Flutterby™! : Anti Piracy method that might not suck 2001-03-15 17:38:47+00

Anti Piracy method that might not suck

2001-03-15 17:38:47+00 by TC 5 comments

You plunk down your and install your game and what the heck, you go for the full install and chew up 800meg of hard drive space for one game! Thats all in the realm of acceptable but when they force me to put the fucking CD!! in everytime I want to load that game. They have crossed the line. This might be an acceptable answer. I think software companies should get paid but not at the cost of making the product anoying. Don't even get me started on Dongles....

Sounds like snake oil to me. Though of course there was the infamous Autodesk 3D studio thing with some of the calculations going through an active dongle in such a way that illegal copies that didn't actively replace the work done by the dongle would gradually degrade the CAD files into a mishmash of points and lines.

I imagine they're just trying to scare off buyers of pirate CDs; psych-ops'r'us !

So you're saying that anti-piracy schemes that require you to put in the CD every time you want to run a program are no good, but that an anti-piracy scheme that would require you to run the program off a non-pirated CD every time is all right?

Well, given that it's a PlayStation thingie and Todd's used to playing console games, I guess I can kinda see how he resolves the contradiction, but...

The hard bit, of course, is telling what's an original CD and what's a copy. And we fought this game back in the days of the Apple ][ without a clear resolution and with a much more fixed definition of hardware and more nebulous one of software.

Ah, I have left too much for interpetation. As Dan pointed out this technology is only on the Playstation now and they have somehow "magic black box stuff" figured out how to tell a clone from an original and this sparks an arms race between crackers and developers during which time as Phram points out...consumer confidence in pirate software falls. It's no longer s boolean function of being a good copy or not. it's seems to work, but is it really???

Ok on the PC side of things, let's suppose this magic system can tell if a hardrive install is original or memorex. This would seem to be more effective than the forcing 14 year olds to buy CDRs and forcing Todd to put the FUCKING CD in everytime.

The PlayStation has a modified CD reader and the originals are only produced by Sony. In addition to being a funky black color, they have some specific ECC errors that are used to determine if the disk has been copied. Somewhere around here I have a partially disassembled firmware from a Yamaha CD burner where I was trying to override the ECC error corrections to be able to make exact, bit-for-bit, copies of PlayStation CDs. You can also achieve the same result by putting a modchip in your console. The 'acceptable' reason for all of this is to defeat the region encoding on the PS.