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!
Re:Fire up the soldering irons... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Ya, that is the one thing I would like to see. With the rate of development for Linux on the PS3, I think we won't have to wait long.
Comment removed (Score:4, Funny)
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:Fire up the soldering irons... (Score:5, Informative)
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Fire up the soldering irons... (Score:4, Interesting)
It's really this kind of ignorant, the corporate masters must be right bull, which allows them to get away with it. The reason why the PS3 has that sort of restriction is so that you don't run OSS or Linux compatible games on it instead of the games that Sony wants you to buy.
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?
Re:Fire up the soldering irons... (Score:5, Funny)
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, Informative)
Make me one while you're at it and then I'll have spare parts. Thanks.
Re:Fire up the soldering irons... (Score:5, Insightful)
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:5, Funny)
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.
Re:Fire up the soldering irons... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Fire up the soldering irons... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Fire up the soldering irons... (Score:4, Interesting)
I therefore assume the rest of that microsoft article is a similar load of bullshit. That said, no, changing RAM alone will not usually trigger a reactivation.
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:5, Insightful)
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:5, Funny)
Re:Fire up the soldering irons... (Score:5, Funny)
So what you're saying is, your parent's modded your Wii?
Re:Fire up the soldering irons... (Score:5, 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: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.
Re:Fire up the soldering irons... (Score:5, Informative)
Sure there will be some code that talks to the TPM - the so called Trusted Computing Base (TCB). This will be built into unchangeable ROM or into the CPU itself. You'll have to work at Intel or AMD to have the technology to get around this.
The game itself will be encrypted with a small wrapper doing the handshake with the manufacturer to load the decryption key into the TPM.
There are only a few options to get around this:
I'll go for (3), that's for sure.
Re:Fire up the soldering irons... (Score:5, Interesting)
tpm works the same way SSL works.
namely there's a PKI.
i.e. each chip has its own key which the user cant get to, which is verified by a certificate chain (ala SSL).
if the software can't verify the chain, it will refuse.
so attacking the TPM chip isn't how you attack it.
you attack is by simply getting the software to verify with a trojaned certificate. We can do that today w/ web browsers by inserting our own "top level" certificate. You think it be difficult w/ games?
Re:Fire up the soldering irons... (Score:5, Interesting)
Or give it a legit TPM chip and just capture the output of whatever it is verifying. I'm guessing its the equiv of a cdkey check that returns some kind of hash needed to play.
Theres no way any large number of actual operations go through this chip as it would kill performance, which is the bread and butter of selling new pc games. All you need to do is replace, skip, or duplicate the pieces of code that depend on this chip.
Re:Fire up the soldering irons... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Fire up the soldering irons... (Score:5, Interesting)
(4) Decrypt and then remove the TPM checking code from the game.
In other words, run it legally on a TPM-equipped machine and then crack the hell out of it and create a new unencrypted executable minus the DRM shit.
Re:Fire up the soldering irons... (Score:4, Interesting)
That's exactly what people did when removing the StarForce DRM from games.
TPM only does validation of certain code. Ultimately an unencrypted copy of the game will end up in memory. Even if the OS is locked down, you can hit the reset button, load Linux and dump the contents of RAM.
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:4, Interesting)
People make mistakes. Programmers are people. And furthermore, this isn't just some theoretical thing. It happened recently to Nintendo, a game company that likely has more money to throw at such problems than most.
Re:Fire up the soldering irons... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Fire up the soldering irons... (Score:5, Interesting)
Defeating copying schemes has always been an educational past-time of mine. I learned to write my 8's almost perfectly when I copied out, number by number, the Quarantine chart mass/velocity chart because I couldn't photocopy the black text on dark brown glossy paper.
I even improved my memory when I memorized both the X-Wing and Tie Fighter manual keywords... that was a lot of manuals for a 12 y/o - I actually think it helped. I wouldn't be where I am today if I wasn't capable of picking up a software manual
So, TPM is a way for me to spice up on my logic probing eh?
Matt
Re:Fire up the soldering irons... (Score:5, Interesting)
One particularly annoying part is that the paying customers must foot the bill for the copy protection. This applies to both motherboard components and licensing the protection scheme itself. Software developers/publishers won't just eat these costs out of the kindness of their hearts. It's usually a triple-hit for the consumer, who not only have to cover hardware and licensing costs, but generally have to endure the burden of intrusive copy-protection schemes. Whether it's entering a long and complex serial key, fumbling for a game disk that's not needed for anything more than verifying authenticity, or some other method -- it all tends to put an undue burden on a customer who has already paid for a product.
In my opinion, this actually encourages some people (who would otherwise pay for a product) to violate the terms of the EULA in one way or another. No matter the copy protection scheme, most cracks allow a user with average technical knowledge are able to easily circumvent a scheme.
Perhaps I'm missing something - but it sure would be nice to abandon these copy protection schemes. I seriously doubt that the practice prevents anything but the most cavalier copying/sharing - and I doubt that this copying is what developers/publishers are targeting.
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)
Re:Fire up the soldering irons... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Fire up the soldering irons... (Score:5, Informative)
Try two years. And AACS still isn't truly broken.
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:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Fire up the soldering irons... (Score:4, Interesting)
I wonder.. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:I wonder.. (Score:5, Insightful)
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: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:I wonder.. (Score:4, Interesting)
I think that neatly addresses your other point:
There are certain DRM schemes I will tolerate, but most of them, even if I buy the game legitimately, I will go straight to the Internet for a crack.
So, piss off the more technically savvy customers, and still lose at least as many customers to piracy as before. Sounds like a no-brainer lose situation for the developers.
Re: (Score:3)
OTOH I also bought several games I've never gotten into-- From CoD4 to Chaos Engine (ancient top down shooter for you younglings), and I might just as well have thrown money out the window. Pirating is a nice way to make sure you actually like the game before shelling out - Demos are nice in theory but they tend to.. well.. suck.
Valve has the right idea with how they're promoting Portal. I'm on the verg
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.
Play it (Score:5, Insightful)
if you can play it, you can copy it.
Re:Play it (Score:5, Informative)
The halting problem... (Score:3, Interesting)
To my knowledge, though, nobody has gotten a system together which is theoretically uncr
This quote will stand the test of time (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Yes. (Score:5, Informative)
The system creates a hash key based upon an analysis of the encrypted software and hardware combined together. If this matches a third party checksum, then the third party releases the decryption key to the encrypted software.
This would make sense for networked console games or PC's with broadband connections.
Re:Yes. (Score:5, Funny)
TPM != NGTCB (Score:5, Informative)
The current version of the TPM is not in the active path at all. Fundamentally, all a TPM 1.2 chip is, is a smart card that is attached to the motherboard. The only difference between it and an Aladdin eToken that is plugged into a USB port are two things. First, are the platform configuration registers, which you manually have to put data into, and second the TPM is resettable from the BIOS screen.
TPM chips, as per the TCG 1.2 spec ship disabled and deactivated, and the user of the machine has to go into BIOS to enable the chip and take physical ownership. Otherwise, it can't be accessed by the machine in any way.
Motherboards TPM chips are rare to find. For a server I built that is to be able to boot unattended, but have all its volumes encrypted using BitLocker, I had to chase down stats on Intel's website and compare them to currently selling motherboards, then cross-reference them to make sure there was an actual chip, and not just BIOS headers.
The Atari founder is quite wrong. Using the TPM won't give much protection from pirates. We've already hard hardware devices encrypting software for decades -- the good old fashioned dongles.
Second, no modern OS ships with a trusted, sealed OS path that is forever static and can be signed from the OS company and passed directly to the TPM like console operating systems are done. Windows Server 2008 has different drivers load for RAID and other low level devices which vary widely party. For example, If you install a new role like Hyper-V on Windows Server 2008, you have to disable and re-enable BitLocker, or the OS path won't be the same. Bitlocker doesn't use OS signatures from a central source, when its enabled, it does its own signing and sealing of the boot path and other user selectable data (BIOS settings, NTFS stats, MBR, partition table.)
The Atari founder assumes too much. PCs are not consoles where having a chip on a static OS and hardware can provide adequate protection. For the TPM chip on PCs to be used for piracy protection, every gaming machine would have to have one physically present, enabled, activated, and ownership taken in the OS the chip is running under, the OS would have to have a static low level kernel that never changes from machine to machine regardless of CPU or devices installed, which for a PC is virtually impossible.
TPM chips also have been emulated too. All it takes is one person to be able to bypass the protection, and the game is cracked.
All and all, in my personal experience, TPM chips are a good thing, especially with BitLocker. A server can boot unattended but still possess hard disk encryption so someone who gets physical access to the box can't just boot a CD and copy off the server's contents. I'd recommend this for co-loc boxes, especially in these times where thieves are learning that a data center heist can net far more cash in information to sell on the ID theft market (or just plain old extortion) than a bank robbery would haul in.
A laptop owned by a company bound by corporate regs can use BitLocker or PGP to ensure the laptop has hard disk encryption, but doesn't have any more passwords the user has to remember. Finally, someone can use BitLocker + a PIN, so if someone steals a laptop or machine, they only have 3-5 guesses before the TPM refused entries or starts adding substantial delays between password guesses.
Of course, there are hard disk encryption programs with pre-boot authentication (TrueCrypt, PGP, etc.), but BitLocker is the only one that offers the feature of booting a machine completely unattended, but yet remain secure. Of course, one can have an OS boot then manually mount encrypted volumes, but BitLocker removes the hassle of this, especially if the machine is in a remote location where no admins would be present, and a network connection is not feasible.
The TPM chip in its current form is a security asset (IMHO). It, in its current incarnation, would provide little help for new DRM or antipiracy schemes.
Re:Yes. (Score:4, Insightful)
pplz on teh internetz! (Score:5, Interesting)
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:pplz on teh internetz! (Score:4, Insightful)
PR department at Atari is having a heart attack (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
OMG Trustable Computing! (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:OMG Trustable Computing! (Score:4, Informative)
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: (Score:3, Interesting)
It is like the trusted path for blueray content in vista, but then for software. You cannot run software unless it is in a signed environment.
If in 10 years the OS consists of virtual machines, one of those machines will be a TPM box that is controlled by Big media/game makers, that will only allow their
Re: (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.
Until you grant setgid Administrators to the game (Score:3, Insightful)
Atari founder cries wolf about piracy-ending chip (Score:5, Informative)
With apologies to the original author... (Score:5, Funny)
(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!
Re:With apologies to the original author... (Score:5, Informative)
TPM wtf? (Score:5, Informative)
It's pretty much Palladium all over again. Remember that?
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.
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.
delusional at best (Score:5, Funny)
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"..
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: (Score:3, Insightful)
I think I heard this type of statement before... (Score:5, Funny)
Piracy of gameplay? (Score:4, Interesting)
From the article: "The TPM will, in fact, absolutely stop piracy of gameplay." I assume this TPM is a Trusted Platform Module [wikipedia.org]. For example, Windows Vista Ultimate's BitLocker feature uses the TPM. But don't you need at least Windows Vista to run games for Windows that require the TPM?
Besides, is it even possible to pirate "gameplay" as such? The Tetris Company likes to assert a copyright on Tetris, but game rules can't be copyrighted [copyright.gov]. One leading case is Lotus v. Borland.
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.
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
It'd be pretty hard to do (Score:4, Informative)
But heck, it's the securiest OS on the planet be running those games. TPM is irrelevant then.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
"there's no reasonable way to hack it"
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]
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.
The end of gaming piracy! (Score:5, Funny)
Try running GTA IV on your PC (Score:3, Interesting)
The game industry already has a copy-protect mechanism that works. It's called "game consoles".
Re:Try running GTA IV on your PC (Score:5, Informative)
New TPM chip? (Score:5, Interesting)
If it does stop piracy 100% ( which i doubt ) then it will cripple the industry as he's got no clue how much piracy HELPS the market, just like it does the music market and regular software market.
+ my system wont ever have a TPM, so does that mean they are selling defective products ?
This is misfiled. (Score:3, Funny)
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: (Score:3, Informative)
Re:How to stop game piracy.... (Score:5, Informative)
Simple...let's go back to the cartridges...
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
http://www.osxbook.com/book/bonus/chapter10/tpm/
Movies can be camcorded. Games can't. (Score:4, Insightful)