Sony and Nintendo Step Up Anti-Piracy Efforts 147
Edge reports that Sony and Nintendo are both expanding their anti-piracy operations in an effort to reduce piracy rates on the PSP and the DS respectively. Nintendo has hired Neil Boyd, who handled anti-piracy operations for Warner Brothers, to help them demonstrate their "willingness to take action against criminals who are making money out of the infringement of games developers' copyright." Sony has taken a more direct approach, choosing to alter the hardware used in the PSP Go so that things like the Pandora battery can no longer be used to alter the firmware.
Re:Oh please nintendo don't do it! (Score:5, Interesting)
ps: Here, NDS flash cartridges are even sold at the groceries...
Totally Retarded (Score:4, Interesting)
in every way.......
Sony produced the PSP Go for a very specific market, whether they understood it or not. People buying that are not interested in stupid fucking "snackables". Dear God, they make it sound like something a 2nd grader would eat at lunch.
The PSP Go is for people that *already* understand how to take existing UMD's in their collection and convert them and play them on the PSP. The attraction of the Go model is more memory, less power consumption (UMDless), and a smaller form factor, and possibly longer battery life.
Their attempt to cripple the unit so that you cannot play UMD backups, while being blatantly offensive towards supporters of Fair Use, just totally destroyed their *real* market for the product.
I am actually interested in the PSP Go. ONLY IF I CAN PLAY MY UMD BACKUPS. If not, then STFU Sony and you don't get my money.
Total Morons.
P.S - Yes... it can be used for pirated ISOs as well as Fair Use ISOs, but that does not make my point any less valid about their market does it?
Re:Totally Retarded (Score:3, Interesting)
"If I make a backup copy of a UMD game I purchased, it can never be anything remotely resembling theft.... .... Of course we could make the argument that since we bought the original liscenses to old games we don't have to pay for them again when they become available (i.e. once you buy a liscense it can't be revoked).
The fair use case you mention is an excellent example of hypocrisy of the industry itself when it comes to old games they re-release but to whom the customer already owns the license to access it. Ironically enough "piracy" is justified in this case if we are to take the "license" seriously (I already bought the license to play x game x years ago, you re-release it, I still have the license, etc).
Re:And yet they've given up on Wii piracy (Score:3, Interesting)
The've shown that they believe that Wii homebrew == Wii piracy (having attacked generic homebrew almost exclusively, not just piracy tools, and considering that they harassed us when we attempted to notify them of a security issue)
I seem to remember using Google to search for the phrase "homebrew is piracy" and ending up on a page that argues that Nintendo holds one or more patents on the DS Game Card protocol. If this is true, then homebrew devices infringe patents.
Re:Oh please nintendo don't do it! (Score:5, Interesting)
Hell, eventually they managed to make all pirated game self-loading and because the Dreamcast used a proprietary disk format that could hold more then 750mb, some people managed to remove content from the game to fit it on a regular CD. Thus making the GD-Rom's piracy measure of going past the 750mb useless.
I read a post-mortem article from one of the leads at SEGA after support was dropped. They took a gamble with the Dreamcast and knew they had to reach a certain number of units sold both in games and in systems to be able to compete with the Playstation 2. They never officially blamed piracy but they said it definitely hurt them, especially in the last six months before the PS2 arrived.
In my opinion the arrival of the PS2 didn't kill the Dreamcast, piracy did.
Not their only bonehead move (Score:3, Interesting)
If, instead of putting the "SELECT" and "START" buttons in the little round spot in the mirror-image position of where the thumbstick is on the Go, they had put in another thumbstick and put those two buttons somewhere else, they would have made ports of shooters and other PS2 and PS3 games to the PSP a lot easier. Backward compatibility with old PSP games would be trivial - the old games don't "know" about the second thumbstick, so they'd automatically ignore it.
I like my PSP quite a bit. It has served me well on long flights and on bus trips between Rio and Sao Paulo. I've watched movies and TV eps on it, and I've enjoyed some of the games, especially some of the shooters like the Syphon Filter games, which I think do the best job of working around the problem of having only one joystick, but it would be nicer if all the shooters could have the same controls, which would be the case if there were two thumbsticks plus the direction and "shape" buttons. Y'know... like EVERY console controller. And as I said, it would make ports of console games that much easier, which could greatly expand the number of games available for the PSP.
It's a huge pain in the ass to switch between different shooters on the PSP, because I end up confusing the control schemes between different games. Since the controls are only that different from game to game because the games use different workarounds for the single-joystick problem, the solution is obvious... to everyone but the geniuses at Sony.
The PSP hardware has gone through three updates in the last few years, and the most obvious change to strengthen the platform has not been part of any of them. Instead, they've focused on making it smaller and lighter, which I don't want at all. In fact, I have a case and leave the PSP in it at all times because the whole thing feels sturdier in my hands. One of the reasons I chose the PSP over the DS was because the DS felt flimsy and easy-to-break to me. So of course, when Sony updated their hardware three times, it was to make it lighter and smaller, but not to, y'know, do the one thing that would really improve the platform as a whole.
I will give them credit for the video out that they added on the 2000, though. That's the one feature of the newer models I really wish I had. Battery life is a decent one, but I just bought an extra battery (with a larger capacity than the original Sony one) and make sure both are charged before I leave on a trip. I also use the power cord when I can (in airports or bus stations, at home, etc.). I've never had to quit playing because of lack of battery power.
Re:And yet they've given up on Wii piracy (Score:3, Interesting)
So to me it's no wonder that for Nintendo, Wii homebrew == Wii piracy because that's exactly what it is.
Nintendo states on warioworld.com that it categorically declines to deal with students, hobbyists, and microISVs: one needs a dedicated office and a track record of published titles. So for which platform should students and hobbyists be building a portfolio to start a company? Most PC monitors are just too small for four people.
Even installing homebrew is not for the faint of heart
Bannerbombing a Wii into the Homebrew Channel installer involves loading files onto an SD card, putting it in the front of your console, and going into the Wii settings. And you probably already "voided the warranty" by owning your console for 13 months.
Re:Oh please nintendo don't do it! (Score:3, Interesting)
How come the arrival of super-easy piracy for the PS2 (Available shortly after V2 arrived on the market, so a matter of months) didn't kill it?
Or the fact that pirating a game for the XBOX (also available mere months after XBOX's existence in the market) meant faster load times and easier game selection?
And how come the Gamecube lagged behind both, despite that "quality" piracy wasn't available until several years after its launch?
Or the PS3 lagging behind, despite no widespread piracy? Or the XBOX 360 surpassing it despite simple-as-a-flash piracy? Or the Wii also surpassing it with also rather simple pirate mods?
Your argument is backwards. Pirateable consoles have always been the winners. Look at the NES, they didn't just make 1,000,000-in-1 carts and do away with the lockout chip, they pirated the ENTIRE SYSTEM!
Dreamcast died because of a lack of marketing and availability. I never even saw one in my entire life, and I own almost all consoles from most all generations. It's the 3D0 of the modern world.
Re:And yet they've given up on Wii piracy (Score:4, Interesting)
You do NOT need to take those risks just to run homebrew, and running homebrew is pretty much completely safe these days (there are always some theoretical risks risks, of course, but the practical incidence of issues is just about zero). If you disagree, please point me to a single report of someone having bricked their console by using our official installer (people who have previously applied warez hacks need not apply). Again, you're confusing the tools you need to just run applications (that is, Bannerbomb at a minimum, and then The Homebrew Channel if you want convenience) with the tools used to pirate games: not just the loaders - those are safe - but the system software (IOS) hacks and the extremely nasty exploits used to install them (because the people who write these things aren't real reverse engineers and don't know any better).
Piracy tools are extremely dangerous for two reasons: 1) you need to fundamentally patch the Wii software to run pirate games (so it'll read game data from another source), and 2) the people behind them are often highly incompetent. As a result, you get things like cIOScorp, which replaces every single version of IOS with a single patched version. That's the equivalent of taking a whole bunch of shared object sonames for a single library (each with different ABI quirks) and replacing them all with a single, patched version. Where this shared object is as critical as the C library.
Besides the actual insane hacks they use, their installers are almost universally crappy. They don't check return codes, so often they'll uninstall some critical piece of system software, then fail to install it again. Running any piracy tools while your internal storage is near full is almost a guaranteed recipe for a permanent brick. I also know this because I make a device to help repair issues generally caused by using out-of-region games and people often ask me if they can use it to repair their consoles after one of these accidents (the answer, invariably, is to send the Wii to Nintendo and pay their normal repair fee). I've had dozens and dozens of people tell me personally about having bricked their Wiis with piracy software, and none at all who have had any issues installing homebrew using our installer.
You don't need nasty hacks to play imports. Playing imports with homebrew is perfectly safe, since it only involves a replacement game loader that doesn't check for the region (it's something optional, not enforced by the IOS security software). This is totally safe (and useless to warez games). The critical difference is that warez game loaders need to patch IOS so it can at game runtime continue to load data from whatever media the game is stored on. Region-free loaders are just disc loaders, you can write one in a couple hundred lines of code using the stock Wii software and without the need for any hacks beyond running PowerPC code. You don't even need to touch a single file on NAND - you could run a region-free disc loader from Bannerbomb, which is basically provably safe because it doesn't touch persistent storage. This is completely different from piracy tools, all of which need to permanently alter system software one way or another.
To debunk your specific claims:
The Homebrew Channel is an _installable_ application that makes _zero_ changes to your firmware. It installs itself exactly as a WiiWare channel would. Its installer perfor
Re:And yet they've given up on Wii piracy (Score:3, Interesting)
Wrong. The Homebrew Channel uses an undisclosed exploit to install itself that the warez people don't know about. Currenty they're using an older exploit that Nintendo failed to patch to install their stuff. The patch cycle for the past couple of updates has been like this:
- Nintendo releases update, breaks everything
- We use an exploit that we developed to release a new version of HBC (this is useless for the pirates because they still can't use that to install their patched IOSes, it only lets you run homebrew without installing hacked versions of anything)
- The pirates discover some complicated, dangerous, typically illegal trick to get their stuff to work anyway. The latest couple have been IOS16 (part of a leaked service center disc) and an older exploit that comex wrote which went largely unnoticed until someone realized that it still worked on the latest firmware.
The people behind warez utilities are quite incompetent and unable to come up with exploits of their own (or reverse engineer ours). However, they've been lucky enough / Nintendo has been stupid enough so far that they've found (crude) workarounds for the past couple of patch cycles.
However, since BootMii has been released now (which gives users full ARM code execution, no questions asked), the pirates will just use that next time Nintendo fixes their exploits, so they no longer have to come up with exploits of their own.
The issue isn't security through obscurity. It's just that Nintendo's security sucks. Examples: plaintext RAM with no checksums, no signature verification for already installed content, the strncmp() signature fiasco, not adding a dummy IOS16 the first time they tried to fix strncmp() across the board, duplicating production keys into the IOS binary code, no NX type protection, poor security practices for IOS drivers, blatantly exploitable system calls and IOS RPC calls, and the list goes on.