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Vuvuzelas Blare On Pirated Copies of Music Game
An anonymous reader sends this quote from Wired:
"A novel anti-piracy measure baked into the Nintendo DS version of Michael Jackson: The Experience makes copied versions of the game unplayable and taunts gamers with the blaring sound of vuvuzelas. Many games have installed switches that detect pirated copies and act accordingly, like ending the user's game after 20 minutes. Ubisoft has come under fire multiple times for what players have seen as highly restrictive anti-piracy measures that annoy legitimate users as much or more so than pirates. But some more-mischievous developers have used tricks similar to the vuvuzela fanfare to mess with pirates. Batman: Arkham Asylum lets unauthorized users play through the game as if it were a normal copy, with a single exception: Batman's cape-glide ability doesn't work, rendering the game impossible to finish — although you might bash your head against it trying to make what are now impossible jumps. If you pirate Command & Conquer: Red Alert 2, brace yourself for an explosion, as your entire base will detonate within 30 seconds of loading the game."
Seriously, people would copy a game playing Michael Jackson? Seems like the vuvuzelas are redundant.
John
if they can tell it's pirated... why all the crazy piracy schemes in the first place? Why even LAUNCH the game? how can they tell?
"Batman: Arkham Asylum lets unauthorized users play through the game as if it were a normal copy, with a single exception: Batman's cape-glide ability doesn't work, rendering the game impossible to finish — although you might bash your head against it trying to make what are now impossible jumps. If you pirate Command & Conquer: Red Alert 2, brace yourself for an explosion, as your entire base will detonate within 30 seconds of loading the game..."
So how is this different then the purchased, bug-ridden, unfinished versions that are pawned off on us with every release?
I'm assuming they intentionally leaked the bugged game to torrent sites, etc.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
Ah, yes, I remember that. It was always fun to uninstall and reinstall the whole fucking game because the DRM flipped a shit over nothing at all.
I'm assuming they intentionally leaked the bugged game to torrent sites, etc.
But that wouldn't be "detection"... (then again it wouldn't exactly be a surprise for a slashdot summary to use a wrong word)
Congratulations on unlocking an easter egg that gives you much more challenging games.
The same way they always have for the last 30 years. Bury some code that's supposed to toggle some hardware effect in the cartridge or media, check for the side effect, then crap out if it fails.
Another way is just using attributes of the cartridges against pirates. Copies are often made on read-write media, but legitimate cartridges are read-only. So you have legitimate executable code that says "DO_MUSIC: call PLAY_MUSIC", and you add a statement that says "write to address DO_MUSIC 'call PLAY_VUVUZELA'". A legitimate cartridge can't overwrite the ROM, so it fails, and the call to PLAY_MUSIC remains in place. But on a rewritable cartridge it does overwrite it and zzzzzzzzzzzzzz happens.
John
I have played a pirated copy of Command & Conquer: Red Alert 2 for years.
While true, you just suck at it so much you lose every game in under 30 seconds so you wouldn't have noticed the explosion. :)
Copy protection is generally a module that's linked into the system, gets called at start up, does some validation / checksumming / decryption etc. Crackers tend to attack the validation so that it returns 'all good' even when its not. Or they wait until the relevant bits are decrypted and then copy those in and bypass the validation/decryption entirely. ... its more complicated than that, but that's sort of the gist of it.
Crackers attack the copy protection, and then once its defeated release the cracks/cracked copies.
This piracy detection is essentially a separate redundant anti-piracy module, with the same sort of detection/validation stuff as the primary one. However it doesn't get activated at start up. It gets activated later, sometimes much later,and instead of throwing up a "not a valid copy" it instead modifies the game rules or parameters slightly.
The idea is that the crackers won't find it. They are attacking the primary copy protection which inevitibaly falls... but often they are only interested in cracking the game, and being the releaser; they often aren't actually all that interested in playing the game itself. So once the protection appears defeated and they appear to be able to play the game they release.
However the 2ndary copy protection is still intact, and messes with players who actually try to complete the game.
Its not really any harder to defeat than the primary copy protection; if anything its usually easier. But since it gets missed its gets to mess with pirate copy players for a few months while it gets identified, defeated, and then new cracks are released. Meanwhile there are now bunches of people running the old cracks who might never figure it out... especially if the impact is subtle.
The main problem with these copy protections is that like any copy protection, some times it doesn't work and legitmate customers are affected. This can be particularly troubling if the impact is subtle... so they come to think the game is just defective (which I guess it is).
The vuvuzela noise isn't a copy-protection technique. It's just that the South African version of the game was the first to be cracked; it's in the legit .za copies as well.
I have played a pirated copy of Command & Conquer: Red Alert 2 for years.
I can vouch for TFA's claim.
I played RA2 quite the last year or two of high school with some friends in one of the computer labs. We ran into a problem though because the C: of the machines was re-imaged each night (via Deep Freeze). Ironically, the school wouldn't buy a full copy of Deep Freeze and relied on the trial version, which only let you Freeze one partition, and limited the size of that partition. Since the computers had extra room (as the D:\) we installed the game on there.
Unfortunately, the game's data in the Windows registry (stored on the C:) was erased each night and the next day when we went to play we'd see this exact behavior. Game would start fine and exactly 30 seconds in everything went boom.
I assumed the nightly wipe was part of it because it played fine until then. As a guess, I tried reinstalling the game and exported the entire RA2 registry key to a file. As long as we re-imported that file before playing each morning, the game would run fine.
No idea what the real mechanism is, but there you go.
"What do you despise? By this are you truly known." --Princess Irulan, Manual of Muad'Dib
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Why someone would pirate, let alone pay for either of these mentioned games kind deserve far worse...Michael Jackson? Cmon... Hopefully they'll start putting porn into "pirated" copies of TV series so I can see some cute British guys doing it in between scenes of Merlin, Dr. Who and Skins.
GTA IV had a copy-protection prank too: the pirated game plays fine until you get in to a car, which then accelerates uncontrolably while handling as if the character has been drinking.
Pretty funny, but it did bite a lot of legit, paying customers, contributing to the general verdict that the game was much too buggy at release.
# cat
Damn, my RAM is full of llamas.
And it doesn't need to be. Of course, they can't prosecute anyone who "pirates" the freely disseminated version, but then.. maybe they don't want to prosecute people who obviously like their product and therefore might become customers with a small nudge, and if they displace real pirated copies, then they cut down on piracy either way, although the recipients might still think their copies are, in fact, pirated.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
The thing to remember about warez crackers, is they tend to be more skilled than the people who release the games. Trying to outsmart them is a fallacy.
Then why don't they try, I dunno, maybe writing their own games instead of leeching off the work of others!
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
Surely if it did some cool undocumented thing in the pirated copy you would be impressed enough to pay for the full version - kind of like a "tip" for a job well done.
I dont think they should put annoying stuff in the pirated copies, but if it subtely made winning impossible, yet by the end of the game it becomes obvious, then I think credit where credit is due - the developers are really trying to win you over. and a job well done should be rewarded.
Much better than the stupid "check the internet every time you load the game" piracy prevention techniques. Either its a pirate copy or it isn't. There's no point going after all illegal downloads etc. - just the ones where people were too lazy to go to the shop and pay. Getting the target market right in the first place is half the battle.
This seemed like a reasonable sig at the time.
The point of DRM, from the publisher's perspective, isn't to prevent piracy - it's to delay it. Most of the sales will happen within the first week, due to the advertising focus - look at all the huge launches like Halo or Call of Duty, that sell millions in a day. If a game can stay uncracked for a month, the DRM is considered to have done its job exceptionally. If you can make DRM that takes a full day to test, and which would take several attempts to circumvent fully, you can easily delay the piracy of the game long enough that potential pirates instead go out and buy the game.
The old school RPG EarthBound for the SNES had a similar, albeit HORRIFYING copy protection mechanic.
If the anti-piracy measures flagged, it would jack up the encounter rate twentyfold--the game would literally be swarming with monsters.
Worst part: if you make it all the way through to the final boss, after his first form the game will lock--the only way out is to reset it, only to find that every single one of your save files have been erased. Starmen.net has an entire page dedicated to this at http://starmen.net/mother2/gameinfo/antipiracy/ .
"Anyone know how they detect pirated copies?"
One very old scheme is to embed a checksum of the code segment inside the binary itself and then check it at runtime. It's not foolproof but it will identify most pirated copies with zero chance of false positives.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Apologies in advance for being a little confrontational about this topic ...
The thing to remember about warez crackers, is they tend to be more skilled than the people who release the games. Trying to outsmart them is a fallacy.
Sorry, but popular meme is utter bollocks. Crackers are (mostly) good at cracking software and while I agree that successful cracking is quite a technical task or challenge, and that not many people are capable of that skill there are at least two very obvious problems with what they do.
There are plenty of examples of software available that has never been completely cracked - yes, the software works to a point but it's not 100% cracked. Virtual synth Zebra 2.5 by U-he is a great example. That's one point against the so called "genius crackers".
The second point being that if the crackers were any good at software development they would have the vision, skill and patience to create new software that inspires people to play through the game / create beautiful works of art / solve new problems. It is quite obvious that they do not have these skills, and will instead take the glory from spending a few hours in front of a debugger and then claiming the work as their own.
I know who gets my respect ... and who gets my money ...
Peace,
Andy.
The cards emulate the game card and they don't permit writing from the console side. I have an Acekard for my DS so that I don't have to carry carts or my mp3 player while I am using the DS.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
but if it subtely made winning impossible, yet by the end of the game it becomes obvious, then I think credit where credit is due - the developers are really trying to win you over.
But then how do you distinguish this from a game that's genuinely difficult, like Tetris The Grand Master 3 that gets ungodly fast starting around 3:00, and then turns off the lights around 5:00 and you have to beat the game by sense of feel?
In other news, developers come up with a great way to drum up press for a game that otherwise no one would have paid any attention to.
Generally will fix whatever anti-piracy gimmicks they impliment. The same thing was done to Chrono Trigger on the DS where when you made it to the first time warp it would repeat that scene infinitely. As soon as somebody found out the trigger for what makes it repeat that they released the cheat codes to put onto your cart and you could play the game just fine.
Leaving aside the inevitable flamewar about piracy and sales and that endlessly retrodden path of discussion, to interject some technical details: to a cracker they're usually called a 'trap', 'flag' or, if you will, a 'logic bomb'.
Some of them might be obvious, but of course if they're obvious they'll be found right away. The idea is that by making the traps subtle or to require you to actually play the game to some extent (and essentially playtest it) to uncover them, they'll be harder to track down because you'll have to complete the game 100% to be 100% sure you've de-fanged all the traps (or for a non-game piece of software, use every feature quite extensively - some pieces of software like AutoCAD infamously contain subtle traps as well which slowly corrupt your designs, which can be extremely unfortunate if the protection is not working as it ought to).
A couple of decades ago, I even once saw a trap that released a bootsector virus if you tripped it (yes - really). Unfortunately, it appears the developers had inadvertently tripped it during development without realising, so the second disk of the pair had the virus already in the bootsector - in every copy of that game someone bought at retail, they could get a very unwelcome surprise if they ever booted off the 'Data Disc' by mistake...
Very few houses develop their own copy protection these days, even fewer now than before. They tend to buy systems in wholesale like SecuROM, TAGES or StarForce - all of which work in basically the same way, which is to wrap the executable (like an executable packer, although they actually tend to expand it considerably) and turn parts of it into complicated puzzle-box style interpreted virtual machine code - hidden amongst which will be protection checks, and anti-debugger code (none of which actually works well on a modern, state-of-the-art debugger, especially since the development of hardware hypervisors - but that never stops them putting it in anyway) and the executable will have callbacks which rely on the results of those protection checks to determine whether the booby-traps trigger or not.
Incidentally, those new-fangled online checks are almost always simply a more elaborate callback, where the code that returns the response lies on a remote server and would possibly have to be emulated or bypassed for a 100% crack. (This can be a lot easier than you think: Ubisoft have no excuses for their hubris, it's just not that effective.)
Of course, frequently, these intentional logic bombs can trigger by accident on a legitimate copy, or when hardware (or software) that wasn't planned for or tested is present, or if you are running software that the copy protection vendor doesn't like - this has been true since the dawn of such systems in the 1980s (Rob Northen, etc). Some of these bugs are often confused for traps too, and a rare few of them don't appear if you crack the game.
Naturally a properly-working crack (a "100%") will have had all of the traps systematically removed - with many schemes it's possible to do so in a frighteningly automated fashion, with enough work on the system, and since a software house tends to re-use the systems and only changes specific details of the callbacks, you can see one reason why they appear so quickly.
That, in turn, leads to properly working 100% cracks also being very widely used by legitimate purchasers of the software - because the copy-protected version of the game doesn't work right: and the more complex, sensitive trigger-happy the protection, the more likely it is to fail incorrectly. (Ask anyone who ever bought a game with StarForce, or, say, Spore, what I'm talking about here.)
Ideally, developers would stop putting logic bombs into their code deliberately. It's poor ethics, bad programming practice and can occasionally be incredibly dangerous (especially in non-gaming fields). There are probably enough bugs in your code to worry about without intentionally adding some - that's simply being re
Most pirated software of this nature has been modified to bypass serial number checks, etc. If you can detect any modification to the program, then they cannot do this bypassing without also finding the check-summing code and fixing it also.
I found one of these when I was a teenager. Freaking subtle. Brilliant.
Steve Jackson's OGRE, for the Commodore 64.
I bought it. And did what any good geek would do. Made a backup and played that. And I could never beat it. But I did eventually screw up that disc - the old 5 1/4 discs did mess up fairly often. Especially in the 1541 drive.
So I played the original. And beat it. Made another backup. Couldn't beat it. A light went off.
I did a statistical analysis. All I did was fire at treads for several games. They're supposed to be hit 33% of the time regardless of weapon or circumstance. On the backup copy, it was close to 17%. On the original copy about 33%.
They built a single column shift into the game if it detects its a copy.
EVIL.
Especially seeing as how - wait for it - I was a paying customer. Thanks guys.
On the plus side, I did get really good at that game. You had to be playing at a column shift disadvantage.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
M$ should add removeing the old DRM systems that don't work in X64 to the MS malware remove windows update.
That's like asking why a safecracker doesn't manufacture safes.
Ideally, developers would stop putting logic bombs into their code deliberately. It's poor ethics, bad programming practice and can occasionally be incredibly dangerous (especially in non-gaming fields).
Ideally people would pay for the software they liked. Ideally the filesharing of copyrighted material would only be used as evaluation, followed by deleting the software (after an evaluation period of a week or so) or paying for it. Ideally the distribution of disks would be stupid, because it's cheaper to set a filesharing server to send it over the interwebs.
The companies have reacted wrong, but the pirates incited the reaction.
Well, I might have a way, but it only works on a semi spherical planet in a vacuum.
The checksum for the _code_ section is stored in the _data_ section of the binary. Does that help?
That seems highly unlikely - days, maybe weeks, at best.
The chaos lasts for months, because once the torrents and cracks are out, there's no unreleasing them... so they are floating around out there.
Bad example. A Mac program used by an exceedingly small group of folks, versus games which have a much larger user base.
You don't need a net connection if you put Steam into offline mode.
A few months back I had a dodgy internet connection that would only work occasionally and even when it did the signal strength was pitiful (computer on 2nd floor, router on ground). I played Left 4 Dead 2 quite a bit while offline.
The problem for me was when my computer got a connection for long enough to start downloading an update but not long enough finish downloading. I was then unable to play left 4 Dead until the download had completed - which took about a month as my connection was terrible. I don't see why it can't keep the game playable until the download has finished.
Brain surgery - it's not rocket science!
Yes, once you've figured out how the checksum is generated. But once you have figured out where/how the checksum is generated you could also modify that code to always return "checksum validates" or somesuch...