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Rockstar Ships Max Payne 2 Cracked By Pirates
Jamie noticed a fairly amazing little story about Rockstar shipping a version of Max Payne 2 via Steam that was actually cracked by pirates to remove the DRM. The going theory was that it was easier for them to simply use the pirate group's crack than to actually remove their DRM themselves.
So Rockstar needed crackers help to release an old game in a digital download version? Maybe now it makes companies think that games without DRM are superior to DRM-laden versions, if even they need cracked versions to re-release the games whose developers are already gone.
On top of that they're using someones elses work and profiting from it.
Someone at kotaku's comments also noticed they're using cracked executables for the original Max Payne.
"Pirates sue Rockstar for using and distributing unlicensed cracks."
There's another way you can sue them. Abondonware rights were added to the DMCA that made it legal to crack games that are "no longer being sold or supported" for your own personal purposes of archival. Now, it's still illegal to distribute those cracked games. So the people who cracked it might have a claim that they cracked these games for their own archival purpose after Max Payne left stores and did not distribute them. But the great part is that you don't need to sue them, you can write that up in a letter notifying the ESA who will take them to court and, effectively, may sue the copyright holders for distributing a cracked game even though they own the copyright on it. After all, it just might fit the description of abandonware and set precedent one way or the other.
I hope the crackers seriously stick it to them. Copyright length, game DRM and licensing really don't make any sense to me. Honestly I really am upset that I paid for ~$40 for Contra on the NES back in 1990 only to have to pay $8 for it on the Wii today with no ability to transfer it from that device to another. How many more times must I pay for the Contra license to what is the exact same game?
My work here is dung.
One of the Rockstar coders was a member of Myth.
(you think I joke, but crack / warez teams are often loaded with industry insiders...)
Back when Babylon 5 was still being produced, some licensing issue had held up making any models of the ships being produced as toys, which prompted some outfits to start making their own models and selling them illegally.
JMS even mentioned one of these being shut down, but being impressed by the quality of these models, apparently made with nothing more to go on than screen caps.
In an episode soon afterwards one of the characters on the show was shown using a very detailed model of one of their ships... when questioned whether these two events were related, JMS' only response was "waste not, want not..."
"Waste not one watt!" - CZ
Not exactly.
The original DRM was removed, since steam is a central DRM provider, and having two DRM systems would be extremely undesirable.
It is a kind of snapshot of the waste that is DRM, but that's not really any different from any sort of licensing being non-productive overhead. It's a cost of doing business.
-josh
Did anyone state that no QA had been done? I would assume (read: HOPE) that Rockstar had the brains to test the hell out of this binary before saying "Well, let's just release it and see what happens..." Granted, probably as much maybe a little more work than patching it themselves, but it would behoove them not to check the code or at least monitor the data paths of the executable before blindly putting it to market. Maybe they even worked WITH the cracking group to gain the source-code so they could ensure there was nothing malicious(er) going on.
This is large scale commercial piracy. This is exactly the kind of thing that copyright laws are supposed to protect against.
But the warez group won't bring suit because of its own unclean hands.
The cracking and warez scene is not done for money, it's done for fame and respect. There are strict rules and levels of vetting done for pirated software as it makes its way through the system to end-users. Including malware in a crack is a death penalty for any group; their stuff will never be accepted again by site operators, and it would make it to a tiny segment of the population even if it weren't noticed.
Just about any other attack vector for malware, specifically rootkits, will have so much better penetration than a game crack that it's essentially a waste of time to a) crack the game so it works without the DRM (and yes, other crackers can figure out what you did to crack it), b) write undetectable malware to include in it, c) build a reputation good enough to allow the release of the crack, d) get your crack done and out the door before anyone else so yours doesn't get nuked, and e) harness the very few people who will receive the crack.
Keep in mind that a, b, c and d can all be undone by a single person in the distribution chain nuking your release because it's suspect or was released five minutes after someone else's working crack.
In other words, you don't know what you're talking about but LET'S ALL HOP ABOARD THE INSIGHTFUL TRAIN HERPA DERPA DERP.
so your saying software cracking is peer reviewed