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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?
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
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!
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.
TPM = Trusted Platform Module.
The system creates a hash key based upon an analysis of the encrypted software and hardware combined together. If this matches a third party checksum, then the third party releases the decryption key to the encrypted software.
This would make sense for networked console games or PC's with broadband connections.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
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
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
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.
09-f9-11-02-9d-74-e3-5b-d8-41-56-c5-63-56-88-c0
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.
So now, crackers will actually have to buy the game and then dump the decrypted content. Atleast that guarantees another purchase.
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.