A History of Copy Protection 536
GamerGirll1138 writes to tell us Next-gen has an amusing walk down memory lane with their history of copy protection. There have been some crazy schemes over the years to ensure that you paid for your software, everything from super-secret decoder rings to ridiculous document checks. "With bandwidth expanding and more and more games publishers exploring digital distribution, there's little doubt that we're entering a new phase in the history of copy protection and those who would defeat it. What's more, the demand for games as a chosen form of entertainment has never been higher. All this considered, it's impossible to believe that the cat-and-mouse game of piracy and copy protection will not reach new levels of intensity, with new technologies deployed on each side, and that some of them will surely create new hurdles for even those who simply wish to purchase and play the newest games. Ah, for the heady days of the code wheel."
Single page link, that starts at beginning. (Score:5, Informative)
Respectfully disagree (Score:3, Informative)
A couple of problems with that.
First off, it's no big deal to snoop USB, [google.com] which makes dongles pretty easy to crack.
You have to petition the USB folks so you get a unique vendor's ID, which is a pain. Plus, they are finite. [driveragent.com]
You'd have to get Microsoft to give you a digital certificate to make your dongle driver legit - also a pain. And you'd have to go through a driver installation just to load your software, more of a pain.
Finally, dongle bound software is just as crackable with a monitor. There has to be some code that goes out and checks the dongle, then returns "yes this is authorized" or "no let's not run". Just zap that bit and the dongle goes away.
Article sucks, but I remember two ... (Score:5, Informative)
An extremely useless article even by slashdot standards, but I remember two copy protection schemes that sucked even more:
Lenslock [wikipedia.org] - used by a few 80s home computer games. I'm fairly certain it might have been a UK-only thing. It was horrible. You had to fold this crappy bit of plastic a certain way and hold it over a part of the screen. If you were lucky, and your TV wasn't too large or too small, you might be able to make out the decoded letters which you had to type in.
And then one we used at work: Parallel port dongles [wikipedia.org]. I used to work in electronic CAD and all the software used this, the result being you needed 5 or more dongles all plugged in at the same time to do any useful work. In the end we got someone in the workshop build a kind of "dongle motherboard" where you could plug in multiple dongles more conveniently than having them hang out the back of the machine, and more importantly pull them out to swap between machines.
Happy days ... No, actually sucky days. I'm glad I use almost completely free software now.
Rich.
We Copied That Floppy (Score:5, Informative)
The Atari 810 floppy drive [wikipedia.org] (the highest density storage available, like a 1TB HD is now, and the only game in town other than ridiculous tape drives, except for the extremely rare and stratospherically expensive 5MB Corvus HD) had a little potentiometer in its circuitboard controlling timing of the eletromagnetic signal waveform sent to the write head, that could be turned out of calibration to deliberately write a bad sector. So pirates would map the original's bad sector list, then copy the good sectors, then detune the pot, then write to the list of bad sectors - ruining them, then retune the pot and boot the copy.
Sure, that's pretty complex, voids the floppy warranty, and intimidates a lot of potential pirates. So instead, some people just stuck a disklabel to the edge of the target floppy, left the label sticking out of the drive, and grabbed that tab to jiggle the floppy while writing to each of the bad sectors - ruining them. Presto!
Besides, the pro pirates had the same mass floppy duplicators with the same programmable "write bad sector" circuitry that the original game vendors had, so the large, commercial pirates weren't fazed (pun intended
In fact, beating the copy protection was often more fun than the game. So around the world people were working to beat it, even if they never played the game again, but gave copies to friends just to show how ubergeek they were.
This cat & mouse game is in fact the exact model for all SW copy protection. It's become only a worse value waste for the SW producers, especially in content. They should use their only advantage, their earlier possession of the SW/content, to make big bucks at the first release, just like Hollywood does for movie premiere big weekends. Then let the pirates do their distribution work for free, and charge for support, customization, and subscriptions to upgrades. And build brands to sell their future releases.
Because "Don't Copy That Floppy" has been a losing battle, long before people would say "what's a floppy?"
Re:I have no issues with copy protection if... (Score:5, Informative)
Several months later, after swapping a bad CDROM drive and upgrading RAM, the license key no longer works. So I call Maplesoft, again, and go through the same stupid hassle. The tech FINALLY gave me a machine-agnostic license after all the other crap she tried didn't work. If I had known, I would have asked for one in the first place.
Adding insult to injury, I had some outrageous charges on my phone bills because I didn't realize calling Canada carried "international calling" surcharges.
In the end, I didn't find Maple as useful as I expected. So the moral: I'll be more careful about spending money on proprietary software in the future.
Re:I have no issues with copy protection if... (Score:3, Informative)
Thank god for soldering irons! (Score:2, Informative)
But either way the most effective copy protection by any standards are consoles. PC copy protections will always be broken easily even some multi player games (namely steam games, quake, etc) have cracked servers that people with pirated copies of games can use.
Consoles on the other hand must be chipped. Right now the only console that can be effectively chipped is the Wii. Even still that is a pretty large barrier and at the most 1% of wii users are going to chip their wii because it takes some skill and has a lot of cost.
Personally I chip other people's Wiis and now with the wii-clip its pretty darn easy. But it isn't chepa and my cheapest chip costs 40 dollars just in parts (D2CKey and Wii Clip V1). And of course isn't easy to solder and sometimes you screw things up.
I have almost 150 bucks invested in soldering mats etc. It is just a rather hard pitch to mess with someone's wii. But anyways I digress.
The xbox 360 is near impossible and you can't play on the internet (kinda essential to 360 gameplay
Unlike the wii the PS3's and Xbox's warranty gets voided simply for opening it.
Basically I think in the Game Publishers are trying to make a shift to consoles which are pretty solid. Mod chips are not a very popular thing. 1 out of 5 kids will talk to you about a game they pirated but maybe 1 out of 80 kids you talk to will have chipped console (and 1 out of 1 thousand if its not a wii).
FlexLM - The Devil's DRM (Score:3, Informative)
Can't work. (Score:3, Informative)
As soon as the whole OS, including the hypervisor, is ran inside an outer virtual box, the whole point is moot, and the hyper visor can't trust the anti-modding hardware (is it real genuine functioning hardware ? Or is the hyper visor communicating with an anti-modding hardware simulated by the emulator, communicating with it using bogus crypto keys injected by the emulator, and that simulated hardware will OK whatever pirated software goes in ?)
The only thing that could stimulate some player to buy the game is packed in goodies. Making big game boxes filled with lots of useful items (maps) fan-service items (scale model of some ingame object) etc.
That won't prevent dork who'll never pay for the game anyway to try hard to find a way.
But that will make you sure that the fans will happily rush to bux the "collectors' edition" of the box. Specially if the goodies are somewhat useful.
The only problems are :
- This raises the costs of the distribution : Bigger boxes, more expensive to produce content (as opposed to simply 1 disc + 1 small leaflet telling that the manual can be printed from a PDF file + tons of ads). As if the creation of the game wasn't expensive enough.
- Difficulty to use : if some goodies plays a critical role in the game (as in maps, scrolls with spell formulas, etc.) it might be inconvenient for players on the road. Some gamers like to play games while on the move (in the plane) and they might have to lug around the goodies for each game. Or, worse, suddenly come to realisation that this critical puzzle can only be solved if they use that goodie that they have left at home / lost long ago / etc.
Games bundled with high-end gaming hardware are another solution, as gamer are likely to buy the hardware anyway, and the licensing cost for the game are small compared to the hardware it self. ATI bundling Valve products with some high-end radeon comes as an example. Even in the old DOS days this has been seen (there was a game that came with its own sound card which acted as a dongle. I think it was B.A.T.)
Disclaimer : I tend to like "Collectors' edition" and prefering buying those. Nevertheless I systematically download cracks for any game I legally buy - simply to avoid the inconvenience of the copy protection system (be it to avoid damaging the game media - this had already happened to me - or avoiding to install some StarFuck root-kit).
qcrack (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Ahhh, holes burned in disks (Score:5, Informative)
The routine was hidden inside a really lame obfuscation scheme. It would read a section of encrypted code from the disk, XOR it byte by byte with a byte selected from a table, and store it in RAM. Then it would select another byte from the table and do the XOR again. And again, thirty or forty times. Each cycle would begin by altering the single-step and breakpoint interrupt vectors to point to an exit instruction.
If you went to the trouble of tracing your way down through all that, you were rewarded with a delicious irony: the ProLok disk was, itself, a copyright infringement. In order to do the write/read checks they had to insert hooks into the BIOS -- but that was not so easy in the small-RAM days when the BIOS executed directly from ROM instead of being shadowed out into RAM. Vault had to make its own BIOS, and did it by (drum roll) copying IBM's (rimshot). And they made an absurdly lame attempt to cover it up: they took some 800 bytes of the IBM Fixed Disk BIOS, added their hooks, then went through it and interchanged logical-shift-left and arithmetic-shift-left instructions wherever the MSB and carry were guaranteed to be zero (meaning both instructions did the same thing). So, disassemblies of the two BIOSes would look a LITTLE different...
Oh, the crack? A two-byte change on the disk, probably a back door they forgot to remove. Compuserve was the central clearinghouse for cracks in those days, and picked it up within a week.
AFAIK Vault's only client was Ashton-Tate, who used it on dBase III. The president of Vault was a guy with a law-enforcement background and a SWAT team mentality who fancied himself a mighty crime fighter, and when he was embarrassed by the quick crack, he boasted they were developing ProLok Plus, which would punish crackers by physically damaging the machine. Business customers were enraged, Ashton-Tate dumped Vault (which was expensive because they owned a one-third interest in it), and Vault was no more.
rj
Support Stardock (Score:3, Informative)
At any rate if you want games without the bullshit, and what to support a publisher who believes in that, well then these are your people. I've been real happy so far (I own 8 games from their library). If you see a game you like, I encourage you to buy it through them. The more people that support the model, the more developers that'll realise it's a good idea and release games on it.
http://totalgaming.stardock.com/ [stardock.com]
Re:I have no issues with copy protection if... (Score:1, Informative)