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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."
I'm not a fan of 'Piracy' at all, but Ubisoft DRM tactics are draconian, ridiculous, and are just begging for the attention of those who break DRM for fun or profit.
Ubisoft has brought this upon themselves and now they'll use the fact that their "unbreakable" DRM has been broken to justify their further efforts. Asshats!
Skidrow put their own copy protection on the crack because they simply placed the values from the emulator into a dll. It's nice and convenient to have a dll return the values instead of a server however if they had actually cracked then they would have also cracked the other games for which the emulator doesn't currently exist.
So yes, Assassin's Creed 2 is playable but their copy protection is only broken in the sense that AC2 designers decided to make the server-client for this game return static responses that can be collected and eventually make the game playable for pirates.
The only ethical response to ubisoft is not to buy their product, not to use their product, not to infringe upon their product and then tell them you are doing it and tell your friends.
I'm irritated at the pro-piracy attitude, it hurts open source as well. Without respect for at least copyright-driven IP you can't have real opensource that allows the creator to specify how it is propagated (GPL). All you would have would be the BSD, and we saw what Apple did with that eh?
All Skidrow did was re-package the existing community-developed workaround.
The community created a values.db which contains the name/value pairs to defeat Ubi's server checks, and a server emulator, Skidrow's DLL embeds this file and replaces the server-checking with a local access.
Skidrow then takes full credit for the work (in a total douche move) and they also packed their DLL so no-one would detect their deception.
Here is how unbreakable DRM will eventually work:
When internet connections are high enough bandwidths and low enough latencies, you will only have video transferred to you, all game assets will be entirely stored and run on their hardware, never will anything be stored on YOUR end that you will can manipulate.
That is, you will play "unbreakable" games remotely.
Attached to the "readme" file that comes with the hacked content (which can be found here), Skid Row alerted other hackers that the group's methods were safeguarded against reverse-engineering in order to fend off competing hacking groups and Ubisoft itself.
Let me see if I got it ... you are against the draconian practices of ubisoft ... so you crack the game and ... protect the source of your crack?
I guess how you differentiate between hackers and crackers, this guys are nothing but thieves.
And, before anyone replies saying that this is to protect the patch against ubisoft ... ubisoft created the DRM, they don't need to take a look at the crack's code.
WTF am I doing replying to an AC at 5 A.M on a Friday night?
For the record:
The actual hard work was done by a community of people who bought the game. They ran a proxy that logged all the "values" sent from the Ubisoft servers to the game. Each time the game progresses to another mission (or similar), it requires a different set of "values" to determine what game data to load (or a very similar method). The people who logged these values then submitted them to a community database, which collected them and sorted out any fake ones uploaded by Ubisoft employees or griefers.
This community also made a server emulator, which served the "values" to the game upon request. The server emulator, written in python, was a pretty simple HTTP server; the game connected to it by editing the system's "hosts" file and hardcoding DNS responses for ".ubisoft.com" to localhost (where the server emulator runs).
Thus, the game is only crackable once enough people have bought the game and logged all possible values for all possible missions states. It's not a total loss for Ubisoft in a sense -- it prevents "Pre" releases, wherein a release group distributes the game before the actual release date. It also ensures that a certain number of people must buy the game and contribute "values" to the community database; all in all this ends up lengthening the time from game release to full-working pirate release.
SkidRow's new crack is simply an IPC (inter-process communication) method of delivering the "values" to the game, bypassing the network connection to the game. Therefore SkidRow's version doesn't use a server emulator running on localhost, but rather patches the executables of the game and has the "values" hardcoded into the cracked DLLs.
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.
Dragons Lair was VERY successful- and it had a wee amount of delays..
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragon's_Lair
The game's enormous contrast with other arcade games of the time created a sensation when it appeared, and was played so heavily that many machines often broke due to the strain of overuse. It was also arguably the most successful game on this medium and is aggressively sought after by collectors.
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
Nobody that pirates is a "potential customer". The end goal of the piracy movement is that it is all free or it isn't even made, and we are about 50% along the way towards that now.
DRM is a pointless hiccup along the way to utter destruction of revenue from digital goods. Now, whether you think that is good or bad is perhaps interesting. But it is undeniable that this is the goal and where we are going very, very quickly.
China gave up on selling music already. The US isn't far behind. Europe might be there before the US. Asia, Africa and South America never paid for anything anyway.
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.)
and from reading the article it looks like the created a testing nightmare..
I wouldn't play Assassin's Creed 2, Command and Conquer 4, or any other game which required a constant internet connection for single player use, regardless of the state of cracks or how low the publisher dropped the price.
Fuck Ubisoft. Fuck EA. They've both lost a paying customer by pulling this bullshit, and I buy a lot of games.
Fuck 'em both.
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
Do not use the crack and do not play the games with DRM if we want to really see an end to DRM. Even playing the game without buying it can be good publicity that generates sales for those who would complain they are not selling enough. Resisting the temptation to consume products instead of creating our own is the real problem. Instead of consuming things because we feel we need to, if we do not agree with the product we should instead work to create our own. We cannot let self-doubts and temporary failures prevent us from being creative if we are to bring about a new creative renaissance without DRM.
Uh, yea, if you're going to talk smack, make sure you know what you're talking about.
A linux server is EXACTLY how I bypassed the DRM initially, and I DID get past the memory block most couldn't get to - learn to check your in-process opcodes, fools.
I had ACII running the week before official release. I beat it the day of official release.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
Comparing games to food and drink is just ridiculous. One you can't do without - the other, you think you can't do without because obviously you have more money than sense. Well, some people 'can't live' without heroin either, I'm sure they convince themselves that the drug is more important than food, a roof, friends and family. Good for them, and good for you!
Of course it is like a luxury item that people will stop buying. YOU are addicted to gaming if you think that nobody has the resolve to just unplug from the cycle. I haven't bought or played any games for years - DRM has always been one of my hates because it punishes ME for what everybody else is doing, but primarily because outright bullshitting on the system requirements by every single company made it impossible to judge what to buy, without doing incredibly monotonous research on hardware and benchmark sites which no one should have to be subjected to. Hardly as big or invasive an issue as DRM, but still enough more me to think 'fuck this for a laugh', so just how much worse is DRM in my opinion and in the minds of millions of other people?
I struggle to understand how anyone can be intrested in 15 pages of pie charts and framerates for every single graphics card that has ever been packaged as if it tells you anything more than how much money you owe Nvidia or ATI to keep getting the next-next-gen franchise-ware that EA/Activision/UBI have carefully appropriated unscrupulously from more independent and imaginative companies and proceeded to either bastardise into the recurring sports-themed-shit production line or just senselessly killed off for no other reason that to sit on the rights so that no one else can be a threat to them. Good riddance big gaming companies, you'll be driven into the ground by the same simple minded, overbearing buisness environment that you created to make yourself fat and rich off people's ignorance.
This isn't about price. This is about the freedom of the internet, which is slowly being eroded, and with it our personal freedom. It's easy to take the path of least resistance and simply seek technological circumventions to censorship and other online restrictions. But, while we keep playing with such toys, those that would control knowledge are busy building both the legislative and technological systems that will make this battle that much harder to fight in another decade or so.
The longer the latency, the worse the user experience. This is because it is a lag of everything, including user interface. You do something, you don't see it happen until later. That is noticeable, and is annoying. Now the problem with latency is that the only real way to combat it is to have the source and destination physically closer to each other. Reason is that light speed is the ultimate limit and while it sound fast, it isn't when talking data latency. Light can orbit the Earth around 8 times per second. Sounds really fast and is, unless you are talking data. To state that another way, that's 125ms. So what that means is that if you want to send data half way around the Earth, you are talking a minimum theoretical latency of above 100ms. Even assuming everything is perfect, that's just how long it would take light in a vacuum to get there and back.
Of course in reality it gets worse. Fiber optic cable has an index of refraction, which means light travels slower in it. It moves at maybe 66% of c or so. Also you don't get to have a nice direct line with fiber. It snakes around mountains, follows railroads, goes down to the bottom of the ocean, etc. It is longer than "as the crow flies." Then of course there's the routers. No matter how good, they are going to add some latency as the process the information and forward it to the right port. Finally there's the fact that an actual data payload takes time itself to transmit.
So you have to have servers distributed near to the clients to maintain a nice low latency and make the system work well. This is a problem for two reasons:
1) Cost. It will cost a hell of a lot more to have servers in data centers all over the world than to try and host them all at one site.
2) Security. This is the biggy. Given that the point of the is copy protection you have a real problem. If everything is at your site, ok you can take measures to do a real good job securing it. However if it is at various ISPs all over the world, that's a problem. All it takes is someone who works at one of those ISPs who also works with a pirate group to get the actual program off your server, since they have physical access that you can't monitor, and then the program is out in the open. Trying to secure against that with hundreds of sites around the world would be impossible.
Problem is you you move parts of the code to the server you run into bigger load problems than Ubisoft currently has, they obviously do not have the infrastructure to keep that alive without outages, then you have the lag.
Etc... it will become harder to crack, but they will alienate even more customers that way, and in the end no one will buy their games anymore.
Sersiously, if the industry is going to move to DRM like that I will give up gaming, or just buy independend anymore. It is not like it hurts if you stop gaming, or play your unplayed back catalog.
It is just like giving up an old habit.
These people value skill and care about giving credit for it. They do not care about stealing a product while expressly leaving the credit where it's due. Their value system is contiguous and non-contradictory, hence not hypocritical.