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Pirates Finding It Harder To Crack New PC Games (engadget.com)
schnell writes: Engadget reports that a few recent top-tier video game releases using updated DRM technology have gone uncracked for more than a month and left DRM hackers stymied thus far. The games FIFA 16 and Just Cause 3, using an updated DRM system called Denuvo, have thus far frustrated experienced Chinese crackers' best efforts far longer than the usual 1-2 weeks it takes for most games to be cracked. Although the article is light on technical details about what makes the new DRM system harder to defeat, it does note that "Based on the current pace of encryption tech, 'in two years time I'm afraid there will be no free games to play in the world,' said one forlorn pirate."
the article isn't talking about videos or music
Metal Gear Solid V.
Took forever to get a crack out, and when a crack did come out by 3DM it took a few more days for a version 2 to be playable. Only when you set your timezone to a chinese one were you able to play. Sometimes on a specific set of hardware you needed a new crack made. You had to skip certain chapters of the game because they crashed.
And after 5 days or so? Music started playing. Shifty crack, even in the pirate world, never fully working scene release even to this day.
As a pirate, I can only salute the guys who made Denuvo.
'in two years time I'm afraid there will be no free games to play in the world,'
There are tons of free games.
Many games studios open up there engines to be used by indy game makers and you can find make great games to play tho not cutting edge on the graphics.
Tremulous - tremulous.net
Renegade X - renegade-x.com
Stream has a ton of free to play games just check out there website (Team Fortress 2, Dota 2, Warframe)
Play real free games if you don't want to buy not cracked games.
It's not currently possible to play pirated PS4 games.
The PS4's security does appear to have been at least partially compromised, however. A recent video appears to show Linux running on a PS4, along with a version of Pokemon. Note that we don't yet have independent verification of this, so there's a chance (albeit probably a slim one given the track record of the group in question) that this is a hoax.
It's still a long way from being able to play pirated games, although it is certainly a first step on that road. More to the point, however, it is even further from being able to make full use of pirated games, given the extent to which the full functionality of many PS4 games is tied to online features. History (e.g. the situation with the Xbox 360) suggests that console manufacturers are pretty good, over time, at detecting consoles running pirated software when they connect to online services and locking them out of said services. A PS4 which can't access the PSN is not much of a PS4.
As for pirated games on the PS3, it was possible. Sort of. There was a specific firmware version which, if you didn't update past it, could be tricked into running pirated games (via a USB dongle, if I recall). However, you should note that firmware updates on the PS3 were mandatory both to use online services and to play games released after that firmware version was issued. So in other words, if you had an old PS3 you kept at the right firmware version and never tried to use it online, you could play pirated games which did not require a more recent firmware version. So it was of limited use for most people and was only ever really a proof of concept.
Requires the stolen object to be missing.
Pirating is copyright infringement. Why does the government even protect copyright?
Many people would rather live in a world without copyright.
In that sense I think anarchy would be great. Those who want copyright can live in a city where those monopolies are protected.
Thank you, Bradley Manning, Edward Snowden and so many others, for courageously defending humanity, my freedom and more!
Really? So you can pirate PS4 games now? How? Was it even possible to pirate PS3 games?
Yes, the PS3 has a pirate scene. The exploit is based on some old ~3.5 firmware; which is why you'll see people asking where to obtain it. They are basically looking to run pirated games.
There isn't anything for the PS4 yet. The current exploit was patched 16 months ago, and only works on the old 1.76 OS. At the moment they're still trying to run privileged code. So at best, you're talking basic home-brew on what is very much an underpowered PC. There's a further weakening of the performance recently discovered: Sony's harddrive IO uses the USB bus (eeooow), which is why replacing the system drive with an SSD fails to get a worthwhile performance boost.
Consider for a moment that those of use who are doing the cracking have already bought the game. It's not about piracy or theft for some of us, it's a puzzle. Since becoming a Dad I haven't had anywhere near enough time to be familiar with this scene, but from what I remember it can be extremely engrossing. Piracy is a byproduct of cracking, not the otherway around.
Piracy getting harder? That's not a problem.
Videogame abundance and the mass-move towards indie-development makes pirating obsolete anyway.
I get all my Games for 10 Euros or less out of the bargain bin. The occasional totally DRM-free 15 Euro download for Shadowrun Hong Kong (Kickstarter Project / Indie Game) adds to that. I'm OK giving 15 Euros for a very neat DRM-free game to an indie studio. It's still dirt-cheap.
Currently I'm playing Deus Ex:Human Revolution for XBox 360. Cost me 9.99 for an original mint copy of the directory cut special edition. Awesome game, pricepoint is a steal.
No one needs piracy or the triple-a publishers in a time where Gamedevs are going indie left, right and center (Hideo Kojima anyone?) and games drop hard off the 60 dollar benchmark as soon as they're published on non-current gen platforms or mobile or the novelty effect has worn off.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
So basically they came up with a scheme that can't be realistically cracked. The point is that the statement "if it can be played, it can be copied" isn't true any more. Similar story with the Apple TV's. The ATV3 was never cracked. I doubt the ATV4 will either.
Actually the team mentioned is from china and considered one of the best, particularly against the drm company used for dragon age and just cause.
No, it remains true that "if it can be played, it can be cracked", as unencrypted bits are needed at the moment of playing, and are right there in the CPU.
Back in the day, you could buy hardware CPU emulators (ICEs) that would emit a transcript as you ran a program. If you had debugging symbols, they'd give you working source code for everything you executed. Far beyond the price the typical hacker team could pay, but we used them professionally. These days you can virtualize far cheaper. "Trusted computing" is the possible countermeasure, but encrypting a video stream isn't the same as encrypting the executing object code.
It's possible the "trusted" computing architecture could be extended in years to come, especially for consoles, but until art assets and graphics/CUDA code move encrypted from disk to video card memory, it won't help (and even then, it has to be decrypted somewhere on the video card).
Since I can't see PC games restricted to FIPS 140-2 Level 3 vid cards, it will remain true that "if it can be played, it can be copied". At what price though?
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
The PS4's security does appear to have been at least partially compromised, however. A recent video appears to show Linux running on a PS4, along with a version of Pokemon. Note that we don't yet have independent verification of this, so there's a chance (albeit probably a slim one given the track record of the group in question) that this is a hoax.
Yes, they got in through a FreeBSD security vulnerability. The Pokemon game is running in a Gameboy Advance emulator. No, it's not a hoax. Team Fail0verflow has a GitHub repository with all the patches needed for Linux and its GPU drivers. You can follow their Twitter account for updates.