Atari Founder Proclaims the End of Gaming Piracy 831
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.'"
Fire up the soldering irons... (Score:5, Insightful)
Sounds like a challenge!
No encryption scheme is 100%; some are just better than others. When will people learn!
I wonder.. (Score:5, Insightful)
Play it (Score:5, Insightful)
if you can play it, you can copy it.
idiot. (Score:0, Insightful)
If its something more clever, such as an encryption scheme, the program can be decrypted by analyzing memory contents after the program is ran.
How many times has the industry claimed to have found the holy grail in anti-piracy measures only to be foiled and severely embarrassed soon afterward?
Re:Fire up the soldering irons... (Score:5, Insightful)
PR department at Atari is having a heart attack (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Fire up the soldering irons... (Score:5, Insightful)
- You will have the perfect copy-protection, but only a select few will buy your game.
- There will be a crack that solves the problem of copy-protection.
And anyway - there has to be some code that accesses the TPM chip, and that also means that given enough time and effort it's possible to circumvent it, or even simulate the TPM chip.Copy protection has been tried before - always with dubious result.
Physical access == game over (Score:5, Insightful)
There is no such thing as un-crackable. There is, however, a level where cracking becomes cost-inefficient.
I still doubt TPM will take us to that level, because it will have to have almost universal adoption and that will take many years. Software or hardware exploits will be found, and adoption/versioning issues will keep them from being fixed.
They should really stop fighting the wave, and put all their anti-piracy money into creative talent and developers.
Re:Fire up the soldering irons... (Score:4, Insightful)
What I see happening is a demand for the manufacturers that will not release boards with this TPM and avoidance of any company embedding them. They will eventually be cracked anyways, so even when they do exist they will eventually become uneffective.
Look at all the anti-piracy measures for the available consoles. They have been cracked, sometimes taking longer but it will be done. Hell it might even bring about mod chips for PCs and as the post's title goes, I'll gladly fire up my soldering iron to bypass this bullshit.
Re:Fire up the soldering irons... (Score:5, Insightful)
OMG Trustable Computing! (Score:5, Insightful)
He smoketh the crypto crack (Score:4, Insightful)
It is not great at letting Nolan Bushnell look into my machine and see what code I'm running.
He smoketh the crypto crack. He should read the TPM spec and see what it really does.
Re:I wonder.. (Score:5, Insightful)
Sure they have, but that doesn't affect the cost of doing business. They are losing customers if they don't keep making advances to try to prevent theft.
There are a lot of people out there who would pay money for a game but choose not to because they can get it for free. If I'm not mistaken, that's what they are trying to prevent -- losing the "would-be" customers to piracy, not those who never had any intention of purchasing it in the first place.
What's the point? (Score:2, Insightful)
Could someone explain... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Fire up the soldering irons... (Score:4, Insightful)
Famous last words (Score:5, Insightful)
Reasons why he's dead wrong (in no particular order and by no means comprehensive):
-TPM in and of itself won't protect against piracy at all if the implementation is botched.
-Tying purchased software or media to a specific hardware device p*sses people off when they repair, replace or upgrade and their DRMed stuff no longer works.
-Talk about opening up Asian markets, etc, is proceeding under the flawed assumption that those who acquire illegal copies of a game would even purchase a legit copy.
-Restricting your potential install base in this manner will reduce exposure, popularity, and ultimately sales of your game despite the opposite being your goal.
Re:Fire up the soldering irons... (Score:2, Insightful)
I tagged this article (Score:5, Insightful)
I own my computer. I bought the hardware. I should be able to do whatever I want with it. The reasons the concept of copyright has been created are not compelling enough to essentially force every computer to have a police chip in it to make sure we honor it.
Atari is claiming this? (Score:5, Insightful)
Trusted Computing uses the TPM module, it's in many but FAR from all computers. It's in this laptop, it can be ADDED to my desktop's motherboard. It's designed to store measures of critical OS and hardware components like the BIOS to prevent tampering. Modify a file who's hash is stored in the TPM and is checked by a critical process and the system won't boot. There's a random number generator in there and yeah probably a private keypair too. So what I can only EVER play my game on this one machine now? It's locked to this machine? Games upgrade their stuff more than anyone else and he thinks this is the great panacea? You could do this today with your own code much the way Vista does, has that helped adoption? The TPM might be a more effective way to do it but it won't guarantee sales.
There are several games on the market and coming to market that I have not nor will I purchase simply because the DRM is too intrusive. Games that require me to be connected to the 'net for "verification" to play standalone or that can only be purchased and downloaded via DRM'd mechanisms aren't of interest to me. I and others have voted with our wallets.
Want to KILL the commercial game industry? Implement this! This guy sounds like your typical PHB who has stumbled upon something in a trade rag, seized upon the idea, and is trumpeting to anyone in management that will listen what a great idea he's found. In short he's a fool. He also sounds like he believes that everyone who's pirating games now will suddenly be forced to start buying them, wow is he and the music industry going to be in for a shock when they finally figure out this isn't the case!
GL Atari, was nice knowing you.
Re:Fire up the soldering irons... (Score:5, Insightful)
Hiya (Score:5, Insightful)
Anyway, thanks for letting me know about TPM. I'll be sure not to purchase hardware from vendors including it on their MBs, since I obviously cannot trust them.
Re:Fire up the soldering irons... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Fire up the soldering irons... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:pplz on teh internetz! (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:pplz on teh internetz! (Score:5, Insightful)
It's important to remember that you only need 1% of people (or even 0.1%) to have the knowledge and inclination to perform these mods, if it allows them to make unencrypted copies of the data. All you need is a small group of dedicated hackers who generate cracked copies of games, and release these in the usual way (bit-torrent, etc.). Just as movie release groups have a lot of specialized knowledge and connections, thereby making copyright infringement trivially easy for the masses, so too will anti-TPM groups appear, who will trivialize this kind of circumvention for the masses.
TPM doesn't make copyright infringement impossible. It merely adds another layer of complexity for the hackers. Alas, hackers enjoy the challenge of breaking through these layers.
Re:He smoketh the crypto crack (Score:3, Insightful)
"They" don't get to authenticate anything on my machine.
For Bushnell to do what he wants to do, he requires a level of control over the initial provisioning of TPMs that he's not going to get.
I'm old, and I'm tired of these people (Score:5, Insightful)
That said, I would hope the industry would LEARN from the failure of music DRM and the HD DVD stuff (note how Blu-Ray is failing to fly off the shelves -- it was the format war, not DRM that kept it from selling, right? RIGHT!?!?)
I am sick and tired of being treated like a criminal. And that's what all this technology does. I don't share the optimism that every solution will be defeated. Impenetrable control is possible. But luckily the industry hasn't been very good at this so far. But compare the ease of defeating CSS with the difficulty of defeating ACCS and you see they are learning.
The best way to defeat this is to refuse to buy hardware that has the controls. I sincerely hope Blu-Ray dies an ignimonious death. As much as I want an HD video format (and as long as I only have 1MBit bandwidth), DVD is good enough.
Stop treating me like a criminal and I'll buy your crap. Until then, get bent.
Re:I wonder.. (Score:5, Insightful)
Adding an encryption chip may prevent the piracy from those who can afford it, but like something for nothing. Now they'll be forced to pay up if they really want the game. It''s a no-brainer win situation for the developers.
Re:Famous last words (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:TPM and apple... (Score:3, Insightful)
http://www.osxbook.com/book/bonus/chapter10/tpm/
You don't own your computer ... (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm not interested in pirating someone's games or music, but I'm just waiting until a fairly obvious operation suddenly becomes disallowed to me because some peckerwood decided I should never be able to do that on my own damned PC for fear that I might be doing something they don't like.
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 appliance they could control and which would force us to become a monetized revenue source with marketing options controlled by them.
I'm getting tired of crappy solutions which are mostly just restricting what I can already do.
Cheers
Re:I wonder.. (Score:5, Insightful)
I love Nolan, but... (Score:4, Insightful)
He must not have had his Wheaties that morning. That's the really dumbest thing I've seen him say in a long time.
He says this:
But he also says this:
So tell me Nolan, exactly how does that work? Do the bytes that make up movies have a different flavor somehow than the bytes in a computer program?
In short Nolan, never underestimate the power of fifteen year old kids who live in the Netherlands. Be prepared to eat those words.
PS: Wiki has a page up on TPM already. [wikipedia.org] Along with links to already existing attacks. [wikipedia.org]
Movies can be camcorded. Games can't. (Score:4, Insightful)
So this brings about a more important Question.. (Score:5, Insightful)
They won't be able to blame piracy, which in actuality has been a promotional tool.
Without that promotional tool, well.... out of sight, out or mind.
Its been long established and even in some cases intentionally applied, that the non-legal distribution of software helps promotion of the software in sales.
This non-legal spread of software started before the word "Piracy" was coined by Bill Gates (as it applies to software). And Bill Gates profited off of the non-legal spread of his BASIC for the Altair computer.
I believe there are studies of this same drop in sales regarding music as piracy is cracked down on by unreasonable aggressive RIAA legal system tactics.
Re:Hiya (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Yes. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:pplz on teh internetz! (Score:4, Insightful)
Until you grant setgid Administrators to the game (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:It'd be pretty hard to do (Score:3, Insightful)
"there's no reasonable way to hack it"
Re:Fire up the soldering irons... (Score:5, Insightful)
Not only that, but we have to bear the cost of buying machines which have features we don't want in them. The manufacturers sure as hell aren't doing it for free or recovering their costs from the ones who want this TPM crap installed.
An EULA on hardware would be evil -- it's a general purpose computing device, I own it, I retain right of first sale. You (well, not you
Sadly, the media companies seem to have far more control over such things than we do.
Cheers
Re:Fire up the soldering irons... (Score:2, Insightful)
The motive (Score:1, Insightful)
"As soon as the installed base of the TPM hardware chip gets large enough, we will start to see revenues coming from Asia and India at a time when before it didn't make sense."
Re:I wonder.. (Score:3, Insightful)
Well, if you can't afford it, don't play it.
I'm not in favor of these measures, but I hardly see why the developers should give a crap about people who can't afford their product. They're, ultimately, not the customer (in any sense).
On the one hand, I don't want hardware installed in my machine that limits my legitimate uses. On the other hand, it's not obvious why the people who can't afford it are the problem of the game publishers.
The middle ground isn't to encourage piracy/borrowing/unlicensed copies on the basis you can't afford it. It isn't OK to cripple the hardware of everyone to protect the rights of content holders who have yet to prove that my machine will be infringing -- that's like outlawing cars because someone might speed or use it as a getaway car.
Significant, non-infringing uses should preclude "possible, suspected infringement, by some people".
Cheers
Re:Fire up the soldering irons... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Fire up the soldering irons... (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, the sheepel should just not buy any game, music or video that infringes upon their rights of free use.
If Joe sixpack would go and ask three questions. 1. can I make a backup copy 2. Can I shift formats so I can play it on a different device and 3. Can I sell it to some one else who can use it just the same as I did when I own it?
If they would just not buy anything that broke those rules. Locked down media would not be an issue. Corporations would not be pushing "by you purchasing this, you give up your fair use rights". Instead they would have to deal with fair use as they always have. On a level playing field with their customers.
To bad the more they see ways to remove pesky "fair use" rights and the more laws they make against circumvention of digital protection. They have to deal with the other end. Bandwith becoming cheaper, and it is easier to distribute and use a "broken" copy of a digtial product than it is to use the original.
Re:pplz on teh internetz! (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Fire up the soldering irons... (Score:5, Insightful)
That won't work with multiplayer any more than fake CD keys will, but that's nothing new. I can't say I like the way the corporations are trying to make general purpose PCs into special-purpose appliances, though; it feels too much like "Right to Read".
Re:Fire up the soldering irons... (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Fire up the soldering irons... (Score:5, Insightful)
What makes me particularly uncomfortable is that the software manufacturers don't advertise what security features they're including in the software. These days, they don't even bother to mention that the discs are not CDROMs, despite being discs that appear to be. They generally break the specification and work unreliably. The Office XP disc which came with my laptop a few years ago, would be incredibly loud compared to other discs, and the entire laptop would shake. (I don't understand why and I can't figure out how a particular disc would behave like that)
Any company that pulls that kind of crap on me can expect to never sell another disc to me. More likely than not, I'll just stop buying commercial games from those studios all together. Open source games have come a really long way, and many of them are incredibly well done in pretty much every aspect. Supertux, Secret Maryo Chronicles and quantum minigolf are good examples. Then there are the obsolete but still fun games which have been given over to the OSS community to maintain and update.
I don't mind a bit of protection, but realistically, every form has been broken up until this point, and it seems fantastic to me that this would change at some point, it definitely seems like a challenge that the crackers are going to win. Much of the time it's done with in a matter of weeks. Why I should have to type in a serial number and insert the disc, when pirated copies out there don't require either one is really beyond me. Seems to me that software pirates have far better customer service than most of the commercial outfits do.
Re:I wonder.. (Score:5, Insightful)
The principle problem I have is the companies and how they want it both ways. When you purchase software you're not buying it, you're "licensing" it. But if something happens to the media your licensed software came on, like it was scratched or broken and rendered unusable, you have to purchase another media at full price, despite the fact you've already "licensed" it.
Use services like Steam and this problem goes away. Although Steam has a few issues if you don't have an active net connection as well, so that could be improved on. But I vastly prefer their idea that once you buy a game, you can reinstall it on as many of your machines as you want so long as you're only playing it on one at a time. And there's no media to lose or need to have in the CD tray.
ID had probably the perfect setup back in the Q3Arena days. Buy our game, then take the disk and install it on all the machines in the office, everyone can play a LAN game for free. But if you want to play online, you need your own key. It was perfect, and it was a wonderful promotional tool. I know at least a dozen people in the office who got so hooked on Q3 during our LAN parties that they went out and bought Q3 to play online. All of those purchasers would never have even thought about it unless they were able to try it for free like they did.
Re:I wonder.. (Score:4, Insightful)
Because saying "if you can't afford it, don't play it" is not a solution.
It's amazing how many people toss economics out the window in favor of vigilantism where piracy is concerned.
Re:Fire up the soldering irons... (Score:5, Insightful)
Besides that god also said to kill anyone caught working on the sabbath. Should that law also be implemented?
Let's go over this again... (Score:3, Insightful)
You would have thought that any company involved in any measure of cryptography would have read Bruce Schneier. Wanna take bets on how long it takes before this scheme is cracked?
DMA (Score:5, Insightful)
A game or other program could license itself to a particular piece of hardware, given that that particular piece of hardware (the motherboard) has a cryptochip. How does a program then verify that it is only running on that particular hardware? It sounds like, from the article, the ploy is to encrypt part of the game program (or all of it) with the onboard TPM's public key, so that only the motherboard with that particular key can decrypt the game. Part of the registration or installation process would be to contact the vendor and obtain the part of the program in question, encrypted for your particular TPM.
That's great, but (and I love the word 'but' when referring to someone's Genius Plan to Implement DRM)...the game has to live in RAM unencrypted, or it would be too slow to play. In this case, I can make a specialized PCI/PCIe card whose sole purpose is to dump RAM. It will just DMA read all available memory and put it on its own 4GB compactflash card or some such. As soon as the unencrypted game hits my RAM, I'll have it to do with as I please. If the motherboard implements an IOMMU? I'll just hit my RAM with compressed air and freeze it, then read the bits out and hack as I please.
DRM won't work because its trust metric is screwed up. It basically says, "I trust that I'm going to run on particular hardware
Re:Fire up the soldering irons... (Score:5, Insightful)
The only current widespread, popular DRM I can think of that hasn't been broken is the copy-protection on PS3 games, and that's likely because only Sony fanboys seem to care about PS3 games.
Re:Fire up the soldering irons... (Score:3, Insightful)
Either the game vendor's keys came with your TPM when you got it.. That's a problem.
Or the game makes a key pair in your TPM when it is installed. That is not a problem. Make your own TPM that lets you export the private keys. The application won't know the difference.
TPMs, as the spec says, do not protect against someone with physical access.
Re:I wonder.. (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm sure X% of people pirate games because they can't afford it. That said, "can't afford" is a very fluid notion-- I have a step-sister who "can't afford" health insurance, but just bought a brand new 42" TV. She sees no problem with that.
Frankly, people who genuinely can't afford games probably also can't afford computers or consoles to run the games on. People who claim they can't afford games are probably lying.
Adding a chip that prevents piracy wont result in any additional income from people who simply cannot afford the games to begin with.
Probably, but it might result in a huge amount of additional income from people who can afford the games and pirate them anyway. A group you're leaving out in your analysis.
Re:With apologies to the original author... (Score:3, Insightful)
Nope. Doesn't stop piracy. [thepiratebay.org]
And they just lost another purchase -- I might have bought NWN because of the Linux port, but I'm not going to tolerate a complete lack of an offline mode, with no features to make up for it...
Re:Fire up the soldering irons... (Score:4, Insightful)
The End is Near - Not Copy but Exec Protection (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Fire up the soldering irons... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Fire up the soldering irons... (Score:2, Insightful)
although the PS3 is still holding out after 2 years of intensive hacking
Re:Fire up the soldering irons... (Score:5, Insightful)
All of you guys have COMPLETELY missed his point. He's neither dragging religious debate into this, nor is he saying modding is stealing. He is saying that "thou shalt not steal" was a similar absolute statement, which people break all the damn time. The point is that making absolute, sweeping statements like "no one can break this encryption" is pointless.
I think some people here are just a bit too trigger-happy with their flamethrowers. Jeez.
Re:Fire up the soldering irons... (Score:5, Insightful)
"and that will spell out a death sentence for motherboard manufacturers that do not support it."
Fixed it properly. The Windows monopoly is very strong, and Intel has been caught cooperating with them before in some unsavory market manipulations. AMD is interesting and useful, but show no signs of bucking against thei particular "feature".
Re:Fire up the soldering irons... (Score:4, Insightful)
This is why I fully support emulation. If you actually don't require the console in question to play a game, why the heck are you spending 400 freakin' dollars to play the games?
Don't fool yourselves. *ANY* game console is already defective by design.
Re:Fire up the soldering irons... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Fire up the soldering irons... (Score:2, Insightful)
And if you spend years making a car on the promise that you'll sell a hundred of them. And then sell one to a person who makes exact copies of it... well you probably wont make any more cars, will you?
Re:pplz on teh internetz! (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Fire up the soldering irons... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Fire up the soldering irons... (Score:2, Insightful)
I think you're both right. Laws are meant to promote good conduct and accountability. Laws are used to protect corporate and government interests.
Re:Fire up the soldering irons... (Score:3, Insightful)
Ok let me change gears. I also don't cry for buggy-whip makers, but they lost their jobs because of changing technology, not because someone came up with a cheaper way to make whips.
Actually, I just don't think _any_ car analogy will work here. Ok, here's one: Your neighbor comes over with his micrometer and contour gage and recreates *plans* for your car. Then he goes out and buys the steel and plastic and makes it himself. He can try to sell it, but then people should know that they have a choice between a toyota Corolla and bob's garage Corolla. Maybe there isn't a difference; if not, then the market will probably shift towards bob. And in this situation, I would still have to side with the car makers. Your argument doesn't really work when you *want* the car but buy the copy when your defense (the buggy whips) is that you no longer want the car and that is why you shouldn't have to pay them. You still do want a car. You still do want to play games. You are just looking to circumvent the costs that other people have payed for centuries (i.e., paying someone else to do something for you, like programming a game).
I think that in the real world if everyone made cheap copies of toyotas, then toyota would go out of business. Then you would either be stuck with 2008 toyotas forever, or someone would come up with something new. They would invest the capital to create something new. They would become the new toyota and the cycle repeats.
Like I said, I don't think that you can equate music/games/movies with buggy whips. People WANT music/games/movies whereas buggy whips and steam engineers are simply not NEEDED anymore. There is a world of difference there- Mars, Inc. going out of business because no one eats Snickers anymore vs. Mars, Inc. going out of business because no one pays for snickers anymore, even though they are taking and eating snickers like wildfire.
-b
Re:Fire up the soldering irons... (Score:3, Insightful)