Ubisoft's DRM Cracked — For Real This Time 443
therufus writes "A few days after the release of Assassin's Creed 2, naughty piracy sites were announcing they had cracked Ubisoft's Online Services Platform. Turns out, that wasn't entirely true. While it was possible to load into the game, players were unable to advance past a certain memory block. But now, it seems Ubisoft will need to draft a new response. A new crack has begun circulating that removes the DRM entirely."
Let The Excuses Begin (Score:5, Insightful)
Ubisoft has brought this upon themselves and now they'll use the fact that their "unbreakable" DRM has been broken to justify their further efforts. Asshats!
Re:Let The Excuses Begin (Score:5, Insightful)
The reasonable approach would be "Unbreakable? Yeah we've heard THAT before, no thanks, let's not waste money bothering with this. Lets use the programmers who would be designing complex DRM systems and have them join the team that's actually creating the game." Unfortunately I think that what you said will come to pass. They won't recognize that "try harder" is not the correct way to deal with a failed idea.
There WILL be unbreakable DRM, heres how: (Score:5, Insightful)
Here is how unbreakable DRM will eventually work:
When internet connections are high enough bandwidths and low enough latencies, you will only have video transferred to you, all game assets will be entirely stored and run on their hardware, never will anything be stored on YOUR end that you will can manipulate.
That is, you will play "unbreakable" games remotely.
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Re:There WILL be unbreakable DRM, heres how: (Score:5, Informative)
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Because it's not appropriate to post links to pump and dump scams on Slashdot?
Re:There WILL be unbreakable DRM, heres how: (Score:5, Interesting)
Indeed, "I'll believe it when I see it" is not a bad position to take with OnLive.
Seriously though, it's going to take a very long time before an online system can replace a local system - think about it, current bus technologies between hardware and TV/Monitor run in the multi-gigabit range.
Now that's uncompressed, Cable TV has shown that you can crank those numbers down quite a bit, but you're still talking about a lot of people completely saturating 200-300mbit connections to match the quality of video you get on your local hardware. The connection would have to be very very reliable as well - just a few hiccups in latency or speed can cause extreme annoyance for the gamer. So in reality you're looking at probably a 500mbit connection with a guarantee of no less than 300mbit or so.
It would take one hell of an infrastructure improvement to handle that.
It's also a moving target, because video advances continue (though slower than some would like), and by the time we get 500mbit connections in enough homes to make this viable (you'll always be cutting off a big chunk of the market with this setup), the target could very well need to be 1gbit to match local hardware.
And there's always the problem of latency (Score:3, Insightful)
The longer the latency, the worse the user experience. This is because it is a lag of everything, including user interface. You do something, you don't see it happen until later. That is noticeable, and is annoying. Now the problem with latency is that the only real way to combat it is to have the source and destination physically closer to each other. Reason is that light speed is the ultimate limit and while it sound fast, it isn't when talking data latency. Light can orbit the Earth around 8 times per se
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At which point prices will have to drop significantly because you're no longer selling a game; you're selling a subscription to a game.
Re:There WILL be unbreakable DRM, heres how: (Score:5, Insightful)
At which point prices will have to drop significantly because you're no longer selling a game; you're selling a subscription to a game.
Hahahahahahahahahaha
Re:There WILL be unbreakable DRM, heres how: (Score:5, Insightful)
You think they will drop their prices? Obviously, you don't know anything about the greed of the media companies.
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He doesn’t have to. He only has to know something about basic physics of a market.
No price drop -> no buy -> bankrupt
price drop -> buy -> PROFIT
Re:There WILL be unbreakable DRM, heres how: (Score:4, Insightful)
please unthink what you have just thunk aloud (Score:3, Insightful)
Comparing games to food and drink is just ridiculous. One you can't do without - the other, you think you can't do without because obviously you have more money than sense. Well, some people 'can't live' without heroin either, I'm sure they convince themselves that the drug is more important than food, a roof, friends and family. Good for them, and good for you!
Of course it is like a luxury item that people will stop buying. YOU are addicted to gaming if you think that nobody has the resolve to just unplug
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"Well, some people 'can't live' without heroin either"
They 'can', it's just not very nice. I say can as I expect suicide rates would go up quite substantially if masses of people weren't self medicating often after trying the legal stuff.
People without those kind of persistant problems (such as people taking opiates for 'fun' or for pain relief) don't seem to have too many problems giving the opiate up for good. (quite a bit of peer reviewed stuff about, esp related to pain relief or things like all the her
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And this is why we need mandatory economics education for every student.
Price is not based on "greed", price is based on supply and demand. Companies charge what you are willing to pay, which is influenced by the quality of the product and the price of the alternatives.
That's why electronic books are not significantly cheaper than paper books. The price of the paper and distribution is only a baseline lowest cost, it has nothing to do with what someone is willing to pay.
Re:There WILL be unbreakable DRM, heres how: (Score:5, Insightful)
and this is why a high school level economics education is not sufficient to properly understand market forces.
Re:There WILL be unbreakable DRM, heres how: (Score:4, Informative)
And this is why we need mandatory economics education for every student.
Price is not based on "greed", price is based on supply and demand.
You may wish to avail yourself of that economics course- market forces have no control over initial prices, only what the price will trend towards. Companies could base their initial price on anything at all- greed being a significant factor.
Companies charge what you are willing to pay, which is influenced by the quality of the product and the price of the alternatives.
That's why electronic books are not significantly cheaper than paper books. The price of the paper and distribution is only a baseline lowest cost, it has nothing to do with what someone is willing to pay.
And that would be relevant if they had equivalent sales. As things stand, it actually argues against your point: ebook sales in the US last year come to about $13 million dollars out of a (roughly) $23 billion dollar a year industry, according to the AAP. If the quality of the product and the price of the alternatives are the only driving factors, then I conclude that people are unwilling to pay equal amounts for a product that has no associated baseline costs and a product whose cost is dominated by those factors.
Re:There WILL be unbreakable DRM, heres how: (Score:5, Insightful)
And that would be relevant if they had equivalent sales. As things stand, it actually argues against your point: ebook sales in the US last year come to about $13 million dollars out of a (roughly) $23 billion dollar a year industry, according to the AAP. If the quality of the product and the price of the alternatives are the only driving factors, then I conclude that people are unwilling to pay equal amounts for a product that has no associated baseline costs and a product whose cost is dominated by those factors.
The low numbers are partially because the baseline cost is free - go to the library (or Project Gutenberg [gutenberg.org] for pre-1923 works, the last year to probably ever be public domain [wikipedia.org]). The truth is, the product you buy is not a product, it's a one-platform non-transferable DRM encrusted unresaleable bunch of words that will be disabled when the dot.com at the other end of the wire decides it's profitable to abandon [boingboing.net] or goes out of business [bricklin.com], sold for the same price as a tangible product. Ebooks are massively crippled so they are worth even less than a sherlockholmes.txt [gutenberg.org] ASCII file, and yet have still been priced uncompetitively, almost so they won't make a dent in the centuries-old paper codex business.
The only sheeple customers who can't say no to DRM seem to be those who respond to marketing that tells them they need to buy the latest gadgets to be cool and fashionable. Why do you think iPhone buyers were so upset when the price of the phone dropped from $600 to $400 [macnn.com]? Because more people could afford to join the fashionista club.
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Why do you think iPhone buyers were so upset when the price of the phone dropped from $600 to $400 [macnn.com]? Because more people could afford to join the fashionista club.
Lowering the in-group bar might be why some people were angry, but I really doubt it was the main motivation for the anger. Even in the article you linked it states that people were pissed because they thought Apple was gouging the loyalists with an artificially high initial price, then lowering it to hook in the normal customers. Th
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market forces have no control over initial prices, only what the price will trend towards. Companies could base their initial price on anything at all- greed being a significant factor.
Uh, who said anything about "initial" prices?
Ebooks as a mass medium are still clearly in their infancy. The wide range of pricing models, distribution mechanisms, and presentation mediums argues strongly that ebook publishers and retailers have a great deal of uncertainty about what the market will eventually consider a good price for ebooks. Because no such consensus has been reached, I think its fair to call this the initial pricing stage. If you have an alternative terminology I'm open to it.
That has no relevancy to the current discussion. And even if it did, why don't companies charge $1,000 / game, and be REALLY greedy? By your logic, market forces don't matter and people would just pay it.
I've just constructed an argument BASED on market forces
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The fact that prices consistently fail to fall to just about the marginal cost of production DOES, however prove that there are either very few truly healthy markets out there or that market theory is fundamentally flawed.
Re:There WILL be unbreakable DRM, heres how: (Score:5, Interesting)
Ever wonder why we have to haggle on prices? Because motherfuckers are greedy.
There is something to what you say, of course the necessary corollary is that they are also stupid. I run into this quite a bit. A company that charges a "fair" markup on its costs will do better in the long run than a company that haggles to get every dime. It is why haggling went away for a long time in America (and elsewhere, but I am less familiar with the economics of this sort elsewhere). Quaker merchants in the colonial era sold their merchandise for what they believed to be a fair markup over their cost. Everybody knew that when you went to a Quaker merchant, you paid the same amount as the next guy no matter how good of a haggler you were. They also knew that the Quaker's markup was not excessive. Additionally, the Quaker merchants response to people who wanted to haggle was, "That's my price, if you don't want to pay it, go to somebody else." This meant that the merchants who haggled only got the customers who were good hagglers (eventually, as people who weren't good hagglers realized they were paying more than from the Quaker merchants) and therefore could not make as much money as the Quakers (or other non-Quakers who followed the same model).
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I'll throw in my .02 here. I stopped buying games. I stopped buying games because they became VERY expensive, are hogs, are being dumbed down to run on the console first and the PC second, and because the DRM is becoming ever more intrusive. Case in point: Supreme Commander 2. I LOVED the original TA game, I enjoyed Supreme commander 1, and now this... Built for console, dumbed down for the PC, and it requires STEAM. No sale. I like FPS, I play UT2K4 and once in a blue moon UT3. I have tried Battlefield and
Re:There WILL be unbreakable DRM, heres how: (Score:4, Insightful)
And why do you think that media companies will always be in control?
Sooner or later, someone will come up with a viable economic model that isn't based on scarcity; knowledge, information and data is inherently both copyable and modifiable, and any scarcity is artificially imposed.
The traditional model fails because it relies on the price of copying being higher than the price of buying.
The ad model fails because it relies on the data not being modifiable.
Games, books, or anything else that is basically data, need a different economic model altogether. One where you can copy and play as much as you like, and where a successful originator can't rest on his laurels, but will be forced to continue to create to get income rolling in.
Perhaps an art tax, where each tax payer gets to tell who gets his art tax at the end of the year. Or perhaps something else. One thing is certain: The current system is broken, because it bases itself on limiting the supply.
Re:There WILL be unbreakable DRM, heres how: (Score:5, Insightful)
And that sort of "Streaming" of a game will totally eliminate the re-playability of the game.
I have games that are 5, 10, 15, 20+ years old that I STILL go back and play. Some of the companies that made the games I have do not even exist anymore! No game company is going to pay to keep servers running so customers can continue to play the game that long after it was released.
I will NEVER EVER buy a game that is not totally contained on the media I am purchasing. I like to go back and re-play games for DECADES to come.
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I will NEVER EVER buy a game that is not totally contained on the media I am purchasing. I like to go back and re-play games for DECADES to come.
I hope that you still have the freedom to maintain that stance without giving up games entirely.
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At which point prices will have to drop significantly because you're no longer selling a game; you're selling a subscription to a game.
Why the hell is this modded "insightful"? It's either "troll" or at best "funny".
They'll just sell a lifetime* subscription for the regular price.
* Really just as long as we feel like running the servers. No longer than the date of the release of the successor or 2 years from release.
You're missing the point (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:There WILL be unbreakable DRM, heres how: (Score:5, Interesting)
Lag/latency is bad for games And yet-- (Score:3, Interesting)
Dragons Lair was VERY successful- and it had a wee amount of delays..
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragon's_Lair [wikipedia.org]
The game's enormous contrast with other arcade games of the time created a sensation when it appeared, and was played so heavily that many machines often broke due to the strain of overuse. It was also arguably the most successful game on this medium and is aggressively sought after by collectors.
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The delays in Dragon's Lair was for you to have a chance at actually doing the appropriate move at the right moment. Without those delays you'd be fucked.
I still have the original laserdisc of Dragon's Lair.
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Then the crack will consist of downloading a permanent copy of the game assets and making the client download them locally from a running server, fooling the game to think it is downloading it from the remote servers.
Re:There WILL be unbreakable DRM, heres how: (Score:4, Interesting)
You mean like people already do with World of Warcraft pirate servers?
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Re:There WILL be unbreakable DRM, heres how: (Score:4, Informative)
WoW has the assets stored on the client side. The server just controls the mobs and manages the communication between clients.
For a free WoW server they mostly had to work out the protocols No hacking or cracking of servers was involved.
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And yet, they are still taken down using the DMCA....
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"Wow does not have assets stored on the client side."
Gee, I wonder what this shiny fucking WoW disc is for, then?
Looks like a fair deal of assets are stored client-side to me.
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Breaking the "DRM" in that case would actually be theft of service.
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The name you're looking for is Software as a Service.
Bandwidth is one issue but the main concern is latency or "lag". In the case of games even a tiny bit of latency can cause it to be unplayable. Once you get round trip time for your commands to be sent and the video returned, you've got a lot of unhappy customers and the expense of feeding all that high resolution video.
It doesn't have to be so extreme though. You can always implement pieces of the game not related to rendering on the server. Which is ess
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It doesn't have to be so extreme though. You can always implement pieces of the game not related to rendering on the server. Which is essentially why Ubisoft has done here.
The question then becomes how difficult is it to reimplement those parts...
And the answer so far seems to be harder than cracking traditional drm but within the pirates capabilities to do eventually.
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I have no idea how these OnLive guys are going to handle frequent hardware updates since high-end games continue to push hardware.
Not really. Most games are essentially using DirectX 9 with additions because that's what the current generation of consoles supports. When the next round of consoles comes out they'll support DirectX 12 and you'll see nothing but DX12 games for the next five years. The boundary-pushing games are a thing of the past simply because that only works if you only release for the PC. Everyone else is tethered to what you can do with the chips found in consoles.
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That may take a while, at least for reaction-heavy games.
Ignoring latencies in active repeaters (routers, switches...) just the speed of light in fiber has a measurable roundtrip (about 12ms from Stockholm to Paris). Then add audio-video-encoding, which realistically needs to buffer at least a few frames to get decent compression (x264 for live-broadcast is usually varying from 500-1000ms), so that adds another 20-30ms. Then you'd either need strong FEC, or very fast re-transmission to not occasionally suff
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ISP bandwidth caps and the lack of network neutrality will prevent that from being successful.
Re:There WILL be unbreakable DRM, heres how: (Score:5, Interesting)
Man can make a one-time pad, man can not break a one-time pad. Your generalization is false.
Re:Let The Excuses Begin (Score:5, Insightful)
In that respect, DRM is like a witch trial directed at legitimate paying customers. If the DRM stays intact, the witch sinks and dies, and the DRM perpetuates its own myth by "proving" its own success. If the DRM is cracked, the witch floats and lives only to be burned at the stake, and the DRM perpetuates its own myth by "proving" the need for harsher measures.
Either way, the DRM isn't really doing anything but killing witches - I mean, eliminating paying customers.
Re:Let The Excuses Begin (Score:5, Funny)
Well, since paying customers weigh the same as ducks, they are all witches and deserve to be burned at the stake, obviously.
Once again Science and Justice rule the day!
Re:Let The Excuses Begin (Score:4, Funny)
We all are, but evil pirates keep their money in their pockets instead of spending it, and that added weight allows them to escape detection.
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What part about people using your software and not paying for it a 'myth'? They are simply trying to prevent non-legitimate customers from playing the game. If the DRM prevents pirates from playing the game then it is already successful.
But it's not preventing non-legitimate customers/pirates from playing the game, it's preventing its legitimate customers from playing the game do to issues with the DRM. Thus it isn't successful at all.
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Brought what upon themselves? The so-called scene groups always try to crack any copy protection, and so far they've always succeeded in the end.
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Ubisoft has brought this upon themselves
Brought what upon themselves?
Are you trying to say games with more permissive DRM have NOT been cracked? Or that games without DRM haven't been stolen?
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I think he's trying to say that games without DRM are more successful.
While it's hard to argue that piracy affects the bottom line of game sales (if piracy is an option, it WILL reduce demand for the retail version), there is little to no evidence that DRM measures reduce the amount of piracy. Due to their digital nature (the very thing that makes them easy to copy in the first place), once a game is cracked that particular version is cracked forever, and anybody with an internet connection can get it. Be
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iTunes has no music DRM since forever ago . Therefore your entire rant is just pointless.
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Um...what? iTunes doesn't DRM its music files anymore.
Nor has any scientific evidence ever been provided that piracy negatively affects sales. Maybe you're the one who should stop complaining?
Re:Let The Excuses Begin (Score:5, Insightful)
Indeed, different company, but same issue here: I was going to buy Spore when it came out, because it sounded cool. When I found out about the DRM that amounts to their installing a rootkit on my system, I just downloaded the cracked version instead. I figure if they're going to treat me like a criminal from the get-go, why not earn the punishment? Turns out I had a much easier time of things than most anybody who actually paid for and installed the software. Go figure.
It's like the parents who leave the house for the afternoon, and tell the kids they have to do chores/homework and aren't allowed to watch any TV. Instead of trusting the kids at all, or even waiting till they get back to determine if they broke the rules and watched TV, the parents decide to punish the kids ahead of time because they know they'll break the rule anyway. Well, since they've already been punished for it, why wouldn't the kids watch TV when they aren't supposed to?
These fucked up DRM schemes are exactly the same - if I'm going to be punished for following the rules (heavy restrictions on use, rootkits, compatibility issues, etc), why the hell would I follow the rules? A lot of people already know most cracked versions are easier and more convenient to play compared to the retail versions, so where is the incentive to buy retail? Some people are honest enough to buy retail and then get the cracks, but you're still breaking the law so why bother buying in the first place?
depends on the meaning of "for real" (Score:5, Informative)
Skidrow put their own copy protection on the crack because they simply placed the values from the emulator into a dll. It's nice and convenient to have a dll return the values instead of a server however if they had actually cracked then they would have also cracked the other games for which the emulator doesn't currently exist.
So yes, Assassin's Creed 2 is playable but their copy protection is only broken in the sense that AC2 designers decided to make the server-client for this game return static responses that can be collected and eventually make the game playable for pirates.
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So yes, Assassin's Creed 2 is playable but their copy protection is only broken in the sense that AC2 designers decided to make the server-client for this game return static responses that can be collected and eventually make the game playable for pirates.
Wait - what? The server returns the same responses for everyone? This was their "unbreakable" DRM? Was it at least encrypted or something?
Re:depends on the meaning of "for real" (Score:4, Interesting)
Even unencrypted it took weeks to emulate/"crack" the protection. So this was rather successful by the standards of DRM. They can step up this kind of protection in future titles. Allegedly the new Settlers game uses a variant of the same DRM which has a more complex integration with the server. Either way, the legit customer is stuck with a game that will only run when the server is up and reachable. If you see anybody playing AC2 on a plane or even on a train, they're almost certainly playing a pirated version, because legit customers simply can't run the game.
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Even unencrypted it took weeks to emulate/"crack" the protection. So this was rather successful by the standards of DRM.
I have to kind of grudgingly agree with you there.
Look at the latest version of BD+ - used for the first time on the Avatar BLU-RAY.
Avatar was released on Thursday it was cracked by the end of Friday by at least two different groups (Slysoft and Fengtao aka DVDFab).
So, by that measure, Ubisoft's DRM was a massive success.
Meanwhile, Fox just blew another $100K+ for a day's worth of copy prevention.
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Doesn't matter if it's a breach of the EULA, as if you're in the US it's illegal under the DMCA.
Re:depends on the meaning of "for real" (Score:5, Informative)
The protection for AC2 is tacked on. Settlers 7 received somewhat better protection and there is no working server emulator for it yet. In the future it will be more dynamic and most likely include server side game logic. The significance of it not being truly cracked even with a basic protection as in AC2 is this: every time Ubisoft releases a new game then the pirates must play through the entire game collecting the values which can take a few weeks to get 100% unless the process can somehow be automated. This is over and above any changes to the protocol used to communicate between the client and server between games which the cracker must code for to capture those values.
I wish people would act more ethically (Score:5, Insightful)
The only ethical response to ubisoft is not to buy their product, not to use their product, not to infringe upon their product and then tell them you are doing it and tell your friends.
I'm irritated at the pro-piracy attitude, it hurts open source as well. Without respect for at least copyright-driven IP you can't have real opensource that allows the creator to specify how it is propagated (GPL). All you would have would be the BSD, and we saw what Apple did with that eh?
Re:I wish people would act more ethically (Score:5, Insightful)
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So, why the fuck would you want to play their games if they are total assholes? It is not as if they are the only people who have ever made any games.
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Re:I wish people would act more ethically (Score:5, Insightful)
So... You don't like Ubisoft's DRM but since you really really like AC2, you wait for a crack then still buy the game?
Look it's your money and everything so you're free to use it however you want, but to me buying their game whilst hating their DRM is very short sighted and counter-intuitive. If the current DRM-Crack arms war continues to escalate, I fear we'll just end up with a subscription model or something so draconian that pirates might just not be able to crack. You might be able to play Assassin's Creed 2 for now; but come Assassin's Creed 3, we'll all be fucked.
I'd rather we just all stop buying Ubisoft's product now, even if that means we won't be playing their latest games, and hope that they shape up. Send a clear message to them that they're going to lose their customers and sales unless they remove their fucking DRM.
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I think it's more of "I really want it, but you're a total dick, so I'll just steal it."
It's certainly not right, but it's also not un-justifiable. Given that a pirateer generally has a better gaming experience than a legitimate gamer should be illuminating.
Really, the more obtrusive these DRM schemes get the bigger the market will be for pirated copies. That's the crux of their problem.
You know a much more effective way to limit piracy? Make it more convenient to buy it than to pirate it. Valve has sho
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Re:I wish people would act more ethically (Score:5, Funny)
I hear Duke Nukem Forever is pretty close tho.
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This is exactly the point. Do not feed them, you teach them nothing if you still buy their product. Refuse to buy their product, tell them why and tell everyone else.
Proprietary software is not necessarily immoral or unethical, but treating your own customers like common criminals is arguably unethical (this goes for Apple too).
Re:I wish people would act more ethically (Score:4, Insightful)
That is why the parent was talking about ethics. Unfortunately, these days for most people protesting is fine as long as you don't have to actually sacrifice anything.
Re:I wish people would act more ethically (Score:4, Funny)
I wish I had money to buy a decent PC, so I could say I've skipped AC2 because of DRM...
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Do you really think that they don't take a peek at how well seeded the torrents of their games are? They have a pretty good idea when a game is being pirated and when it just sucks. The pro-piracy attitude is nothing more than being too cheap to buy the game and not having any respect for the developers. If you like the game, then you associate some value to it and you should buy it. Otherwise, don't play it.
Not so fast (Score:5, Informative)
All Skidrow did was re-package the existing community-developed workaround. [cs.rin.ru]
The community created a values.db which contains the name/value pairs to defeat Ubi's server checks, and a server emulator, Skidrow's DLL embeds this file and replaces the server-checking with a local access.
Skidrow then takes full credit for the work (in a total douche move) and they also packed their DLL so no-one would detect their deception.
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The community created a values.db which contains the name/value pairs to defeat Ubi's server checks, and a server emulator, Skidrow's DLL embeds this file and replaces the server-checking with a local access.
Considering those values are 'static' (which enables crack/emulator to work), what values would you suggest SkidRow to use?
I have no idea what the story here is, nor do I care, but seemingly server/clients exchange static values, how could their crack use some other values? o.0
Hypocrisy at it's best ... (Score:4, Insightful)
Attached to the "readme" file that comes with the hacked content (which can be found here), Skid Row alerted other hackers that the group's methods were safeguarded against reverse-engineering in order to fend off competing hacking groups and Ubisoft itself.
Let me see if I got it ... you are against the draconian practices of ubisoft ... so you crack the game and ... protect the source of your crack?
I guess how you differentiate between hackers and crackers, this guys are nothing but thieves.
And, before anyone replies saying that this is to protect the patch against ubisoft ... ubisoft created the DRM, they don't need to take a look at the crack's code.
Skidrow didn't do the hard work (Score:5, Informative)
The actual hard work was done by a community of people who bought the game. They ran a proxy that logged all the "values" sent from the Ubisoft servers to the game. Each time the game progresses to another mission (or similar), it requires a different set of "values" to determine what game data to load (or a very similar method). The people who logged these values then submitted them to a community database, which collected them and sorted out any fake ones uploaded by Ubisoft employees or griefers.
This community also made a server emulator, which served the "values" to the game upon request. The server emulator, written in python, was a pretty simple HTTP server; the game connected to it by editing the system's "hosts" file and hardcoding DNS responses for ".ubisoft.com" to localhost (where the server emulator runs).
Thus, the game is only crackable once enough people have bought the game and logged all possible values for all possible missions states. It's not a total loss for Ubisoft in a sense -- it prevents "Pre" releases, wherein a release group distributes the game before the actual release date. It also ensures that a certain number of people must buy the game and contribute "values" to the community database; all in all this ends up lengthening the time from game release to full-working pirate release.
SkidRow's new crack is simply an IPC (inter-process communication) method of delivering the "values" to the game, bypassing the network connection to the game. Therefore SkidRow's version doesn't use a server emulator running on localhost, but rather patches the executables of the game and has the "values" hardcoded into the cracked DLLs.
The real issue here is that SkidRow took the "values" database from the community who initially logged them, and pretty much claimed it as their own work. The original cracking community inserted some fake "values" as trackers in order to determine when anyone stole their work and released it.
Re: (Score:2)
griefers
It always surprises me, how game industry people don’t seem to know the word “troll” at all.
They are trolls. And this is the normal word to use for them.
Or I will start referring to trolls as sourpussies just to confuse you! ^^
Re:Skidrow didn't do the hard work (Score:5, Interesting)
The real issue here is that SkidRow took the "values" database from the community who initially logged them, and pretty much claimed it as their own work. The original cracking community inserted some fake "values" as trackers in order to determine when anyone stole their work and released it.
One group of pirates being ripped off by another group of pirates is not an issue, it's funny.
Re:Skidrow didn't do the hard work (Score:5, Insightful)
One involves deception or not telling the full truth.
Re:Skidrow didn't do the hard work (Score:4, Insightful)
And both involve stealing from someone else
No, as a matter of fact neither of them do.
Question and Problem (Score:2)
If Ubisoft applies a similar but tweaked version of this DRM to another game, will it take hacker groups like Skid Row the same amount of time to develop a crack? If so, then Ubisoft will be quite happy to continue releasing games that sell for several weeks before their DRM is cracked.
On the other hand if this means Skid Row can now apply the same technique to all of Ubisoft's games, then the company has just wasted a lot of money and frustrated many of their customers all for the sake of one game.
The next step (an insider's view) (Score:5, Interesting)
I work at Ubisoft as a programmer, which is why I'm posting as an AC. What the next step will be in the DRM, the ramp-up, is gameplay code that is run from the server. So in order to crack that one the pirates will have to fully emulate the server side code. Not the whole of the gameplay code mind you, just a small, but necessary and essential, portion. This should be in effect for the coming summer releases.
For the record I think Ubisoft are being asshat idiots in continuing to ramp up this obscenity of a slap in the face to paying consumers. And I'm not alone, you should see the in-house mailing list flamewars about this (which also means that other employees are freaking greedy douchebags, it's not just the suits.)
Re:The next step (an insider's view) (Score:5, Interesting)
And I'm not alone, you should see the in-house mailing list flamewars about this (which also means that other employees are freaking greedy douchebags, it's not just the suits.)
Please leak them.
Re:The next step (an insider's view) (Score:5, Insightful)
Oh, I'll be leaving soon, but for other reasons. Mostly because they work you into the ground sweat shop style, they are hellbent on NOT making innovative fun games (it's always about how it looks, not how it plays), and because the place is full of greedy capitalist douchebags.
Re: (Score:3)
I had the exact feeling about their games when I bought the last Prince of Persia (I bought it because it was DRM free)
the game was all about looks but not about fun, I am not sure when Ubisoft changed their attitude, but the game was clearly not good although it looked spectacular.
Seems like the last PoP will be the last game from them I have bought in a long time, since they are hell bent to keep up their DRM.
Re: (Score:3)
Problem is you you move parts of the code to the server you run into bigger load problems than Ubisoft currently has, they obviously do not have the infrastructure to keep that alive without outages, then you have the lag.
Etc... it will become harder to crack, but they will alienate even more customers that way, and in the end no one will buy their games anymore.
Sersiously, if the industry is going to move to DRM like that I will give up gaming, or just buy independend anymore. It is not like it hurts if yo
I could *not* care less. (Score:5, Insightful)
Fuck Ubisoft. Fuck EA. They've both lost a paying customer [slashdot.org] by pulling this bullshit, and I buy a lot of games.
Fuck 'em both.
don't use the crack, don't play the games (Score:5, Insightful)
Do not use the crack and do not play the games with DRM if we want to really see an end to DRM. Even playing the game without buying it can be good publicity that generates sales for those who would complain they are not selling enough. Resisting the temptation to consume products instead of creating our own is the real problem. Instead of consuming things because we feel we need to, if we do not agree with the product we should instead work to create our own. We cannot let self-doubts and temporary failures prevent us from being creative if we are to bring about a new creative renaissance without DRM.
Re: (Score:2)
There's an unstated, totally unproven assumption that pirates are impatient and will buy the game if it isn't cracked soon. There's been a lot of handwaving about this from people trying to justify DRM, but they're all assuming a link for which they have no evidence.
My theory, equally unsupported by real data, is that the vast majority of pirates are
Re:Almost 2 months (Score:5, Informative)
and from reading the article it looks like the created a testing nightmare..
Re:get a clue (Score:4, Insightful)
Nobody that pirates is a "potential customer". The end goal of the piracy movement is that it is all free or it isn't even made, and we are about 50% along the way towards that now.
DRM is a pointless hiccup along the way to utter destruction of revenue from digital goods. Now, whether you think that is good or bad is perhaps interesting. But it is undeniable that this is the goal and where we are going very, very quickly.
China gave up on selling music already. The US isn't far behind. Europe might be there before the US. Asia, Africa and South America never paid for anything anyway.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Uh, yea, if you're going to talk smack, make sure you know what you're talking about.
A linux server is EXACTLY how I bypassed the DRM initially, and I DID get past the memory block most couldn't get to - learn to check your in-process opcodes, fools.
I had ACII running the week before official release. I beat it the day of official release.