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Ubisoft's DRM Cracked — For Real This Time
therufus writes "A few days after the release of Assassin's Creed 2, naughty piracy sites were announcing they had cracked Ubisoft's Online Services Platform. Turns out, that wasn't entirely true. While it was possible to load into the game, players were unable to advance past a certain memory block. But now, it seems Ubisoft will need to draft a new response. A new crack has begun circulating that removes the DRM entirely."
It's already in the works at On Live. IMHO I think the latency related to gaming in this fashion will ruin it for everyone (unless you're playing board games or the like).
Even unencrypted it took weeks to emulate/"crack" the protection. So this was rather successful by the standards of DRM. They can step up this kind of protection in future titles. Allegedly the new Settlers game uses a variant of the same DRM which has a more complex integration with the server. Either way, the legit customer is stuck with a game that will only run when the server is up and reachable. If you see anybody playing AC2 on a plane or even on a train, they're almost certainly playing a pirated version, because legit customers simply can't run the game.
Switch back to Slashdot's D1 system.
You mean like people already do with World of Warcraft pirate servers?
The real issue here is that SkidRow took the "values" database from the community who initially logged them, and pretty much claimed it as their own work. The original cracking community inserted some fake "values" as trackers in order to determine when anyone stole their work and released it.
One group of pirates being ripped off by another group of pirates is not an issue, it's funny.
All I want is a secure system where it's easy to do anything I want. Is that too much to ask ~~ Randall Munroe
I work at Ubisoft as a programmer, which is why I'm posting as an AC. What the next step will be in the DRM, the ramp-up, is gameplay code that is run from the server. So in order to crack that one the pirates will have to fully emulate the server side code. Not the whole of the gameplay code mind you, just a small, but necessary and essential, portion. This should be in effect for the coming summer releases.
For the record I think Ubisoft are being asshat idiots in continuing to ramp up this obscenity of a slap in the face to paying consumers. And I'm not alone, you should see the in-house mailing list flamewars about this (which also means that other employees are freaking greedy douchebags, it's not just the suits.)
Indeed, "I'll believe it when I see it" is not a bad position to take with OnLive.
Seriously though, it's going to take a very long time before an online system can replace a local system - think about it, current bus technologies between hardware and TV/Monitor run in the multi-gigabit range.
Now that's uncompressed, Cable TV has shown that you can crank those numbers down quite a bit, but you're still talking about a lot of people completely saturating 200-300mbit connections to match the quality of video you get on your local hardware. The connection would have to be very very reliable as well - just a few hiccups in latency or speed can cause extreme annoyance for the gamer. So in reality you're looking at probably a 500mbit connection with a guarantee of no less than 300mbit or so.
It would take one hell of an infrastructure improvement to handle that.
It's also a moving target, because video advances continue (though slower than some would like), and by the time we get 500mbit connections in enough homes to make this viable (you'll always be cutting off a big chunk of the market with this setup), the target could very well need to be 1gbit to match local hardware.
Security is mostly a superstition... Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. - Helen Keller
Ever wonder why we have to haggle on prices? Because motherfuckers are greedy.
There is something to what you say, of course the necessary corollary is that they are also stupid. I run into this quite a bit. A company that charges a "fair" markup on its costs will do better in the long run than a company that haggles to get every dime. It is why haggling went away for a long time in America (and elsewhere, but I am less familiar with the economics of this sort elsewhere). Quaker merchants in the colonial era sold their merchandise for what they believed to be a fair markup over their cost. Everybody knew that when you went to a Quaker merchant, you paid the same amount as the next guy no matter how good of a haggler you were. They also knew that the Quaker's markup was not excessive. Additionally, the Quaker merchants response to people who wanted to haggle was, "That's my price, if you don't want to pay it, go to somebody else." This meant that the merchants who haggled only got the customers who were good hagglers (eventually, as people who weren't good hagglers realized they were paying more than from the Quaker merchants) and therefore could not make as much money as the Quakers (or other non-Quakers who followed the same model).
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
Man can make a one-time pad, man can not break a one-time pad. Your generalization is false.