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Ubisoft Steals 'No-CD Crack' To Fix Rainbow 6: Vegas 2
Ariastis writes "UbiSoft has long been against No-CD patches. Referring to them on their forums would get you warned or banned. But now, they have just officially released a patch for Rainbow 6: Vegas 2, which, when opened in a hex editor, can easily be identified as coming from the RELOADED scene group, not from UbiSoft programmers. A picture of hex analysis is shown in the story. See? Piracy isn't that bad! It saves you from having to code fixes for your own games! (Watch the drama on the Ubi Forums before it gets scrubbed clean.)"
Stealing the intellectual property of these crackers that they so rightfully deserve -- how could Ubisoft do such a thing?
On a serious note, is Ubisoft actually legally allowed to distribute these cracked executables, because they are of their own product?
Mind, I don't get why, because they would have the original source code anyway.
Perhaps I'm a bit silly thinking this, but I have a lot of respect for the majority of the cracking scene.
Time and time again they've always proved just how talented and resourceful they can be.
I say props to them! At the very least, Ubi should sack whatever middle-manager that decided to release this as an "official" patch or lazy programmer that decided to submit this rather than build a proper executable and give THEM a job instead. I've had more "official" patches from both Ubi and EA (And a few others) break stuff than dodgy, pirate hacks.
+1 IDisagreeSoHeMustBeATrollOrAnAstroturferOrAShill
They aren't "stealing" anything, the executable was theirs to begin with. If you spruce up my house with some fancy artwork it doesn't make it your house.
I bet this is just a case of a rogue programmer trying to meet a deadline. Instead of writing up his/her own fix, they tried to pass off RELOADED's work as their own. It passed QA and was released to prod. Congrats on the fine work form the RELOADED programmers!
I can already see the torrent of people coming in to call all slashdot users hypocrites for calling this stealing but defending "piracy" as not stealing and all that, so I figure I might as well clear this up as soon as possible:
Thing the first: Slashdot is not one person, it is many people, so it's not inconsistent for vocal members of the community to call this stealing but piracy not stealing.
Thing the second: "steals" is still a bad word here. "Steals credit" would be better, if anything, but I still think the wording is bad anyway.
Thing the third: most pirates at least hold to the moral ground of giving credit where credit is due, which is clearly not the case here.
Hopefully this will head off those silly comments. Eh, who am I kidding, it's Slashdot. I'll probably wake up to 50 of them. Oh well, I tried.
Remember, open source is free as in speech, not free as in bear.
It's not that they stole it, it's more that they couldn't be bothered to make an official one. .exe and checked it for irregularities or they'd have noticed the cracking group's moniker and removed it. That, plus it would have been easier to recompile a new one from the source they have.
I mean, when you think about it - what if that crack WAS dodgy? What if it had a time bomb in it that wiped out your hard drive after a certain date? I don't think for a second that Ubi disassembled the cracked
Of course, I trust the group but I know full well that if it DID have something dodgy in it, I'd be fully responsible for it and have to accept that it was my fault.
But in this case, Ubi could have been under some serious shit if such a thing had happened.
There's really no excuse, it's sheer laziness on their part.
+1 IDisagreeSoHeMustBeATrollOrAnAstroturferOrAShill
This is a No-CD crack, which has a legitimate use. If you lose your CD for instance. The hacking group in question hasn't stolen anything of Ubisoft's.
...Why is that, Ubisoft?
(1) You're posting an illegal crack that violates YOUR OWN RULES on piracy
(2) You stole someone else's crack. Couldn't bother making your own? Sheesh. Now THAT'S French for you!
This french surrender business and now this "whatever is retarded is french" is so obtuse!
It's like saying all americans are morons and deserve Bush.
I'll change my sig when I have the time...
Of course, I trust the group
why? Do you know who they are? where they are from? know the personally? You know who are current members of the groups, and what their motives are?
Personally I do not trust anonymous groups of coders on the internet who cannot be tracked down to run exes on my machine. If ubisoft format my hard drive, I have legal recourse against a known company. The same if my company trashes your machine. Your defence against some random group of kids on the internet is basically fuck all.
I'm surprised how much risk people expose their PC's to in order to avoid having a CD, or (more often) to get free games.
DRM-free indie games for the PC and Mac: Positech Games
Two wrongs don't make a right, dude.
What cracks me up (pun intended) is the fact that Ubisoft have been UTTER BASTARDS in the past. If you posted complaining about Starforce on their forums, their employees would accuse you of being a hacker, a pirate etc... People get banned for posting links to cracks. HAVE been banned for posting links to THIS VERY CRACK.
This priceless, and utterly UTTERLY hilarious. A major software company relying on a cracking group to fix their stupid issues that their choice of DRM caused.
The only way this could be ANY funnier is if it was Electronic Arts instead, and even that would be pushing it as Ubi's attitude toward their consumers in regards to DRM is a hundred times more offensive than I've ever seen EA be.
It's not stealing if the original programmers were not deprived of anything. Whether the good guys ("pirates") do it or the bad guys (the "content industry") do it, unauthorized copying is not stealing and never has been.
My turnips listen for the soft cry of your love
They created the no-CD patches to coincide with their "Blizzard Account" system which allows you to buy their games online and then download them. I'm assuming they wanted a consistent platform for all their users, and it doesn't exactly make sense to have someone purchase and download a game and then have to wait for the CD to arrive in the mail just to start it up.
Additionally, if you already own the game, you can enter your CD key on the site to gain the ability to download them directly from Blizzard.
Regardless of what support the company has given its costumers, remember that the crack was made to circumvent anti-piracy schemes.
There wouldn't be any need for anti-piracy schemes if people were trustworthy and didn't steal software.
People use pirated software -> companies lose money -> companies invest in trying to avoid illegitimate usage of their software -> copy-protection schemes are put in place -> problems with copy-protection schemes arise -> people who don't give a shit about the fact that the software was a result of an investment in both equipment, marketing and man hours still keep finding ways to pirate the software.
So everyone uses cracks to go around copy protection schemes when they're not supposed to, and then when that company uses that crack to fix a problem, everyone is outraged. So it's OK if you steal from a company, but it's NOT OK if a company uses, to fix their own product and provide the support everyone cries for, something that was made specifically to target that company's product making it easier to pirate.
You know, people have worked to develop the product. Money has been invested. It's a company, it's supposed to make a profit, not to create software out of pure charity.
And no, two wrongs don't make it a right, you're right when you said it. And everyone should have thought that even if the company sucks at supporting its users (first wrong) that doesn't forgive anyone for pirating software (second wrong). I'm not saying that you shouldn't be able to fully use the product you bought. But does anyone here honestly believe that only the guys that bought the product are the ones using the crack? I don't think so.
This sounds like hypocrisy to me.
Just be glad that now that there is an "official" fix for your problems.
Onda Technology Institute
Reloaded has existed for quite a while and as far as I know they've never put malware in their cracks. While it's obvious there is always a risk involved when you run an executable (no matter where it came from), I'd say you are reasonably save using their cracks. Probably more safe than running DRM'ed software, since that software tries to hook itself into all kinds of important parts of you operating system.
No, when I took the game off the shelf and gave the checkout chick the cash, the game became mine.
In Australia a contract for sale is complete when both the contractor and the contractee agree to the same terms. Both parties must be fully aware of all relevant terms before acceptance. Additional terms cannot be imposed after acceptance.
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
Yeah, and people wouldn't need locks and car alarms if there were no car thieves. I'd still find it more than a little funny if every time you locked your keys in the car, you had to call up a car thief to open it for you. In fact, I'm pretty sure I'd be laughing my ass off, just like I am at Ubi.
How's that for a car analogy? :)
Exposing themselves as a legal entity would *probably* backfire.
I'm just guessing.
In Capitalist America, bank robs you!
A copy-protection must never stop a legitimate customer from using the product they've bought, though.
If that sometimes happen and the company responsible doesn't come up with a fix, that legitimize the creation of 3'rd party fixes, or cracks.
So even though the copy-prevention schemes arose from piracy, today, piracy is sometimes necessary due to copy-prevention schemes.
/.Mattsson - My native language is not English, so please don't whine over linguistic errors. (That's lame anyway...)
I'd mod you up but I have no mod points.
To the parent poster, the copy-protection shit to "prevent" piracy CLEARLY DOES NOT WORK. In fact, to me, it's a deterrent. I bought the Sims for my family and tried to burn a backup copy because I knew they'd scuff up the CD. Wouldn't burn due to protection on the CD.
What'd I do? Took it back to the store and downloaded a copy. Fuck you, EA / Maxis. They're grateful they don't need the CD to play anymore and I'm grateful I don't need to worry about it getting wrecked like the previous one.
I use no CD cracks on all of my legally bought games. Having to put discs in and take them out is kind of cumbersome when I have them all safely stored in a metal CD binder. If I wanted to switch through game discs all day I'd play my console instead.
"He who can destroy a thing, controls a thing." --Paul Atreides, Dune
. I'd still find it more than a little funny if every time you locked your keys in the car, you had to call up a car thief to open it for you. How's that for a car analogy? :)</i>
Quite close, but it is even worse. In this case it is not YOU would have called the car thief. In this case you would have gone to "Ford" or wherever you bought your car, and the people at the "Ford authorized service" had to call the thief to open your car...
har har... I can just say that what Ubisoft did is amazing
Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'I can't configure Debian'
No, I bought the game. If you had me sign a contract before I paid money for the game, then I signed the EULA. I can't sell you a hamster and, as soon as you get it home and put it in its cage, demand that you do *anything* else.
Copyright law states that you can't copy the disc or distribute it, but it does not tell you that you can't modify it. I realize the 9th circuit just bought into that, but I wouldn't be surprised of an appeal. And even if there is no appeal, I'd happily argue the case again in court.
You can't make me agree to a contract after the fact, and forcing me to spend money on gas (and that's no trivial matter anymore), and waste my time (which also costs me money) because I disagree with the contract you've given me after the sale occurred. The onus is on you to have me agree before the purchase is completed; once you do that, you're absolutely correct.
Maybe that's what game vendors need to do; provide an industry standard kiosk with the EULA present before the purchase transaction can be completed; that way if I find the terms too cumbersome, I just don't purchase it and don't waste the money or gas on the event.
Some people might trust RELOADED more than they trust Ubisoft or at least whoever Ubisoft outsources their DRM to.
;).
I'd personally trust many of these "scene" hackers more than I'd trust Sony to not to try to pwn my machine.
That's not to say I'd trust them that much
I'd still find it more than a little funny if every time you locked your keys in the car, you had to call up a car thief to open it for you.
Well, the more accurate analogy would be if locksmiths used tools developed by car thieves to unlock your car when you locked the keys inside. And guess what? They do.
There wouldn't be any need for anti-piracy schemes if people were trustworthy and didn't steal software.
You crack me up. No, really, you do.
Do you know who gets hit by those anti-piracy "measures" ? Not the pirates, that much I can promise you. It's the regular customers who have to deal with this, I'm sorry to say, shit. Pirates get a pre-cracked bug-fixed ISO downloads that just work. They also get game updates working sooner than those sorry fools who bought the game at an online download store (the legitimate kind, that is).
This anti-piracy bullshit does absolutely nothing to prevent, you know, piracy. It is not necessary.
People use pirated software -> companies lose money
BS argument #1. Let me bring a BS argument of my own ! People share software -> other people like it and buy that software, having had the opportunity to test it -> company makes more money than it is allegedly "losing". This argument is just about as full of holes as yours is.
-> companies invest in trying to avoid illegitimate usage of their software
By being good corporate citizens, offering excellent support for their legitimate customers, offering a better experience than "pirates" ever could and focusing on their legitimate customers instead of wasting countless development and testing hours on stuff that provably does not work and only annoys regular customers ?
-> copy-protection schemes are put in place
And usually cracked a few days BEFORE the game hits store shelves. Excellent.
-> problems with copy-protection schemes arise
PREDICTABLE problems. KNOWN problems. You don't think the QA department knows about these problems ? CARES ?
-> people who don't give a shit about the fact that the software was a result of an investment in both equipment, marketing and man hours still keep finding ways to pirate the software.
Why do you care about these people ? They are not gonna buy your software anyway. They might if they get a better experience for a reasonable price, they might not. In the meantime you are losing gazillions of customers to DRM issues, fixes for direct2drive issues that only exist because nobody bothered to check that the protection doesn't blow up on those releases, etc. -- good going.
People are gonna copy your stuff. You cannot make them not do it. This is a known fact, a fact that has been known for over 20 years. There is no copy protection scheme that has not been utterly broken.
So everyone uses cracks to go around copy protection schemes when they're not supposed to,
And scratching their heads asking "why did I pay for this shit, again ?" And making a mental note not to buy it the next time. Or, if they really want to play it and really don't want to deal with this ... shit ... Pirate it straight away. At least you know the scene guys have quality control -- when their releases don't work, they get nuked.
That is a very sad state of affairs. Pragmatically, you are better off using a pirated version.
and then when that company uses that crack to fix a problem, everyone is outraged.
Not so much that they are using the crack, moreso that they are banning people who previously talked about that same crack, should not actually be NEEDING that crack if they had ANY developers left (you see, disabling this "copy protection" is as easy as, you know, not applying the copy protection installer to the executable you get out of the compiler), etc.
So it's OK if you steal from a company,
Who said that ?
but it's NOT OK if a company uses, to fix their own product and provide the support everyone cries for,
Credit where credit is due, huh ?
When the price is zero the demand is infinite.
The price is never zero. My time has value. Figuring out that the tools I use for work are what is causing the game to ungracefully exit is a cost. Cleaning up the parts of the system that the game modified is a cost.
On the other side, finding a crack that works is a cost. Cleaning up the spyware from the websites that host cracks is a cost. Troubleshooting the buggy game with a boggy crack and no support because you have a no-cd crack is a big cost.
When the price is zero the demand is infinite.
Maybe, but the price is never zero. Even if there's no monetary cost, there will be some cost or effort involved. For example, I have free fertilizer for the taking. The cost is that you don't want to drive out here for the sole purpose of picking dog crap off my lawn. There is not infinite demand for my "free fertilizer".
Want a better example? There's a bunch of music out there on the interwebs that I could go download for free, but I don't, because you'd have to pay me to listen to that tripe. There's also a bunch of software I don't pirate because I neither need nor want it (and also because I'm ethically against that sort of thing, but lets not cloud the issue).
Want an example that'll really hit home for the /. crowd? If demand is infinite when price is zero, why doesn't everyone run Linux?
I see your informative link, and raise you a pithy comment.
that someone in the coding department is going to be fired. If you're going to steal/use someone elses code - COVER YOUR TRACKS FOOL!
Ave Molech Setting
As has been said many times here over the years, if you don't like a product, don't buy it. Video games aren't medical care or food, so you sure don't need to buy them (hint: consider buying your family a book, or better yet, getting them outside to exercise). And EA didn't mislead, you knew they had DRM on it. So you are hostile at someone not misleading you trying to protect their product?
I've used no-CD cracks simply because I could. But cursing a company for trying to stop piracy? Waste of energy and misguided hostility. Vote with your pocketbook.
Slashdot "libertarians": Small government for me, big government for those I disagree with. -1, I disagree with you
Briefly: People mostly get it with a new computer, so they don't actually shell out anything for it and they don't know about the (often hidden) option to omit installation of Windows for cash. Or they pirate it instead of getting Linux, because that's what they are used to.
Oh, so all piracy is of stuff by big media corporations? Really? How about small game developers whose games are regularly pirated? I guess they suck too, 'cause they aren't giving it to you for free.
Piracy isn't a "mass advertising campaign." A few pirating gamers might say something about a game to a friend or two. But the idea that that's more beneficial than getting paid for their fucking work is astonishingly retarded. (Especially given that said pirating gamer would probably just say to his friend "here, I'll burn you a copy.")
Rationalize it all you want: you're still fucking people over.
"You can either have software quality or you can have pointer arithmetic, but you cannot have both at the same time."
There is no copy protection scheme that has not been utterly broken.
I don't think this is true.
I do :)
Some high-priced software (e.g. CAD toolkits) ship with a USB dongle containing a CPU and part of the executable in encrypted form. In the course of the program's normal execution, some data is sent to the dongle, processed, and sent back. The dongle is designed to self-destruct when cracked open. This scheme is highly resistant to cracks, provided the part of the executable is well-chosen to not be recreatable, and typical attackers cannot obtain a large supply of dongles.
It is resistant and resilient, yes. I would not call it impossible, having seen what has been cracked in the past and what a decent financial incentive will do for the motivation to crack.
I have seen some of these systems first-hand over the years, always getting more and more intricate. Without fail, they have also gotten more and more burdensome on the regular users of the software. Want that "old" (2 years) dongle supported ? Forget it. Want that parallel port dongle working on your shiny new laptop ? Forget it. Want to exchange a broken one for a new one a month after the "service contract" that was tacked onto the "purchase price" expires ? Tough noogies.
Architects and engineers put up with it in large part because there are few or no alternatives that do not do the exact same thing.
Yet, you usually find a cracked version of AutoCAD in certain circles, anyway. In the above scenario, it really just takes ONE cracked dongle to get at the executable code. As for crackers not obtaining a ready supply thereof ... Why would that be ? These companies usually outsource to companies dedicated to making those dongles. Those companies, in turn, want to sell their dongles to other companies to secure their products. Naturally, those companies would like some samples, and possibly some development samples. If the stakes are high enough (a $20k software component that you can sell on the black market for $1k-$2k a piece if you crack it properly), why not set up a front company, get some of those samples, and work on those. You don't need to work on a "real" dongle until you have perfected your method, and you can get more than one "real" dongle by getting another one from the originating software company for the legitimately-purchased license (I assume these crackers will have access to a company with a service contract like that). They won't just say "no" when you say you lost your dongle on a trainride.
Not that I'm saying it's necessarily reasonable for consumer videogames to use such an elaborate scheme
It'll come. Right now Blizzard is marketing electronic devices designed to improve the security of their World of Warcraft logins by augmenting the regular username/password tuple with one-time-passwords generated by an electronic device. People are eating it up because they want to protect their accounts. I don't think it'll stay confined to securing online accounts ... 3-4 years down the road, you'll see some high-priced games sporting activation smartcards (or something equivalent). I think. It's madness.
It is crackable. The more user-friendly something is, the easier it is to crack.
For smaller developers DRM is often mandated by the publisher. And the publisher doesn't give a damn about the developer or their game so long as it sparkles well enough to attract consumers. In the PC gaming world that standard is ridiculously low.
If you refuse to DRM, they refuse to publish your game and you make no money. And no, self-publishing is not a viable option for a lot of companies. Almost all major video games sell mostly on hype. If you can't afford a major advertising campaign and don't happen to already have a pack of rabid fans refreshing your home page for the latest scrap of news, then there's no way you can recoup the development costs of a AAA title just selling stuff off your web site. And that's not even taking into account the problem of getting said money in the first place without whoring yourself out to a publisher.
Having said that, I have no fucking clue what Ubi's excuse is, as they're certainly big enough that they aren't at some evil publisher's mercy. Maybe they've grown large enough that they're like EA, with enough bureaucracy between the studios and the publishing execs that they may as well be separate companies.
> I actually can't play games with the CD in the drive - my laptop slows to a molasses-like crawl whenever data is being read from the CD drive. \n Check the cdrom's device options. If there's a DMA option available, then setting it would definitely improve performance. I've had a similar issue with this linux setup-config/laptop. \n Cheers !
So basically ubisoft had broken their game with the CD protection DRM, something that nearly all games companies include, but I haven't the faintest idea why this is still a sane thing to do..
So now they have to use an "illegal" (or so they keep telling us) third-party crack to break their own DRM.
Or more likely, someone else's DRM that they purchased for a large sum of money, only to introduce bugs into their game and annoy their customers.
Sounds like great value for money to me! :)