible to pirate "gameplay" as such? The Tetris Company likes to assert a copyright on Tetris, but game rules can't be copyrighted. One leading case is Lotus v. Borland.
I am an old fart programmer (anything past 40 is WAY old in technology) so gaming long since left me behind. Face it, asteroids was as advanced as I got.
That said, I would hope the industry would LEARN from the failure of music DRM and the HD DVD stuff (note how Blu-Ray is failing to fly off the shelves -- it was the format war, not DRM that kept it from selling, right? RIGHT!?!?)
I am sick and tired of being treated like a criminal. And that's what all this technology does. I don't share the optimism that every solution will be defeated. Impenetrable control is possible. But luckily the industry hasn't been very good at this so far. But compare the ease of defeating CSS with the difficulty of defeating ACCS and you see they are learning.
The best way to defeat this is to refuse to buy hardware that has the controls. I sincerely hope Blu-Ray dies an ignimonious death. As much as I want an HD video format (and as long as I only have 1MBit bandwidth), DVD is good enough.
Stop treating me like a criminal and I'll buy your crap. Until then, get bent.
TPM isn't going to solve anything.
Look at apple! Apple uses a TPM chip to prevent osx on non-apple hardware... BUT clearly it didn't work.
Maybe the atari guys havn't heard of el-jobso and his merchants of 'cool'
Todd Davis, CEO of Life Lock, proclaims the end of identity theft.
Similar to the upcoming US election results
As fellow person on the internet, I postulate that this will be cracked in no more than 6 months.
Money is the root of all evil?
There is not even a TPM chip in many models of Mac.
I continue to be irked by the fact that 3rd parties increasingly have more control over my PC than I do.
I'm not interested in pirating someone's games or music, but I'm just waiting until a fairly obvious operation suddenly becomes disallowed to me because some peckerwood decided I should never be able to do that on my own damned PC for fear that I might be doing something they don't like.
If the media companies had their way, they'd basically get rid of the entire concept of general purpose computing and be stuck with an appliance they could control and which would force us to become a monetized revenue source with marketing options controlled by them.
I'm getting tired of crappy solutions which are mostly just restricting what I can already do.
Cheers
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
The software my company writes is tied to the TPM chip. What it prevents you from doing is taking a copy of our software and running it on another machine. When you register it, you then download an encrypted image for that specific TPM chip. Without systems level access to that machine and some pretty expensive hardware tools, there's no reasonable way to hack it. Of course, our entire application/OS is encrypted whereas encrypting an entire game would become a hinderence to game play. Therefore, I doubt it will take off.
But heck, it's the securiest OS on the planet be running those games. TPM is irrelevant then.
"Stealth encryption chip" is a stupid way to describe what a TPM does. It hashes memory to provide assurance that running software is authentic (signed by a trusted certificate), and it grounds this assurance in hardware that would be extremely difficult to hack.
Uses for TPM are mostly evil (DRM enforcement), but also good: They could make things a lot harder for the authors of worms, trojans, and virii.
I already play next to no big commercial PC games because of random, carelessly severe copy protection scumware that's in it now. Having a TPM has no benefit to me, just added cost to restrict my usage so if I have a choice, I will get a PC without one. Not that I'm a pirate and think this will stop copying or anything, they'll probably just circumvent it like always unless it's integral to the function of the software.
But whatever, they can go this way and guarantee that I'll never buy another PC game. My consoles get lots of love already.
Computer games are not a requirement, they are a recreation.
What are other recreations?
Well, game consoles have their own transparent protections the average user never even sees, board games, card games, role-playing games, wargames, trivia games, reading, listening to music, learning an instrument, playing sports, going for a walk\run\bike ride\drive, hanging out with friends, etc etc etc There are plenty of ways to spend time that don;t require computer games.
Continue to add more of this ridiculous garbage to software and you won't have to worry about piracy, people will quit buying any of your products all together. 0 sales = Dead Company.
Treating your customers like criminals and making your product inconvenient will only cost your entire customer base
He must not have had his Wheaties that morning. That's the really dumbest thing I've seen him say in a long time.
He says this:
a new stealth encryption chip called TPM will 'absolutely stop piracy of gameplay'.But he also says this:
...it won't stop movie or music piracy, since 'if you can watch it and you can hear it, you can copy it.'So tell me Nolan, exactly how does that work? Do the bytes that make up movies have a different flavor somehow than the bytes in a computer program?
In short Nolan, never underestimate the power of fifteen year old kids who live in the Netherlands. Be prepared to eat those words.
PS: Wiki has a page up on TPM already. Along with links to already existing attacks.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
If I remember correctly, most software that required a dongle (hardware that generally sat on the parallel port) in the early 90's swiftly had a patch/cracked version out.
...how are they now going to explain the drop in game sales?
They won't be able to blame piracy, which in actuality has been a promotional tool.
Without that promotional tool, well.... out of sight, out or mind.
Its been long established and even in some cases intentionally applied, that the non-legal distribution of software helps promotion of the software in sales.
This non-legal spread of software started before the word "Piracy" was coined by Bill Gates (as it applies to software). And Bill Gates profited off of the non-legal spread of his BASIC for the Altair computer.
I believe there are studies of this same drop in sales regarding music as piracy is cracked down on by unreasonable aggressive RIAA legal system tactics.
You owe me a new computer monitor.
If a game or program requires a downloaded compnent it is pretty easy to make it impossible to play without a network connection. Too bad if you don't have one ready at a moment's notice.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
From a theoretical standpoint, that works assuming you can run through or predict the outcome of every possible input sequence anyone can give it. (Or at least, say, the most frequent 80-90% of possible inputs if you want bad copies.) Even a computer can't play-test a modern game to that degree of completion, though maybe a computer with a human to spend a lot of time patching conditional state changes into it could.
To my knowledge, though, nobody has gotten a system together which is theoretically uncrackable. (Without having holes in the theory, anyway.) So we haven't gone down the "if you can watch it and you can hear it, you can copy it route." Well, not for games, anyway.
The only thing that will end piracy of game software is putting games in cartridges that are technically difficult to reproduce and contain elements required by the game itself. You can use TPM and other technical measures to take advantage of the DMCA (like printer manufacturers do) to prevent people selling cloning cartridges. But as long as the game is stored in a file on disk out of it only takes one person to come up with a way to bypass the protection and put a cracked version online and it's "game over".
'absolutely stop piracy of gameplay'
should we file this with other quotes such as
"there will never be a use for a computer in some ones home"
"we will never need more than 640k of memory"
Etcetera adnasium
anyone knows how is TMP supposed to work ?, is it for identifying/coprocessing vista's useless encryption or is it supposed to encrypt downloaded media to tie it up to the box, the article doesn't really explain anything ? these anti-piracy attempts are incredible stupid, the pc is not a closed box, ppl will reverse engineer the chip and make an emulator for it in like 2 months while it existence causes additional costs because of encryption licenses (that not only will not add additional value to the customer but will actually hurt him), and will cause things not to work with old computers (news flash, a huge user base keeps their box until they blow up or are unable to keep using it without an upgrade, which takes several years, in my country you can find ppl running pentium mmx and pentium2, they even install winxp on them and endure the painfully slow speed rather than upgrade) you know, i remember walking down the street a few years ago and suddenly stopping in front of a newspaper stand, i just couldn't believe what i had just seen, a cover of a pc magazine with a pirate skull crossed off and a "the end of piracy" sign, it seems it had an article about ancient cd DRM, you know, those that were usually cracked before the actual game came out, after rofling for a few hours i kept walking, this article sound the same way.
http://www.phocean.net/?p=100 cold boot attack.
Restore the madness of youth's lechery
So I guess I won't upgrade my motherboard next year...
"We are the music makers, and we are the dreamers of dreams [...]."
Nolan Bushnell said that a new stealth encryption chip called TPM
Next thing you know, Bushnell will tell us that there is an evil conspiracy afoot to ship PCs without floppy disk drives! The man must surely have some highly placed sources!
The chip is apparently being embedded on most of the new computer motherboards and is said to be 'uncrackable by people on the internet and by giving away passwords'
That's the same sense of "uncrackable" in which the Titanic was "unsinkable" and in which Vista is "secure". And "Titanic" and "Vista" aptly summarizes what any company that's going to try to use TPM for software protection is going to create.
Bring it on guys.
Sadly, the chip was stolen before it could be used.
If you can read this, I forgot to post anonymously.
I just defeated it. Got the private key using Van Eck Phreaking on the TPM chip. Next!
7h3$3 4r3n'7 7h3 Ðr01Ð$ ¥0 4r3 £00|{1n9 f0r. M0v3 4£0n9. --OB1
They could make things a lot harder for the authors of worms, trojans, and virii.
I have yet to see a credible scenario where this would be possible without seriously crippling all manner of legitimate and often necessary activities, such as writing or installing software. Those kinds of restrictions might be OK for a game console or cell phone, but they're unacceptable for a general purpose personal computer.
So, don't buy those motherboards and we'll see how long that will last. I refused to buy DRM based hardware.
I think it's time Sweeden (pirate bay) started manufacturing motherboards, so they can make them without this silly chip in it.
Sharing is part of human evolution. If we stop sharing, we stunt our growth.
For a more detailed explanation of this, see the movie "Steal this film 2". Excellent documentary on the history and future of piracy.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=3636669624532830059
No trees were killed in the making of this post; however, many trillions of electrons were horribly inconvenienced.
have more to do with the drop in piracy then anything else. All encryption schemes have a shelf life and none have proven to be a panacea for publishers. Lest we forget the days of everybody pasting HD-DVD and Blu-Ray unlock codes in their sigs...
One the other hand, few bother pirating lousy games...
The game industry already has a copy-protect mechanism that works. It's called "game consoles".
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Does the Encryption chip have a single "Master" Decryption Key, or does each MoBo maker have their own? Or will they try and make it Region specific again? We could be seeing "Exclusive" games released in partnership with a MoBo maker. Or released in the US only. But game will not work in others till they release a patch or update a few weeks or months later. if ever....
Laters Sol "Have you found the secrets of the universe? Asked Zebade "I'm sure I left them here somewhere"
Game manufactures will enable it for the first run of a games release when the only people buying it are enthusiasts who have working hardware or who can read forums. Then they'll pull it off so they don't have to deal with the headaches. By the time they remove it the Zero Day Warez kiddies will have moved on.
What this'll really do is kill the used market. You're game disc is perpetually is tied to one piece of hardware. Right of first sale doesn't matter much if you can't practically use it.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Umm its not new, its been in Thinkpads for years at the least.
If it does stop piracy 100% ( which i doubt ) then it will cripple the industry as he's got no clue how much piracy HELPS the market, just like it does the music market and regular software market.
+ my system wont ever have a TPM, so does that mean they are selling defective products ?
---- Booth was a patriot ----
It should be filed under "famous last words" instead.
This might be a bit offtopic, but the story really reminded me of Treacherous Computing (aka Trusted C.). There is a really insightful film (under a CC license; torrent) about - it explains the concept (and that in less than 4 minutes). Really worth seeing!
----
He proclaims the end to gaming piracy, well, ho ho ho! I can fight fire with fire! -I- proclaim gaming piracy will never end, let's see who's right first!
"Most people, I think, don't even know what a rootkit is, so why should they care about it?"
Of COURSE it won't be totally uncrackable : this system sounds extremely similar to the systems in game consoles. But, it could be made secure enough that breaking this system would require a hardware mod-chip. If Intel were to go further and include the TPM in the processor die, it would become nearly impossible. Well then one can just use/buy the compitions processor and not Intels. I'm not entirely sure how TPM works, but the logical way to do it would be that every single TPM would have a unique private key, not found in any database on earth except for inside the hardware of the chip itself. Only this key would be capable of decrypting code so that a piece of software can run. Games would include a downloaded component, although the majority of the game software would still be using an optical disk, and that component would include a portion encrypted using the public key for your PC's TPM. So the game software on the disc is encrypted
with the same key world wide?
Then it wont be long that you see crackGameCrypto@home distributed computing projects to find that key for each game. A secure third party would have the database of public keys, supplied by the manufacturer of the TPM chips. The database would be correlated with identifying information about every PC. This is so that you could not use hacked software to supply the game company's servers with a public key that you have the private key to. Is there only one manufacturer of TPM chips allowed?
What stop one to incroporate an paper-shell company for the express purpose of getting
public keys into that database. Public keys
that many cracking software will use? PC games would become as armored against piracy as console games. Which isnt much armor to tell you the truth.
What complete nonsense. Don't rush to take a soldering iron to your motherboard, this is all hype.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
Nolan Bushnell: the John Romero of the 1980's.
"+1 Dumbass"? Your post is good, but the idea that you should get +1 karma for not R'ing TFA makes me chuckle...
The CB App. What's your 20?
You can disable TPM by unticking its option from Linux kernel configuration (mine was enabled by default).
And TPM has been around for a while. Nothing new here.
Mod points are a dangerous tool. Abuse them wisely.
Is this guy the same Nostradamus that predicted DVD, BluRay, and [insert your favourite..] encryption to be unbreakable?
Have some self respect and tell me it's a joke.
Do they support TPM? If so, wouldn't they change every time you rebuild the VM?
Personally id just refuse to use the software ( ie, lost customer ), but i'm curious.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
More information can be found at wikipedia
So my plan to rule the world by taking control of all the remaining Catsters is doomed to fail?
http://megadroid.com/Companies/axlon.htm
They should be smart enough to know it's not 100%, and will eventually be cracked...but do they care? No. The real motive is stated right in the article:
"As soon as the installed base of the TPM hardware chip gets large enough, we will start to see revenues coming from Asia and India at a time when before it didn't make sense."
Comment removed based on user account deletion
i was going to post about this. in late 80's early 90's magazines were chock full of ads for paralel port dongles, while here in brasil (a piracy heaven to these days) we were using all kinds of software that were supposed to have dongles, absolutelly free.
using hardware to lock software is like trying to hold pudding with string. it doesn't work.
proof of this is the fact that i had for some months MacOS X running in standard home-build PC. apple does everything they can to limit MacOS to their hardware, just to have people cracking the stuff.
so, here's my tip for game companies, either limit yourselves to erite games for consoles, or lower the price of original games. nothing's better than lower prices to curb piracy.
What ? Me, worry ?
>>"They" don't get to authenticate anything on my machine.
>Then "You" don't get to play these games.
If it comes to that, then they're missing out on revenue. Their loss. I play Bolo.
Evil people are out to get you.
Is this the same uncrackable copy protection employed by Apple to protect Mac OS X? Better not tell these guys about it.
In current TPM hardware, it only works as well as the CPU hooks into it. If you have firewire, you can directly access the TPM's memory. oops.
Did anyone bother to point out that TPM has been discussed to death and the mere existence of the Trusted Platform Module is no news at all?
Power corrupts the few, while weakness corrupts the many.
Any cypher made by man can be broken by man.
Most people aren't thought about after they're gone. "I wonder where Rob got the plutonium" is better than most get.
Specially since TPM is a private key repository hardware.
/. the whole stuff will probably bring just another layer of inconvenience that will force legit user to download the fixed exe, just to be able to play a game that they legally bought in the first place
The only point of TPM is having a hardware layer that can help you prove that software XYZ was indeed build by producer UVW, and obtain the password to decrypt it.
That can't do anything to prevent you from downloading a fixed EXE from the intertube and run that one instead.
In this situation, the TPM will be as effective against piracy, as the nice hologram on original Windows media or the "Don't download it from the net video" ads on DVDs : the users won't even be exposed to it.
As other
(I do. I download the crack for every game I purchase, just to keep Starfuck from installing on my hard drive and to avoid needing to reinsert the DVD / revalidate online before each play. I've had actual CD-R ruined that way)
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
So he's saying that by marketing a game that can only be run on select systems, but will be difficult to pirate, the market will *grow*?
I highly doubt that.
The TPM chip that comes in computers is totally different than the hardware chips, curtained memory, and super-root apps that were in Palladium. In the NGSCB, the hardware had an active role of maintaining I/O, and managing memory.
The current version of the TPM is not in the active path at all. Fundamentally, all a TPM 1.2 chip is, is a smart card that is attached to the motherboard. The only difference between it and an Aladdin eToken that is plugged into a USB port are two things. First, are the platform configuration registers, which you manually have to put data into, and second the TPM is resettable from the BIOS screen.
TPM chips, as per the TCG 1.2 spec ship disabled and deactivated, and the user of the machine has to go into BIOS to enable the chip and take physical ownership. Otherwise, it can't be accessed by the machine in any way.
Motherboards TPM chips are rare to find. For a server I built that is to be able to boot unattended, but have all its volumes encrypted using BitLocker, I had to chase down stats on Intel's website and compare them to currently selling motherboards, then cross-reference them to make sure there was an actual chip, and not just BIOS headers.
The Atari founder is quite wrong. Using the TPM won't give much protection from pirates. We've already hard hardware devices encrypting software for decades -- the good old fashioned dongles.
Second, no modern OS ships with a trusted, sealed OS path that is forever static and can be signed from the OS company and passed directly to the TPM like console operating systems are done. Windows Server 2008 has different drivers load for RAID and other low level devices which vary widely party. For example, If you install a new role like Hyper-V on Windows Server 2008, you have to disable and re-enable BitLocker, or the OS path won't be the same. Bitlocker doesn't use OS signatures from a central source, when its enabled, it does its own signing and sealing of the boot path and other user selectable data (BIOS settings, NTFS stats, MBR, partition table.)
The Atari founder assumes too much. PCs are not consoles where having a chip on a static OS and hardware can provide adequate protection. For the TPM chip on PCs to be used for piracy protection, every gaming machine would have to have one physically present, enabled, activated, and ownership taken in the OS the chip is running under, the OS would have to have a static low level kernel that never changes from machine to machine regardless of CPU or devices installed, which for a PC is virtually impossible.
TPM chips also have been emulated too. All it takes is one person to be able to bypass the protection, and the game is cracked.
All and all, in my personal experience, TPM chips are a good thing, especially with BitLocker. A server can boot unattended but still possess hard disk encryption so someone who gets physical access to the box can't just boot a CD and copy off the server's contents. I'd recommend this for co-loc boxes, especially in these times where thieves are learning that a data center heist can net far more cash in information to sell on the ID theft market (or just plain old extortion) than a bank robbery would haul in.
A laptop owned by a company bound by corporate regs can use BitLocker or PGP to ensure the laptop has hard disk encryption, but doesn't have any more passwords the user has to remember. Finally, someone can use BitLocker + a PIN, so if someone steals a laptop or machine, they only have 3-5 guesses before the TPM refused entries or starts adding substantial delays between password guesses.
Of course, there are hard disk encryption programs with pre-boot authentication (TrueCrypt, PGP, etc.), but BitLocker is the only one that offers the feature of booting a machine completely unattended, but yet remain secure. Of course, one can have an OS boot then manually mount encrypted volumes, but BitLocker removes the hassle of this, especially if the machine is in a remote location where no admins would be present, and a network connection is not feasible.
The TPM chip in its current form is a security asset (IMHO). It, in its current incarnation, would provide little help for new DRM or antipiracy schemes.
I thought TPM was all about controlling the HARDWARE inside of a computer. Every time we had an issue with a laptop not wanting to boot up because of the hard drive or different processor was installed, it was due to the TPM module. Replace with the original part, and everything worked properly again. How does this relate to software?
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
...when users are executing a "fixed exe" they obtained from ?
At which point in time will the TPM enter in action ?
Answer none : instead of going through the hassles of key exchange and such, you just run the plain fixed exe.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
*shivers*
Why is this bringing Douglas Adams to mind ?
Quem a paca cara compra, paca cara pagará.
is said to be 'uncrackable by people on the internet
Yes, and I've never heard THAT one before, either. Don't the copy protection/DRM/anti "piracy" camp understand that we here on "the internets" just LOVE a challenge?
Crack/workaround for "uncrackable" chip available for download in 5, 4, 3...
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
This article is clearly a suit acting as a voice to what his limited understanding leads him to believe. It's kinda cute, how he proclaims his faith in the imminently fallible.
Is apparently still a major problem. You learn something everyday
What? A dork who hasn't done anything but generate PR sheets for 30 years - ISN'T - unveiling technology that is going to change the industry?
Say it isn't so!
Spot on. Trusted Computing has never been aimed at DRM. There are some academic papers floating around about using it for this, but they tend to be aimed at a more military context, e.g. enforcing confidentiality of top-secret documents.
TPMs have some great uses, but mainly for internal corporate networks and computer grids. Check out Trusted Network Connect and IF-MAP for more details. There are often a spectacular number of assumptions necessary to make any serious use of a TPM, and as such solutions on the internet that use them simply wont work*.
For one, they aren't resistant to non-trivial hardware attacks. There have been some great vulnerabilities discovered in various chips. The whole aim of this initiative is to prevent malware from making your software behave badly, not a determined attacker.
Cheers,
John
*Or wont work any better than a solution that doesn't use them.
Read radical news here
- won't give them very important technical benefits in terms of speed and quality
- don't have a huge installed user base which would be able to take advantage of it.
As a recent reference just count what is the fraction of current games that use DirectX 10 : very small, only a handful of games, because that would require Vista + a DX10 compatible video card. And even those games offer this as an alternative to a standard DX9 engine targeting WinXP.
So you can bet that, even if at some time in the future Microsoft pushes a service pack that makes the TPM mandatory and used system wide (i.e.: anything needs to be signed & encrypted to be allowed execution), game developers will still be targeting, WinXP, plain Vista, plain Vista+DX10 in addition to Trusted Vista, except maybe for a couple of games developed by microsoft themselves (expect the windows port of Halo 4 to be a Trusted Vista exclusive).
Developers will wait until Trusted Vista has reached 80% share at least before even considering it.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
What motherboard manufacturer is going to go for this when enthusiasts and hackers will reject it out of the gate for having this chip on board, not to mention the fact that adding this chip adds to the price of the motherboard, thereby increasing the selling price versus the competitors (don't have the chip) motherboard? Of all the idiocy. The only way this is going to happen is if it is legislated, and that will take so long that it will become a non-event in the technology world by the time the US (I know who will lead that foolish charge) gets around to it. Nope - this isn't happening.
And there is no way to unset the setgid bit in Windows?
I'm concerned that I'll have to find some other way to amuse myself soon enough. Software-only protections are often eminently crackable (exceptions: VMs along the lines of StarForce and TheMIDA), however, once the processor/motherboard manufacturers start colluding (hardware-level crypto with non-recoverable keys, physically disabling the debug interfaces, etc), we start to enter territory where software becomes virtually uncrackable if the protection is implemented properly ... and time will indeed tell how to properly do so.
For an example of an existing hardware protection which is "per se" impossible to break directly, see HASP HardLock with its smartcard-based AES decryption.
It has been around much longer. It started with the Trusted Computing Platform Alliance, which was founded somewhere between 2001 and 2002 (in the Wikipedia article, there's unfortunately not much information about its history. The organization is now called Trusted Computing Group (of course, with an SSL encrypted homepage! ;-) ).
The FSF and EFF have been upset about this for a long time, and for a good reason. The initial design of Windows Vista would have included a "trusted kernel" which would've allowed only trusted applications and documents. Luckily, they could not enforce the original design.
If it gets decrypted on your machine, who cares if it's digital video or program instructions? They're bytes. They have to be unencrypted to work. Doesn't matter if it's unencrypted to become video and seen, or unencrypted to become program instructions and executed. It's just unencrypting bytes.
That's why it'll never work. Reason being, the protection scheme is flawed. The person they're trying to prevent from decrypting the payload is the same person who is holding the decryption keys. This scheme is broken by design.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
Gaming will be almost all subscription based soon(TM) anyway. The next GTA will be an MMO.
But damnit, PC gamers everywhere seem to adopt the school of thought that "If I can download it, why pay for it"
What kind of mentality is that? If anyone seriously believes that computer games can be created and then downloaded -without- paying then they better be ready for a large healthy dose of limited assets and/or gameplay/in-game publicity/buyable add-ons.
Big titles require big money, as much on consoles as on PCs - even more on PCs given the compatibility issues they face.
Yet, so many people that I talk with, who are fellow gamers and yes, do play PC games, always have the same one work on their lips when talking about a new game; "download". The only games they do buy are either MMOs or made by blizzard (or both) and everything else they shamelessly download away.
I try to explain to them that game creators cannot continue making PC games if no one buys them and they don't really care.
Take Crysis. Big pc-only release in a long time and what happened? It got downloaded so much the devs have sworn to never release a pc-only title anymore.
It pains me to admit but these kind of PC gamers are what's killing the PC industry. Measures such as this are, sadly, what's needed. Yes, consoles are moddable and hackable too but it's a lot harder from a commoner's standpoint: you need to find someone who actually solders the thing and then you need to lend him your console and even then you're not sure it'll work properly. With PCs? download and play away.
Sure, having a chip on the motherboard may not be fail-proof but I *hope* it will make it hard enough so that people stop stealing games.
IF you want to play something that you like, buy it. If you want to try it out first, get a demo or try it at someone else's house, read a few reviews (for the pedants out there: no, I don't assume and single one review is objective, but I read enough reviews of different sources concerning the same game that I can get a good idea of what the game is about)
I love my PC games, I love how they generally are more expansive, complex, require more than just quick reflex, are not fraternity games for beered up guys (stereotype maybe and I know there are great games even on consoles but you get the point, I'm talking Simcities, Total War, Civ4 (which may be the best example, if you look at the X360 version they're doing. Cleopatra got upgraded to double-Ds or something?), etc.)
I really wish that hard-wired copy protections were not necessary but I don't see any other solution right now.
Cool.
We'll just plug in the atari joystick and use it to break the encryption easily.
Behold the power of the mighty Atari joystick.
See a presentation of it in this uncrackable encrypted DVD , Dough !!!
isn't this the same TPM that was said to make computing more secure for the user?
Nobody believed it, and everybody assumed that it was going to be yet another copy protection and crippling scheme.
Now we know the sceptics were right.
The only reason that I don't mod my xbox 360 and pirate games is that I want to play online, and in the past M$ has banned consoles that are flashed/modded etc. As long as there are broke ass comp sci students who want to play video games, there will be video game piracy.
Orbis terrarum est non altus satis
I was under the impression that DirecTV's most recent encoing technique has yet to be broken. If so, then why whould this not have the same chance?
Cryptography 101 says that if you have ANY encryption scheme where Alice, Bob, and Eve are all the same person, it just won't work. The thing about marketing claims like this--and it is a marketing claim, doubt it not--is that if it is cracked, their entire business falls apart rather quickly.
You would have thought that any company involved in any measure of cryptography would have read Bruce Schneier. Wanna take bets on how long it takes before this scheme is cracked?
There is a glaring hole in the "TPM fixes everything" thing, as with every other piracy "solution". This time, it's called DMA.
A game or other program could license itself to a particular piece of hardware, given that that particular piece of hardware (the motherboard) has a cryptochip. How does a program then verify that it is only running on that particular hardware? It sounds like, from the article, the ploy is to encrypt part of the game program (or all of it) with the onboard TPM's public key, so that only the motherboard with that particular key can decrypt the game. Part of the registration or installation process would be to contact the vendor and obtain the part of the program in question, encrypted for your particular TPM.
That's great, but (and I love the word 'but' when referring to someone's Genius Plan to Implement DRM)...the game has to live in RAM unencrypted, or it would be too slow to play. In this case, I can make a specialized PCI/PCIe card whose sole purpose is to dump RAM. It will just DMA read all available memory and put it on its own 4GB compactflash card or some such. As soon as the unencrypted game hits my RAM, I'll have it to do with as I please. If the motherboard implements an IOMMU? I'll just hit my RAM with compressed air and freeze it, then read the bits out and hack as I please.
DRM won't work because its trust metric is screwed up. It basically says, "I trust that I'm going to run on particular hardware
The Right Reverend K. Reid Wightman,
I'm going to spare myself the trouble of actually making a point and instead point out (zing!) that they probably forgot about Starforce and how that turned out.
"Let's face it, it's a good story. Accuracy would kill it."
You'd think that someone who has made as much money as this guy would rise above pettiness like whether there are some people out there who haven't paid for computer games. How can you be this (apparently) successful and still have that kind of resentment against people who are much less well off than you. What a loser.
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
actually, tpm is just an re-branding with some additional features of the old palladium...
oh, and for those who thnik "cool i can encrypt faster!", sorry for you, but those chip an't cryptographic accellerators...
all work is passed to cpu/gpu/whatever (yeah, because the real encryption is BETWEEN DEVICES, not between computers or what....)
Of course there is: Start > Control Panel > Add/Remove Programs, select the program in question, and click Remove.
You could change the run-as information manually, but then the game would treat this as a damaged installation, use UAC to request elevation, and reassign the group. If you cancel instead of allowing, the game alerts you of this and quits instead of starting the game.
" a new stealth encryption chip called TPM will 'absolutely stop piracy of gameplay'"
... 09-f9-11-etc....
[Shrug] What good is that for people like me who won't pirate a game, but won't buy and play any game that has restrictive DRM either? (Requirement for a network connection for validation, revalidation for change in hardware, etc.)
" 'uncrackable by people on the internet and by giving away passwords'"
Uh huh. Apparently he hasn't thought of a debugger, virtual machine, soldering iron, or logic analyzer as a possibility.
And please don't forget that you are handing the lock and the keys for the lock to the person so that they can unlock and play the game. It may be awkward, but here's ALWAYS a way.
As others have mentioned
These guys need to spend less time time and money trying to sell snake oil that will only annoy their genuine customers and not stop the pirates at all.
They said this when adobe introduced hardware devices referred to as dongles which photoshop would actively check against on a regular basis (and thus photoshop would not function without it).
The result? Crackers removed the dongle code from photoshop. Somehow I think the same thing will happen here.
"Hex, Bugs, and Rockn'Roll"
If you can dodge a wrench, you can dodge a ball.
The comments are pretty retarded. Do you really think these guys are so stupid to do it in software???
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Next-Generation_Secure_Computing_Base
It will be done in hardware and to crack it you'd either have to:
a) work inside amd / intel
b) have a really good microscope and a lot of patience looking for key inside billions of gates on the chip. And I'm not sure if there's even a way to open chip without breaking its structure...
-----There are only two-three competitors, intel and AMD and sort-of VIA. They would cross license the same TPM core. Only these companies would be allowed to add entries to the public key database. Game companies would wait until all new x86 CPUs sold for at least 2 years had a TPM module. By this point, if you had an older chip without one, you could upgrade for less than $50. At this point, the games would be TPM only.
" So the game software on the disc is encrypted
with the same key world wide? "
---No. The game software on the disc would include base libraries and all graphical/sound ect resources. The core executable, including the game's 3d engine, would have to be downloaded from a server run by a game company. (or more likely, run by a reliable third party). That server would encrypt the executable using the public key for the TPM in your PC. Your TPM would decrypt the executable and place it in a protected region of memory that no software but low level OS components can access.
---Enough bits would be used that a brute force approach to crack the encryption would take longer than the heat death of the universe.
----Console game protection stops most copying
I bet it takes some teenybopper with an attitude and a soldering gun about a week to bypass the chip.
And I hate to make an ad hominem attack, but you have to think a guy with a name like "Nolan Bushnell" was born to be the hopeless dick in Revenge of the Nerds 7...the one where a company president makes a stupid observation and has it jammed up his ass sideways by a bunch of misfits who build machines that rival Cray supercomputers in their parents' basements and whack off a lot.
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
I proclaim the end of Atari...
Then tell your imaginary friend to tell Sony to give people full and unfettered access to the GPUs they paid a sizable amount of money for.
/. -- the Free Republic of technology.
'if you can watch it and you can hear it, you can copy it.'
Ahhh so he was lying because i can watch video games, i can hear video games, so therefore by his own words i must be able to copy it!
Nolan has not had a good idea since Chuck E Cheese. I imagine there is a StarWars esque bar where where all the stellar tech geezers hang out, drinking retro-tech Kool-Aid and toasting to their latest bad ideas. "Hey Woz, the US festival sounds like a great idea, Get your wife to handle the tickets!"
Some kind of Secure Hardware Environment is inevitable. A combination of identity (which cost $$$, so is not disposable), network verification in realtime, and proprietary hardware can make this work. You will be able to copy a game, but you won't be able to make it run for very long. The only thing TPM lacks is a way of automatically generating "patches" of a game once a day or more often. The program's author should be able to obfuscate faster than the users can hack. This combined with the attestation facilities of TPM will make copy protection obsolete. It will be replaced by execution protection.
So, basically they want to use the TPM chip as a dongle integrated on your motherboard. That sounds great! So, when I replace my motherboard I have the privilege of either begging the manufacturer for another license or buying a new copy of the game. At least the dongles could be moved from computer to computer. Of course, that still seems rediculous since I'm buying a game, not a $2000+ piece of software...
The way I see it, there's casual piracy and there's professional piracy. The casual stuff any average joe can do in his own home. The more professional kind of piracy, average joe leaves it up to the pro's and can buy the media in street stalls.
So long as we have players that can accept physical media created by end-users, there will be no end to professional piracy. Even if it's enormously complicated, somebody will figure it out and can convert from whatever hyper-protected format there is to the new physical media. And if we talk about online distribution, there's not even physical media involved.
The only way to truly make piracy so inconvenient that it's more trouble than it's worth is to go the route the consoles did with making the hardware crippled so that it requires too many hacks for the average person to deal with. No way is the average person going to risk breaking their console with a mod chip that may or may not work.
As a customer, while I have a dislike for the fragility of physical media, I do appreciate the ability to share. Pure electronic distribution represents both the biggest challenge for piracy and for legitimate consumers. If I purchase a game electronically, I'll be hard-pressed to transfer the rights to a new console, let alone loan it out to a friend when I'm done. If I rent a movie on the Xbox, I can't bring it to a friend's house without bringing the Xbox whereas a movie from Netflicks can be borrowed, carried, played as many times in as many places as I want before it's returned.
On a platform such as the PC, I would imagine it would still be possible to hack things like Steam, creating installers that don't need to phone home. But on locked down platforms like the Xbox, I would imagine this is pretty much impossible.
We all know the real reason for this, of course. Right now, customers can share games after they're done, sell them to someone else, whatever. The publishers see this s robbery and will do their damnedest to stop resale. With electronic distribution, after I'm done playing a game it still sits on the hard drive. If my friend wants to play it, tough shit, he can buy his own copy for full retail price, thank you very much.
I'm not going to say this presents an impossible dilemma, I just think that it means the pirates will have to work harder, get more creative. I see the pirates as a positive force because if the publishers raise the price beyond the inconvenience of circumventing the DRM, people will be more inclined to pirate than pay the outrageous price. Lower the price to a reasonable level, most people will see piracy as taking more time than it's worth. I know of what I speak because I've seen the same pattern with my friends. When we were in high school or college, we had no money but more free time so it was worth it to pirate. Now that we're out and have jobs and the like, it takes too much time to pirate when something is a reasonable fee and we have the money to pay for it.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
I still giggle like a schoolgirl whenever someone says "dongle disk encryption."
(Tee hee!)
The real issue is whether running your own software on a device you purchased is "stealing". Now if you were only *renting* your PS3, I could understand the seller getting upset with you running your own code. But people have to wake up and realize they are not really "buying" a device when they can only use it in the manner designated by the "seller". My solution is to campaign for the laws against false advertising to be enforced against such transactions.
Hack the game progam, not the chip. Remove or bypass the code that checks with the TPM chip. This is not a new idea. It's been done for a very long time. The technique and counters are well understood.
Regarding the title "PR department at Atari is having a heart attack"; not really!
:)
Nolan Bushnell may have founded the *original* Atari, but he left in 1979 (having sold it to Warner Communications in 1976), and I see no indication that he has anything to do with the present-day company.
Besides which, the modern "Atari" is effectively just a brand purchased and used by Infogrames which has no real relationship or business continuity with the original Atari (which split into Atari Corp. and Atari Games in 1984- both streams are now effectively defunct).
The PR department at Atari probably couldn't give a toss!
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
Aren't gamers the ones who are constantly upgrading their hardware to have the latest and fast machines? We are talking about game software meant for PCs here right? I'm not a gamer, for several reasons:
1) I'm a gamer addict, and my family is more important to me - so I abstain (mostly),
2) Game developers are more evil than Bill Gates and Monkey Boy combined (if that is even possible),
3) motion sickness,
4) other reasons I'm not telling.
All I see this doing is causing a market opportunity for:
a) game pirates,
b) new game software companies,
c) hired assassins,
d) all of the above,
e) other.
And generally pissing off your client base. It's generally a bad idea to crap where you eat, but there seems to be an abnormal desire to do this among multimedia corporate heads.
So how much is that dogsh** in the window, anyway?
I think in a lot of the copy protection drm discussion people just think industry and not the people within the industry. A lot of insider knowledge is leaked by people within the industries on both hardware and software sides.
This is what will keep things going, the fact that Industry has to depend on people like you and me who have other ideas and priorities beyond locking things down and making money.
You've obviously never heard of Virtual Game Station, or emulators in general, then. Virtual Game Station was important at the time because it emulated a current gen console on current gen PCs. (well, okay, Macintoshes ... this was back when RISC was still king of the hill).
... I know, you're asking, 'what about the DMCA?' Well, oddly enough, that was passed in 1998, and the complaint wasn't filed 'til 1999 ... but Sony never brought the anti-circumvention provisions.
In the end, Sony bought Virtual Game Station from Connectix to keep the Playstation emulator off the market.
If the Wii is really as underpowered as a people claim, and the controlers are just bluetooth, I'm surprised that I haven't seen emulators for it yet. (and before people say that'd be legal, remember that the US Supreme Court said that it'd just create more market for the games (and peripherals, being they're bluetooth), and the Court of Appeals declared that reverse engineering is fair use
(note -- I'm not a lawyer, and I have no idea if any new laws apply, and it's likely that current manufacturers would try to claim relief under the DMCA)
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
The fact that the comercial grade tools you are used to cost you a lot of money doesn't speak to the base cost of the minimum necessary tools to hack your system.
A single PCI/PCIe/etc "hobbiest" grade board with an FPGA on can be trivially programmed to snapshot running memory to an external serial interface (where another computer will record it) triggered by an entirely real-world event (watch the birdie while I push this button that shorts these two pins).
The fact of the matter is that "back in the day" these sorts of debuggers were a dime a dozen because they were needed. Now days they are rarely needed, and when they are needed they need to be subtle, so they are pricey.
As soon as this TPM buffoonery, or anything like it, becomes common place super obvious and cheap versions of this sort of thing will be back.
Hell, on top of all that there is the recent work that tells us that volatile RAM turns out not to be that volatile after all and you can practically "just reboot" to get a snapshot of memory if you prevent the POST. Hardware doesn't get much cheaper than "what you already have".
Get over your delusions. Whatever your software is, it isn't secure from the guy with the screwdriver standing over the case, and it _NEVER_ will be.
You best _PRAY_ that your companies busineess model doesn't _DEPEND_ on TPM, or at least you should keep your Resume up to date.
Innocent people shouldn't be forced to pay for inferior software development.
--"Code Complete" Microsoft Press
you know... growing up i dont remember hearing much about copyrighted material. to me it was like plagiarism. imo, if you buy it you should be able to do what you want with it.. even share it on the internet. why.. cause you paid for it.. and its yours. im sure its been said over and over but thats how it is right... you bought your car.. its yours no one really cares what you do to it. you bought your house.. .no ones going to care what modifications you really do ... oh no he's bringing in the green chair.. thats illegal!.. pft. if i buy something and i want other people to have it.. should be my choice. and if they say they're losing money they're wrong. they're not losing anything. they're just not making money. so to lose money you have to have it to begin with. and if i was some guy who made some program and someone posted it on the net.. removing any registration what so ever so some joe can download it and use it for free. i really wouldnt care. mainly becuase someones getting use out of it. and its getting publicity ...
but if they really care about piracy why not make everything have to connect to a database online. and see if the person registered that software n what not. but then again theres always ways around that. so why dont they just realise its going to happen...
All it does is drives the price up on hardware since it requires an extra component. It also increase the cost of development since they'll need to employ a 3rd party secure package to prevent people from copying it. This will also drive the price of the software. With higher cost, less people will buy and game company will make even less money. And piracy ensues. Don't get too greedy.
I'll save some space on the /. signature section for TPM's private key, just as if it was 2007 and earlier and we had X-boxes or other "uncrackable" devices....
I see no indication from the article that Bushnell is speaking on behalf of- or indeed has *anything* whatsoever to do with the modern "Atari" (which has little to do with the now-defunct original anyway, being simply a division of Infogrames that got the rights to the name).
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
Game consoles since xbox already have this "uber TPM" chip. and they ALL have it. Guess what you can still pirate any game with a bit of hardware modding (just search GTAIV . torrent)
I proclaim the end of Atari.
won\t this just create a new market for motherboards without the chips? you can't force manufacturers to put these things in. Anyway, game piracy is usually done by making the original software think that its legit, so I don't see what chip on the Mobo can do (not that I'm a hardware expert or anything)
"As soon as the installed base of the TPM hardware chip gets large enough, we will start to see revenues coming from Asia and India at a time when before it didn't make sense." Loved this line. Implying players from Asia don't pay for their game. However there is underestimation of the extent of the problem in some countries in Europe as well.
"Sum Ergo Cogito"
The TPM website says absolutely about this. What are they hiding??!!!1!11!!
-- haaz.
-- haaz.
Easy, just make the game it protects so bad no one bothers to crack it.
and your faith in your intellegence leads others to believe that there is no intellegence at all, only faith...
Remember that?
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"The worst dictatorships were those that required their own governing logic on every computing node."
What's going to happen to the players you lost? Those folks might replace their video game consumption with some other consumable entertainment (card gaming, meatspace RPGs, television, recreational substances) or an improvement in their standard of living, and become a little less interested in what's going on in video gaming. No media powerhouse wants their market to shrink from fashionable to otaku.
Now you'll also convert some freeloaders to paying players, but I think a lot of people will decide that their money is better spent on living and decline to be part of the video gaming community.
In using TPM on your next blockbuster you might also steer people to your TPM-free competitors, some of whom will buy the game just because you're a dick and the competitor isn't.
That said, I think the real value of TPM in gaming will be seen in improving gameplay by blacklisting cheaters, farmers and other undesirables.
/. -- the Free Republic of technology.
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Atari founder Nolan Bushnell said that a new stealth encryption chip called TPM will ' "absolutely" stop piracy of gameplay' at least until pirates figure out a way of circumventing it. Mr. Bushnell also stated that he calculates that protection from piracy will last at least 3 weeks, while rotalties for the use of the chip will amount to $100,000 per game per week.
Speaking of imagination... where is Atari now? Owned by a much larger company and used as a shield against lawsuits (it was made by Atari, no Vivendi, so you can only sue Atari)? Yeah. Good on ya.
Yeah, because reducing your market to the 1% of computers that have such a chip is a classy move.
For his next trick he will probably suggest writing more games for the Dreamcast. There is a tiny market for that too.
For those of you too young to care, Nolan Bushnell was indeed the founder of Atari, back in the 70's. He was crazy and irresponsible back then, and at age 65 his demeanor has only worsened.
His list of achievements includes selling Atari to his arch-rival (and equally unfit) Jack Tramiel of Commodore, after the gaming crash left the company in dire straits. Then he followed it up by ruining his restaurant chain Chuck E. Cheese's, by leveraging its assets and stock value to fund some of his ridiculous projects that inevitably bombed, taking down the restaurant chain with them.
He's spent the last few years trying to sell touch-screen kiosk "solutions" to the wrong crowd. It's good that he tries to push new technology, but he seems to have a complete disregard for sustainability. He got lucky with his Catalyst capital funding group, but that's really just another name for "corporate loan shark".
I don't value a single word that comes out of this man's mouth. TPM chips have been around for a few years now, and they have yet to be used to secure cheap, stinky games. Worst case, if/when they do secure the desktop, some teenager with a soldering iron will be advertising the cure for $50 a pop, just like console modchips today.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
"The more you tighten your grip, Tarkin, the more star systems will slip through your fingers."
An imaginary God makes more sense than calling machine ownership theft. I can say that my imaginary God encourages people to share but you can derive that from humanistic logic alone. Our "thou shalt not steal" friend should be aware that most religions also encourage people to share and the most likely one for a person in the western world has the miracle of bread and fishes as an example of God's bounty. Because we can copy knowledge and entertainment and these things help to reduce human suffering, wouldn't that God endorse and encourage it?
Who do you work for.
I will ensure I take nothing from your company, even if you're selling it. And that should suit you: there will be no piracy. 'course sales will be nil too, but then again, no loss to me.
This explains it pretty well...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8QuptMSA1rs
Who has made plenty of bad decisions, and made some claim a few years ago that was also full of shit.
Atari bombed in the 80's, and chuck e cheese's almost went bankrupt.
I wouldn't take his words so seriously. He likes to think he's still in the loop.
I'll be interested to see how these attacks go. My guess is that people will get used to locking software to a machine and not really care. The main people who will lose out are people who make a lot of money on software piracy.
What I hope that this will do is get rid of a lot of the half assed security measures that only get in the way of legitimate users.
Which games are going to volunteer to limit their customer base first to 10% of the total market, 50% of the total market, 75% of the total market?
I can just imagine that hardware upgrade cycles are completely wild. Blu-Ray isn't being simultaneously mass adopted, Vista isn't being simultaneously mass adopted? So who's going to bet total expected revenue of a game which simultaneously requires serious hardware upgrades for the game to work?
Not only would you be adding significant 3-figure hardware costs to the price of the game, but you'd also be assuming *severe* limitations in the size of the purchasing customer base.
Somebody in EA would just be begging to be fired after the latest Madden Football saw a 50% revenue drop.
For this DRM to stick, to be slowly adopted, some industry players are going to have to undertake extremely significant serious revenue risks.
"From DNA to P2P, we are all Copycats now. Go Go Copycat Power! Copycat Powers activate! Form of, a Copycat." --monxrtr
hey hey hey Jack Tramiel was not unfit. He created the Amiga. Commodore's CEO and other officers were unfit and bankrupted the company in the middle of being the 2nd best seller of computers in the world.
This seems like a good spot to post "Insanity = Doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.".
Although . . . they keep doing this over and over, and every time, I keep expecting them to get smarter.
Maybe "Really Crazy = Expecting the insane to get better."?
Pug
An Invisible Entity of Vast Power whose existence must be taken on faith alone: Liberal Media
1) Replace a hard drive with a larger one.
2) Replace a motherboard with a later generation one.
3) Replace a laptop with a later model, installing the old hard drive into the new machine.
In all three cases, reactivation is always required. Which means that my long years of buying Windows licenses to have "alongside" Linux on my desktop and notebook (yes, I have original disks and licenses for each version of windows from Windows 3.0 through Windows XP, even though I'm a Linux user) ended with Windows XP.
Once I realized what a huge PITA it was going to increasingly be to keep a Windows installation intact/licensed, I just gave up on gaming and Windows altogether. In combination with the copy protection in games, it just wasn't worth it anymore. Now I haven't played a game in three years (I used to have a dedicated gaming machine and stacks and stacks of retail box PC games) and Microsoft and the gaming industry have simply lost a customer.
I have better things to do with my time.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
Nearly all the ideas on Judeo-Christian religion were 'copied' or 'stolen' from previous cultures and religions.
I think the only original idea was that there was but a single god who did it all.
I prefer a distributed religion myself...
Blar.
LOL at this prick, So it's a chip, so what? Never seen a modchip before? PS3 was said to be "uncrackable" but that's been done, so what this chip can protect against engineers like myself??? GET REAL ATARI!!!! A chip is not a solution, just something you can take to your bosses claiming it is a definite solution and get a fat payrise. You make me sick. And yes I do buy retail games actually *ahem* lol
All your base are belong to us.
Wanted: witty unique signature. Must be willing to relocate.
It isn't illegal for them to say, just to stick to it. Magnuson-Moss Warranty Act says, among other things, that in order for an after market modification to void a warranty, they (the company) must prove that the modification was the direct cause of the damage. For example, opening a hard drive to tweak the speed (or whatever) can void a warranty when the dust you let in damages the heads. Putting Linux on your computer, and then the screen cracks because of a faulty hinge can not void your warranty. This whole argument started big time when HP said printer warranties would be void if you used non-HP ink. HP (mostly) lost that case.
A different issue though is that if you are using a mod chip to cheat in an Xbox live game, they can kick you for being disruptive to their service, but that is more closely related to copyright violation. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnuson-Moss_Warranty_Act
Want Big Business out of government? Take away the incentive and start by getting government out of big business!
Trusted Computing Platform Alliance FAQ, as of 2003. This is ooooold news.
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs
So whoever creates a board without this chip will take over the whole market within a year?
and that's enough to foresee a winner ;)
considering how poor vacation time is in North America, I think we should enforce that law too. Perhaps then people would get some well deserved rest :D.
As the island of our knowledge grows, so does the shore of our ignorance.
Throw enough effort at breaking TPM and it will fall. For example if it came to it you could use a scanning tunneling electron microscope to read the actual circuitry that makes up the TPM chip and charge stored in the devices memory. Although if you have the TPM chips scematic and a logic anyliser that shouldn't be a problem.
Am I wrong, or did someone immediately patent using TPM for DRM after a Microsoft conference? There was a story about it and everything, because the guy who patented it wanted to make sure no one was allowed to use it for that.
Let's see... A little Googling says it's Lucky Green who did that but I'm not seeing a good story with details. Maybe this will do, though.
... that he had found Elvis alive and well, that he had adopted a unicorn and started trade negotiations with alpha centuri 5 (during which he realized the moon really is made of cheese)
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
Your assertion that a lack of impenetrable copyright protection equals a loss of profit for the company generating the product protected is false.
In fact, I'd go as far as to say that companies, even in the IP field, do not need copyright to flourish.
Take a look at The Digital Art Auction. Basically, customers bid on a product, stating how much they'd be willing to pay for its release. Then, at a predetermined time when the producer reaches some number X at which he'd make Y profit, he releases the product and charges anyone who bit at or above X, $X. These successful bidders get a copy of the product, and those who bid below get nothing, though the game is now likely public domain so they could get a copy if they wanted.
The idea here is that even though freeloaders can get a copy upon release, if they don't bid what they actually would pay for the product, the product wouldn't be released (or at least, wouldn't be released as soon).
There are a bunch of different ideas as to how this could be done, but suffice it to say that a creative marketplace without copyright can exist where everyone gets paid.
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs
You couldn't be more wrong, I'm sorry to say.
The Amiga came about after Tramiel had jumped ship. It was actually being developed by Amiga Corporation. Tramiel wanted the Amiga technology, but not their staff/company, he was going to lay them off after plundering their nest egg, so Amiga steered clear of Commodore at first. In fact, Amiga was under contract with Atari, but when the Amiga team found out that Tramiel was trying to buy Atari, they hated/feared him and his tactics so much that they struck a deal with Commodore to bail them out of the Atari contract.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
The TPM is a few years old now, it's "Trusted Computing" and the TPM is the Fritz chip.
The TPM works by register cookies, stored in OS memory, used to do privileged tasks. It's simply another facility, just fancier now. It even creates a "Memory Curtain" thingamabob that looks impressive (protected memory, like we have now; one step further, but we can do this with system managed memory and SMI).
The TPM just requires you get into the OS itself with your own driver (or exploit the ATi driver), and then hijack the TPM cookie. Then you can completely disable the TPM protections, having it do the bidding of whatever. It's easy enough for a retard to defeat.
Support my political activism on Patreon.
Bastards... Keep underestimating us. You're just wasting more of your money. LOL
Seriously though, this is why games cost so much... paying for development of stuff that will stop us from using the software we buy.
I work at a major manufacturer of processors and motherboards (rhymes with "win hell"). We have to disable TPM via jumper to get half the other features to work -- and I'm talking board level features, such as power management and the like.
Folks,
forget duplicating cars. Think duplicating microprocessors.
A source inside HP told me that the variable cost of x86 chips was about $10 each. That is, the price to make one more. This didn't count any of the R&D or any other coding, just the duplication cost.
What if you could plug a chip into a slot on a board, and after a few hours, and were able to make your own?
Anyway, we need a new analogy. I bought a buggy whip a few years ago; they're still available.
And I didn't buy it because I wanted transport. I wanted a buggy whip to play with.
In the film "Other People's Money" Danny DiVito made some excellent points about how capitalism and greed have some good uses. However, he was wrong about the buggy whip being extinct.
hanzie
********* sig: If you don't like the law, get filthy stinking rich, and buy a better one.
I continue to be irked by the fact that 3rd parties increasingly have more control over my PC than I do.
In what way do these 3rd parties control your PC, pray tell?
WRT the TPM: You can assert ownership of your TPM any time you like, reset it, wipe it, or even use it for it's intended purpose (secure key storage).
DRM is an evil trojan horse tech, from big brother (tm). It can be used to store encrypted data in RAM that only system software can access. Therefore, if big brother wants to spy on you, he will gather information and store it in this protected space, then transfer the data through encrypted network communication to Borg central.
Although the TPM is definitely a strong platform, it suffers from the same old problems that genral Trusted Computing Bases (TCB) suffer. One very big of those problems (that is yet an open issue) is the communication between the untrusted environment with the TPM. What prevents an attacker, for instance, from setting up a virtual machine (i.e. VMWARE style) that emulates the TPM or even performs a MITM attack?
So true, so true. We can already see the console industry suffering a horrific backlash from peddling the most heavily DRMed hardware on the planet.
It's hard to see how they can survive much longer with sales like these?
Proposed soundtrack for this article. http://frontalot.com/media.php/325/MC_Frontalot_SFTF_(01)_Secrets_From_The_Future.mp3
This is just history repeating when Intel brought out the Pentium III with it's PSN (Processor Serial Number) they claimed the same things. However, most people either didn't buy the chip or just disabled it. Intel then removed it from future versions.
People will just find out what motherboards have this on them and won't buy them. Because demand will lessen for those products the vendors will be forced to remove the chip.
As I expected most comments were from people going on about rights and how they'll break the code. Guess what, the biggest pirates are in Asia where most content is pirated. Most of the popular games cost 5 to 25 mill to produce. If piracy hit a 100% those titles which most people want to play would go away. If piracy hit 0% because of more secure security then the number of big titles would increase. Where's the downside to more security? Can't get it for free? BS argument since it cost money to produce so all you are doing by pirating is making some one else pay for your entertainment. More security means more entertainment and maybe Asia will finally be forced to carry part of the load. There more and more elaborate games made today not because the good fairy is making them but because of profits. Piracy doesn't create demand sales do.
They said the same thing about DVD. About Blue-Ray. About Securom and Safedisc and Macrovision. About your XBox and your Playstation. About the ECU controller in your car.
If anyone is an ignorant asshat, it's you. History is on my side in this argument. And if you had half an ounce of brains you'd understand that a system is fundamentally flawed when someone wants to hide content from you, but also hands you the keys.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
I could only hope. Then I wouldn't have to work on the sabbath.
-Daniel
So now we have to mod-chip our PC's? That's more of an annoyance than anything else.
I also like the line "Cannot be cracked by people on the internet." Giggle. THE INTERNET!!!!
Copy protection makes the stuff more fragile.
Fragile thing break more often.
People stop using things which break.
The game industry went through this twenty years ago and copy protection went away until a new generation thought they had a new idea.
"We tried to kill the games industry in the 80's and now we're back to finish the job."
Leela: "Is all the work done by children?" Alien: "No, not the whipping."
More than once... (see sig)
09F91102 no, 455FE104 nope, F190A1E8 uh-uh, 7A5F8A09 that's not it, C87294CE no. Ah! 452F6E403CDF10714E41DFAA257D313F.
> Bushnell thinks that piracy of movies and music, however, is probably unstoppable because "if you can watch it and you can hear it, you can copy it."
How about if you can decrypt it you can copy it?
Isn't it decrypted? Well the technology would have to be seen.
I'd say give it a week, maybe a quarter. Crackers are awe-inspiring, and I have no doubt that someone internal to the design of this 'trick' will take part in the process of cracking it.
> Want to KILL the commercial game industry? Implement this!
Yeah, the DRM certainly killed the Nintendo, the Super Nintendo, the Genesis, the Nintendo 64, the Sony PlayStation, the PlayStation 2, the GameCube, the Xbox, the Xbox 360, the PlayStation 3, and the Wii. Good point.
Hackintosh.
In what world would the end of piracy mean that whoever pirated the games will buy them? Games are horribly expensive these days, even for those that makes good money. At least here in Sweden. What games companies need is to give people more reason to actually freaking buy something. Like higher quality, better products, and more competitive pricing. I personally think that Steam is a great step in the right direction. Heck, remove the stupid little DRM stuff they have and it would still work just as well. It's just about instant, easy to use, and actually better then pirating. So I don't mind the cost (especially since I pay in USD which makes it way cheaper).
Who cares I have found the ultimate game, it's called life.
Actually, I'd say that if the hypervisor is cracked enough to allow Linux access to 3D, then it's also probably cracked enough that it could be subverted for use as a tool to bypass the DRM on ordinary PS3 games, or assuming it's responsible for the DRM in the first place, cracking the hypervisor would probably mean you're already finished.
Perusing the info IBM supplies, I come to the conclusion that if the hypervisor is cracked by discovering the "Hardware Root of Secrecy" which is a kind of master key embedded in the PS3's CPU, then it's "game over" for DRM on the PS3.
One possible way of finding that key requires a lot of work with an electron microscope, I'd guess. There are others, but they also require a lot of exotic hardware, know-how, and hard work.
When you compare the DRM on the PS3 and on MS consoles, it kind of puts the STI initiative which invented the Cell CPU used in the PS3 in perspective: Sony gets good DRM by picking IBM's brain, and IBM gets a powerful CPU whose development is backed by a popular consumer device by "picking" Sony's market share.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
That would be sweet to be able to tell your boss "I'd love to come in, but it's punishable by death."
A blog about stuff.
Look at China folks: the future is there. You will find it about as difficult to *buy* a video game as it is to buy a buggy whip that costs $100 million to produce. There will be no companies stupid enough to offer them for sale, just as there are essentially no companies in China which *sell* consumer software. Instead, you'll be allowed to rent games and little bits of games (a Sword of Slashdotting, +50% experience for a week, your wedding hosted in the MMORPG of your choice for only $69.99).
Then the pirate enforcement will move inwards, against business partners and developers, who are the only folks that can cause the only problem that matters: a full leak of the server source code. (We are well past the time where a group can just remake the server architecture for an AAA game using the client and observation of the retail game as a design spec.)
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.
This guy could be the next Thomas Watson.
Not to mention the fact that at one time the content must be in memory unencrypted. Grab a memory snapshot, and copy that, and you got the unencrypted content. Eventually something has to be read, the only uncompromisable content is the one that you can't read, therefore is useless.
In order to work, the game producer is going to have to rely on gamers buying new hardware incorporating the chip, and at the same time exclude the vast share of the market that doesn't have the chip. Either that or produce software that allows it to work with or without the chip. So either the producers lose a load of revenue, or produce something that potentially bypasses the chip security. Why bother ?
Used for drive encryption on some higher end lap tops and hasnt really appeared on desktop mobo's yet. TFA read like something a clueless non-IT pro would come out with, not a seasoned computing veteran who kickstarted the whole videogame generation. PS: Apparently you cant copy DVD's - or so I read in 1997.
I mean, really. They cracked the iPhone in what, a week? Three weeks later we had a software hack for even the tech-stupid or non-owners-of-soldering-irons.
The article mentioned a "Private Key". Does that mean they're basically implementing RSA? As in, you can't play our game unless you decrypt it first? If that's the case, whoever designed it wasn't thinking. Sure, we have no way to figure out the PUBLIC key that it was encrypted with, but since whoever's been putting their chips in my motherboard has kindly GIVEN me the key I need...
Hmmmm.... I give them two weeks to crack the core and two months to have a fully cloned, cracked and hacked solution.
Of course they name the chip after the worse Star Wars Prequel....
The
Phantom
Menace
Stick it to the man....crack that shyte.
Atari Founder Proclaims the End of Gaming Piracy
I hope he at least had a "Mission Accomplished!" banner behind him.
It's got something to do with hard-disk and folder encryption. so the stuff that's on my pc can only be opened by the user who made it and then only on my pc. I keep it turned off (The chip can be disabled from the BIOS) for the sake of performance (my motherboard decrypting / encrypting every access to my hard-disk!!!?) and convenience (multi-boot). Would they require this feature to be always turned on. That would be unpleasant to say the least
If you can net $10 per copy sold, and 30 million people play your game, but only 10% will actually pay for it, you put your game budget somewhere under $30 million, not $300 million. To make a game for $300 million and then bake in onerous anti-piracy measures to get the other 90% to pay is just dumb. (hint: you won't be able to get them to pay no matter what)
Nolan Bushnell is on the board of Wave Systems, who makes these chips. (Or at least he used to be.)
(I used to work at Wave myself.)
Is this the same TPM that's introduced by Intel's TXT?
Um...
wow...if someone's using TXT to enforce DRM, we're hosed.
This Paper discusses several ways to compromise your TPM. It also notes that secure boot infrastructure like Intel TXT and the AMD counterpart (when used with an appropriate boot loader) effectively prevents the attacks.
"This mission is too important to allow you to jeopardize it." -- HAL
I wonder if any of those TPM chips have faulty PKI keys because of the recent problem with openssl generated keys http://wiki.debian.org/SSLkeys this not only effects SSL keys but all key types that were generated using openssl not just on Debian, (this includes RSA and DSA keys)
Slashdot really need a way to prevent idiots from getting mod points.
Modern copyright is theft of culture from everyone and it retards the progress of the useful arts and sciences.
Until some cracker get board and decides to crack it anyway.
If ure going to buy a new motherboard in the future, then dont buy a Mobo with this Chip in it. also yea it will be cracked within a few weeks
Is this enough of a Computer Stupidity to include in RinkWorks' Computer Stupidities site?
I honestly think the gaming industry really needs to consider pricing, as well, as an incentive to get people to buy instead of copy (particularly in parts of the world with low per-capita incomes, like most of Asia). There's what, about 3 Billion people in Asia? (I think I remember seeing statistics that there about 1B in China, 1B in India/Pakistan, and about 1B in all the rest of Asia). The thing is, there's a lot of people in Asia, but a lot of them don't make very much money. (Granted, a lot of them probably don't even have computers or know how to use them, but I would bet that out of that 3 Billion, you would probably have close to 1/2 Billion computer users; and, the number must be going up all the time). Maybe, though, you could get them to pay $3 for a game?
Doesn't sound like much, but if your game has enough appeal, and you get, say 30 million people to buy a copy of your game, that's almost 100 million dollars. I don't really know if you could get people to even give you $3 bucks, but I figure you'll have an easier time with that, than with $60. Also, if you are willing to only see $2-3 of revenue per copy, you might be able to experiment with other revenue models, like advertising supported games where the user doesn't pay for the game.