Vuvuzelas Blare On Pirated Copies of Music Game 320
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."
Re:Detection (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:Detection (Score:5, Informative)
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).
Re:butbutbutbutbut (Score:5, Informative)
Believe it or not, most pirates don't sit there and play through the games they just cracked. The ones that do the pirating usually do it so they can disrupt it with their name attached saying "We're the first to hack XYZ". This is why Razor 1911 has a wiki page, because they're so damn famous. [wikipedia.org]
GTA IV (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Re:butbutbutbutbut (Score:2, Informative)
It was covered on /. back in 2001: http://slashdot.org/articles/01/01/25/1343218.shtml [slashdot.org]
Re:Detection (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Using a Flash Cart "Cheat" function... (Score:3, Informative)
Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)