Pirates Crack Microsoft's UWP Protection, Five Layers of DRM Defeated (torrentfreak.com) 138
A piracy scene group has managed to get past the five layers of DRM in Microsoft's Unified Windows Platform UWP -- which enables software developers to create applications that can run across many devices. From a report: This week it became clear that the UWP system, previously believed to be uncrackable, had fallen to pirates. After being released on October 31, 2017, the somewhat underwhelming Zoo Tycoon Ultimate Animal Collection became the first victim at the hands of popular scene group, CODEX. "This is the first scene release of a UWP (Universal Windows Platform) game. Therefore we would like to point out that it will of course only work on Windows 10. This particular game requires Windows 10 version 1607 or newer," the group said in its release notes. CODEX says it's important that the game isn't allowed to communicate with the Internet so the group advises users to block the game's executable in their firewall.
Congratulations! (Score:5, Insightful)
Kudos to CODEX for this impressive feat! They are a living reminder that hard work, diligence, and persistence will ultimately lead to success!
Re: (Score:2)
No damn these filthy pirates. They should end up in a special kind of hell made of my little ponies for subjecting the world to Zoo Tycoon Ultimate Animals Collection. This cracking of DRM proves once and for all there is no God.
"Uncracakble"? (Score:5, Funny)
previously believed to be uncrackable
By whom?
You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
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Every time I see or hear "Pirates Crack blah blah blah" I have this image of Johnny Depp lurching drunkenly around a bunch of hardware with a flagon of grog, exhorting his companions on to greater depths of digital skullduggery...
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Really?
Every time I hear it, I think of Boris [youtube.com].
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They probably watched Hugh Jackman "hacking" in Swordfish [youtu.be].
The scene makes me want to inflict pain of cute fluffy creatures. You can tell Hugh has never been a techy person ever. He probably never even knew what a computer looked like until he showed up on set. Then he rented Hackers [youtu.be], watched it, and acted and interpretation of it (badly).
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Re:"Uncracakble"? (Score:4, Funny)
By the MS marketing department.
Duh.
Pirate? (Score:1)
They keep using the word "Pirate" over and over too. What felonies were committed on the high seas?
Are they actually talking about "Copyright infringement"? In that case, what copyrighted work has been stolen simply by "cracking" this system? If the door is unlocked, does that mean that the possessions have automatically been stolen?
Re: Pirate? (Score:2)
The word piracy now refers to certain types of copyright infringement, in addition to theft of vessels and cargo on the high seas. Get over it. Language changes over time. That's the way of the world.
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Interestingly, the segment was explicitly made short enough that it didn't violate the copyright of the song.
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It's older even than that; a pirate in the sense of "one who takes another's work without permission" dates back to 1701, at least according to Etymology Online [etymonline.com]. Wikipedia dates it back to 1603:
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They keep using the word "America". But Amerca is the continent, not a country (???) /s
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I know. For awhile I tried to get people to use UStatian, but it never caught on.
Re: Pirate? (Score:1)
Perhaps the rest of the world can just agree to call it Dumbfuckistan. We already have alternative names for Deutschland and Nippon so it's not as if this would be unusual
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If I had to make and market my own DRM I'd brand it as "some weak shit that a five year old could probably break in under ten minutes and totally not worth anyone's actual time due to being so trivial and beneath your abilities." Who's going to try seeking out any glory from cracking that?
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4-6 year olds the world over?
Effort (Score:4, Insightful)
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Joke's on him, you can't pirate Linux.
Also, Ballmer is long gone from Microsoft, try to keep up.
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This is pretty much dead-on correct. Sorry, folks, but we live in a capitalist society. You aren't entitled to anything just by right of being able to copy, take, or otherwise acquire it.
If you can't afford (or don't want to pay for) some piece of software, don't use it. It's that simple. In many cases there are FLOSS alternatives that will do the job (perhaps not as easily or effectively, but well enough to pass muster), or especially in the case of games, the software itself is a luxury that you can simpl
Re: Effort (Score:5, Interesting)
What complete bullshit. Just because laws governing the copyright of software have been bought and paid for does not mean that we must obey them.
Pragmatically: take whatever software you want because there is no ideal drm scheme that can stop you.
Ethically: go for it, software is simply an expression of knowledge and copying it does no harm.
There is no scarity in digital goods other than that we bind ourselves into, so why not go for it.
(I say this as a programmer)
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Even if it's digital and an expression of knowledge that costs nothing to copy, if the person who created it doesn't want you to have it, you shouldn't get to have it. And if you do somehow acquire it, you shouldn't be smug enough about the whole thing to think you're somehow in the right.
You don't get to decide what other people do with their stuff.
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But an idea does not belong to a person.
Everything that you wrote flows from this basic fallacy. Ownership works as a model for allocarion of scarse resources. It is fundamentally broken as a model for infornation.
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You don't get to decide what other people do with their stuff.
This is exactly right. So how do you reconcile this with your pro-copyright position? Copyright is exactly this: deciding what other people can do with their stuff.
Yes, their stuff, and not yours. Property rights are fundamentally about who has the right to decide how a good is "used up" (consumed), and are exclusive only to the extent that the goods are scarce, i.e. cannot simultaneously be consumed for multiple purposes. It makes no sense to try to apply property rights to ideas, information, media, and/o
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You've conflated the right to make a copy with the license governing a copy.
Re: Effort (Score:3)
You work for free then?
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No - I create value around the software that I produce.
Re: Effort (Score:2)
Don't the creators of digital goods create value to those that consume them? Should they do that for free?
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Should we pretend that information can be owned to satisfy their poor choice of business model?
Re: Effort (Score:2)
Their poor choice of business model entitles you to their work? Will you come and do some dev for me? I won't pay you because information can be duplicated.
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What they consider to be their "work" is a poor choice given that it can be freely copied and they depend on scarity. It's a pretty dumb decision. Everybody is "entitled" to any information that they can acquire, why should it be otherwise?
Re: Effort (Score:2)
Everyone is entitled to someone else's work? So you will work for me for free then? Cool. Send me your details and I'll send you the specification.
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You can have anything that I choose to produce, which is why it is freely released. Why do you think this would let you choose what I work on?
Re: Effort (Score:2)
You feel that others should work for you for nothing so I'm inferring that you are also prepared to work for nothing. Let me know when you're available and I'll send you some stuff to work on.
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You keep trying to bend my point into what you want to say. It's an interesting, though ineffective, strategy for arguing.
* I say that once people make what they have chosen to work upon available it is freely copyable.
* You keep saying that people should not be able to chose what to work on, that it should be chosen for them.
Why are you having such a hard time understanding the difference? Or perhaps you do understand the difference, but it is the only way to try to make your weak line of argument work. Ha
Re: Effort (Score:2)
You say that you should be able to get the product of many people's work for no money, I.e. expecting them to work for free to entertain you. As you have that attitude, I don't see why you're not prepared to work for free for me. What's the difference?
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Exactly as explained in previous post. Are you really having trouble understanding?
Re: Effort (Score:2)
If you expect others to work for you for free then surely you don't have a problem with me asking you to work for me for free. If you do have a problem with that then you shouldn't expect others to do the same. It's really not that complicated.
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As I've already said in response to this point: you keep trying to bend my point into what you want to say. It's an interesting, though ineffective, strategy for arguing.
* I say that once people make what they have chosen to work upon available it is freely copyable.
* You keep saying that people should not be able to chose what to work on, that it should be chosen for them.
Why are you having such a hard time understanding the difference? Or perhaps you do understand the difference, but it is the only way to
Re: Effort (Score:2)
If you expect others to work for you for free then surely you don't have a problem with me asking you to work for me for free. If you do have a problem with that then you shouldn't expect others to do work for you for free. Perhaps your English comprehension is bad.
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Why do you claim that you should direct my work?
It's not a claim that I've made, it is one that you have made. Why do you believe this?
Re: Effort (Score:2)
I'm not claiming that at all. You said in your initial post that you expect large numbers of people in various industries to work for you for free. Therefore I am inferring from that that you are also happy to work for free.
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You are claiming that freely available results = working for free. Why are you claiming that?
Re: Effort (Score:2)
They're not freely available. Someone has to create them and you think they should do that for you for nothing.
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No - I do not think that: you keep claiming that. A couple of messages ago you admitted it was something you inferred from what I actually said. So it is your claim. I do not agree that it is a reasonable inference from my claim.
But works that are put online are freely available: DRM cannot work and will be broken. My argument was that they should accept this natural state of affairs instead of trying to pretend otherwise.
I am not trying to tell people to work for me for free - this is your misunderstanding
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No, i get paid for my work but i don't expect my grandkids to continue being paid for something i once produced...
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No, like all flawed systems of control it means that you suffer the consequences if you get caught.
Yes, it is self entitled, and also true. Every single one of us is entitled to any piece of information that we can acquire. It is a dellusion to pretend otherwise.
Re: Effort (Score:5, Insightful)
This is pretty much dead-on correct. Sorry, folks, but we live in a capitalist society.
Funny you should say that since DRM is the jack-booted thug enforcing licenses which is a war on ownership and exactly the opposite of traditional capitalism. What we're heading for is more like modern serfdom where you own nothing and license all your software and media subject to the whims of global mega-corporations who decides when they're altering the terms and when your rented experience expires and whether you've violated some sort of rule in that 100-page EULA you didn't read. And with IoT and self-driving cars on the horizon that concept will probably soon be extended to hardware too. Sure you can always say no... in which case you get no security updates and/or everything stops working, it's not like you have a real choice. The "buying and selling" model is on the way out...
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However the problem for me is in security research, if i buy digital product from you i wanna be sure that the thing does exactly what it says it does, and nothing else, i don't wanna buy (be proprietary an instance of the stuff in exchange of money) something that does stuf
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If the media industry had behaved civilly, I'd agree with you. But they didn't. So fuck them.
From wikipedia: The goal of copyright law, as set forth in the Copyright Clause of the US Constitution, is "to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries." This includes incentivizing the creation of art, literature, architecture, music, and other works of authorship.
Infinite copyright, as no
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Even 14+14 years is too much these days. At the time it made sense, it was a time consuming process to print books and distribute them around the world but today the internet allows instant distribution worldwide.
Most media has stopped being sold long before 14 years expires, let alone 28, and it doesn't cost anything to keep a download available...
Copyright should automatically expire once something is no longer available for purchase. Nothing is more destructive than just sitting on something, not willing
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I don't disagree that 28 years is too much. But If there is a minimum, that's it, unless "We the people" can pile up enough money to make 60% of our "representatives" to fix that.
And that's never going to happen.
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Capitalism actually encourages taking shortcuts and copying, and even producing cheaper copies yourself for a profit.
It's only government regulation (which capitalists claim to hate) which enforces copyrights and patents.
Re: Effort (Score:2)
The local warlord would torch your house with you in it
Re: Effort (Score:5, Insightful)
At some point, you probably start spending more on DRM than you gain by through sales that are lost to piracy. I suspect that a lot of piracy of software is done because it's the most convenient way to consume or in some cases the only way to consume. If you're not providing a legal way for digital distribution to occur in some countries, it's little surprise that willing consumers will revert to pirate copies. The other side comes down to economics. You can't sell a $60 game or a $20 movie into a market where those values constitute a monthly wage. Piracy in those territories does not represent a lost sale because it could never have been on to begin with. If you want to sell into those markets, you need to drop prices to a few dollars and it's very likely that you'll get some paying customers.
If you spend $200,000 on developing, implementing, and supporting (you know, when it invariably fucks over a paying customer and they're calling tech support) DRM, but the inclusion only generates an extra $50,000 in revenue then it's a waste. Everyone wants to believe that they're potentially losing millions, but it's clearly not that much. If you use Hollywood's figures for piracy the amount comes out to something larger than the GDP of the entire planet, which should tell you how baseless the calculations are.
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The problem with your reasoning is that you start from the wrong assumption ("DRM does not work").
By any practical sense of success, DRM is working very well. Yes, someone, somewhere will crack any DRM eventually. So what? Who cares? What matters to Microsoft (or any other company) is not unhackablity, but the bottom line, and the bottom line is:
* 99% of users will never hear of this hack. MS and other companies using DRM will make a lot of money out of those, more money than had DRM not existed.
* Most of t
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There's also the period of time before a crack is discovered. Between the game launch and that time, a lot of people will have no choice but to pay for the game they want to play.
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I don't think i've ever met anyone who would prefer to pirate a game, but decides to buy it at full price if a pirate copy is not available.
Generally there are those who want to pay, and those who want or need to pirate.
Those who want to pirate will always do so, and will wait for a pirate copy to become available.
Many people pirate because they can't afford not to, these people *might* buy a game if it becomes cheap enough, DRM has nothing to do with that, only the cost.
Those who generally want to buy game
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There's also the group that doesn't mind paying for games, but will then download the cracked version in order to get a better playing experience.
Similar to the group of people who will buy movies on DVD/BR, but download (or rip if they have the know-how/tools) a copy for use on the media server / player.
I have no problem paying for things. But I'll find a way to use what I buy on any device I want to use it on, thank you very much!
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Only they don't...
The masses will just download a copy thats been cracked by someone else.
DRM schemes only inconvenience paying customers through compatibility problems, decreased performance and decreased stability. As a customer i would also be offended to know that so much development effort has gone into customer-hostile features like drm instead of improving the actual product.
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The assumption that if we didn't use DRM, everything else would be the the same except there would be no DRM, is based on a misunderstanding (non-understanding) of opportunity cost [wikipedia.org]. You have to compare to the nearest viable alternative, not some idealized utopian fantasy (e.g. Congress bans DRM).. So in this
The biggest surprise to me... (Score:1)
...is that there's apparently actual UWP apps out there, waiting to be cracked.
Oh sweet jebus at last! (Score:5, Funny)
I had pirated Zoo Tycoon and it was the best thing ever but the day I saw Zoo Tycoon Ultimate Animal Collection was the day my world changed. Could I have forked over the money? That's obviously crazy talk but since then I've been all consumed with this the sinking feeling I was missing out on one of the greatest treasures that life has to offer. Now that I can pirate Zoo Tycoon Ultimate Animal Collection, it feels like a piece of my soul has been restored! ;)
By Neruos (Score:1)
You do realize that Cracking/Pirating games/movies anything with DRM is not about money. It has never been about that. It has and always will be about the challenge of defeating a technical wall that 1 human puts up and says no other human can over come. It started with Agriculture, then Industry, Medicine and now the Digital-Age and so on. There are clones of just about everything out there, good or bad, worth it or not. Copying is in the human DNA, it is what humans do and will also do.
Copy, Overcome, Ada
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So we're done now, right?
This wall has fallen. Great. The step-by-step information is available now. There's no challenge left, so if your argument is correct, Zoo Tycoon Ultimate Animal Collection will be the only game UWP broken, with maybe a few exceptions as folks experiment with other techniques.
We certainly won't see a flood of new titles being broken and released hours or days after their release like we have when other DRM schemes have been broken, right?
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We certainly won't see a flood of new titles being broken and released hours or days after their release like we have when other DRM schemes have been broken, right?
There will be, because when the wall is breached we take it ALL down to demonstrate to the wall-builders that they have failed. When that first bit of the Berlin wall was breached, they didn't leave all the rest of it in place.
The challenge stops when idiots stop putting up walls.
Buy Nary ... (Score:3)
GameboyRMH blathered:
There will be, because when the wall is breached we take it ALL down to demonstrate to the wall-builders that they have failed. When that first bit of the Berlin wall was breached, they didn't leave all the rest of it in place.
The challenge stops when idiots stop putting up walls.
<facepalm>
You are an idiot.
I've been around the scene for a long time - probably longer than you've been alive. R. Bubba Magillicuddy has been a personal friend of mine since he was 13 years old, and I know from many discussions with him and other crackers on the subject over the years that there's absolutely NOTHING ideological in his or his peers' motives for breaking DRM.
R. Bubba started cracking games when he was 12, because he wanted to play them, and couldn't afford to buy
Umm... so ... well... (Score:2)
Who cares?
Seriously, does anyone still buy stuff where you have to jump through 10 hoops just to play the fucking game you just bought and still be accused of being a dirty, rotten bastard who might think of pondering considering or even dreaming of "pirating" it?
As long as you keep buying that shit, studios will think you're ok with it. It's your money, use it to show them what you think of their attempt to tell you when, how and if you may use software that you legally paid for.
Good. (Score:1)
UWP is one of the most invasive pieces of shit I have ever had the mispleasure of working with.
If you so much as look at the files of a UWP application wrong, there's a good chance you'll fuck it up (thanks to the encrypted file system bullshit) and your only option to fix it is to re-download the entire application from scratch (which is great if you're dealing with a 45GB game). Forget about backing up anything UWP related- it's literally impossible, by design. And good luck getting an older version of an
Yet more evidence... (Score:2)
...That DRM is a complete waste of time, effort and resources. Give it up already, dump the DRM, make people happy. Keep the DRM, get cracked again.. and again.. and again. Same old insanity: Deploying DRM expecting it can't be cracked, but every time it is cracked. Yawn.
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Here's the thing, whether they're doing it yet or not, MELTDOWN makes all DRM bypassable. Sooner or later the cracking groups will be using MELTDOWN tools to locate and bypass all the DRM calls and encryption mechanisms. Which means that until Covfefe Lake processors can no longer run games on the lowest gimped settings, it's utterly useless.
WTF? (Score:1)
"...important that the game isn't allowed to communicate with the Internet so the group advises users to block the game's executable in their firewall...."
Dotard Windows users are supposed to have the knowledge and skills to monkey with the firewall.
On the other hand borking your OS from the internet keeps me in business.
All 5 layers of DRM have been breached! (Score:2)
Oh, the fools! If only they'd built it with 6 layers of DRM! When will they learn!?
Re: All 5 layers of DRM have been breached! (Score:4, Funny)
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If only they'd built it with 6 layers
It would still have been a piece of cake. :)
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5 layers of DRM (Score:2)
What is this, the new "I'm behind seven proxies" for software?
five layers of DRM should be enough for everyone (Score:1)
This sounds a bit like those Gilette ads. What does layer 5 do that layers 1-4 could not already achieve?
There's a reason it took so long. (Score:4, Informative)
It's the first piece of UWP software anyone actually wanted to pirate.