Atari Founder Proclaims the End of Gaming Piracy

OMGZombies writes "Speaking on a conference held yesterday in New York, the Atari founder Nolan Bushnell said that a new stealth encryption chip called TPM will 'absolutely stop piracy of gameplay'. The chip is apparently being embedded on most of the new computer motherboards and is said to be 'uncrackable by people on the internet and by giving away passwords' though it won't stop movie or music piracy, since 'if you can watch it and you can hear it, you can copy it.'"

This quote will stand the test of time

[Gay for Linux]

"TPM will absolutely piracy of gameplay. Also, 640K ought to be enough for anybody."

With apologies to the original author...

[Anonymous Coward]

Your proposal advocates a

(X) technical ( ) legislative ( ) market-based ( ) vigilante

approach to fighting video game piracy. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)

( ) Video game pirates can easily use it to harvest gamer addresses
(X) Legitimate gamer uses would be affected
( ) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks
(X) It will stop video game piracy for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
(X) Users of gamer will not put up with it
( ) Microsoft will not put up with it
( ) The police will not put up with it
(X) Requires too much cooperation from video game pirates
( ) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
( ) Many gamers cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers
( ) Video game pirates don't care about invalid addresses in their lists
( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business

Specifically, your plan fails to account for

( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it
(X) Lack of centrally controlling authority for gamer
( ) Open relays in foreign countries
( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all gamer addresses
(X) Asshats
( ) Jurisdictional problems
( ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
( ) Huge existing software investment in SMTP
( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack
(X) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by gamer
( ) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
( ) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
( ) Extreme profitability of video game piracy
( ) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
( ) Technically illiterate politicians
( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with video game pirates
(X) Dishonesty on the part of video game pirates themselves
( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
( ) Outlook

and the following philosophical objections may also apply:

(X) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever
been shown practical
( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation
( ) Blacklists suck
( ) Whitelists suck
( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored
( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks
( ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
( ) Playing games should be free
( ) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
(X) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses
( ) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
(X) Temporary/one-time gamer addresses are cumbersome
( ) I don't want the government playing my games
( ) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough

Furthermore, this is what I think about you:

(X) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
( ) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it.
( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your
house down!

I was going to make a snazzy comment...

[Valkyre]

I was going to make a snazzy comment on how TPM was toyed with re: OSX and it doesn't seem to be making any trouble....then compare safedisc and securom and how it was so easy to modify executables to bypass the security....or how much more controlled-hardware environments like playstations and xboxes were no trouble at all to break....

Then I remembered someone claims the end of piracy every year and I should go back to my coffee.

delusional at best

[BuckaBooBob]

If it can be Encrypted it can be decrypted..

Then there are people that buy Copy Protection... "Ok.. if it Truly can't be copied.. Then how am I going to mass produce it." never seems to enter their minds.

There really needs to be some studies done on people that make these types of Claims.. Exactly how delusional are these people.. or is it a simple case of diminished mental capacity.. Or is it not the people that make the claims but the people that buy into the marketing Hype that have the issues that should be studied.

These types of Schemes should be rated in the number of Weeks from launch it will take for the technology to be Hacked/Cracked/Made Irrelevant by the "Internet People"..

I think I heard this type of statement before...

[hyperz69]

09-f9-11-02-9d-74-e3-5b-d8-41-56-c5-63-56-88-c0

Re:Yes.

[nog_lorp]

So now, crackers will actually have to buy the game and then dump the decrypted content. Atleast that guarantees another purchase.

Re:Famous last words

[Anonymous Coward]

Nolan Bushnell said that a new stealth encryption chip called TPM will 'absolutely stop piracy of gameplay'.

Good lord, what year is this article from.

Re:Fire up the soldering irons...

[Hognoxious]

people modding their Wiis

I'm Jewish, you insensitive clod!

The end of gaming piracy!

[Kingrames]

Sadly, the chip was stolen before it could be used.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

This is misfiled.

[Pig Hogger]

It should be filed under "famous last words" instead.

Oblig

[Project2501a]

but I still don't see this as being anything more than a minor inconvenience for the pirates.

It's but a thought in the wind for the ninjas

Re:Fire up the soldering irons...

[Anonymous Coward]

Dude, you were so awesome when you were 12.

Re:Fire up the soldering irons...

[maxume]

I hate it when the cops come to my house because I haven't bought an Xbox yet.

I always just lie to them and tell them that my cousin stole it, it usually keeps them off my back for a couple of weeks.

Theft of pong, and space invaders from Atari

[sjwest]

Is apparently still a major problem. You learn something everyday

Re:You don't own your computer ...

[GMFTatsujin]

If the media companies had their way, they'd basically get rid of the entire concept of general purpose computing and be stuck with an iPod.

Fixed that for you.

Re:Fire up the soldering irons...

[Wandering Wombat]

No-one needs to work on Ozzy... his body is self-regenerating. He'll last until the heat death of the Universe!

Again...

Re:Fire up the soldering irons...

[milsoRgen]

Bzzzt, wrong. Laws are meant to protect corporate and government interests.

True that. It seems once you get the basic ten commandmentish rules in the books the law makers end up with entirely to much time on their hands to serve their own interests.

Re:Fire up the soldering irons...

[dadragon]

I'm Jewish, you insensitive clod!

So what you're saying is, your parent's modded your Wii?

Re:Atari founder cries wolf about piracy-ending ch

[Anonymous Coward]

I still giggle like a schoolgirl whenever someone says "dongle disk encryption."

(Tee hee!)

Re:Fire up the soldering irons...

[Goldberg's Pants]

I'm sure if the media companies could go back and retroactively change the commands it would be:

And God said: Thou shalt not violate copyright, nor burn for thy friend thy latest Avril Lavigne CD.

Re:Fire up the soldering irons...

[iminplaya]

...given enough time and effort it's possible to circumvent it...

There oughta be a law!