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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++;
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?
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 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.
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 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
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
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.
I for one won't buy a motherboard with a chip that "calls home" - too great a risk of invasion to privacy for my business. If the chip doesn't call home, it will be cracked in hours, not days.
Website Just Down For Me? Find out
It's important to remember that you only need 1% of people (or even 0.1%) to have the knowledge and inclination to perform these mods, if it allows them to make unencrypted copies of the data. All you need is a small group of dedicated hackers who generate cracked copies of games, and release these in the usual way (bit-torrent, etc.). Just as movie release groups have a lot of specialized knowledge and connections, thereby making copyright infringement trivially easy for the masses, so too will anti-TPM groups appear, who will trivialize this kind of circumvention for the masses.
TPM doesn't make copyright infringement impossible. It merely adds another layer of complexity for the hackers. Alas, hackers enjoy the challenge of breaking through these layers.
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.
whoops... here's the link for TPM & Apple ...
http://www.osxbook.com/book/bonus/chapter10/tpm/
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.
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.
...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.
My thoughts exactly, I'll be searching for motherboards that don't include a TPM chip. I don't pirate games, but I don't care to have unwelcome hardware on my motherboards.
Who do you work for? I want to be sure to avoid your products.
..... don't underestimate the resources of the truly hardcore.
"there's no reasonable way to hack it"
---- Booth was a patriot ----
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."
It won't prevent anyone from pirating once a hack has been found, because you can just create a virtual machine that is equivalent to a hardware hacked one on any platform you choose, and then run the pirated software on the virtual machine. The actual machine will never know about the actual software running in the VM.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
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,
Still, out of curiosity, I just had to check...
Nope. Doesn't stop piracy.
And they just lost another purchase -- I might have bought NWN because of the Linux port, but I'm not going to tolerate a complete lack of an offline mode, with no features to make up for it...
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
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.
In fact it just hit me that TPM will actually make it more attractive for large scale pirates. Whereas before they've had to compete with a lot of home users casually copying stuff, the professional for-profit pirate operations will get a boost from this by weeding out a lot of their competition if doing the copying becomes harder in any meaningful way.