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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++;
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
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.
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.
...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.
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,