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News Game Maker accidentally brands customers as pirates

Discussion in 'Article Discussion' started by brumgrunt, 27 Nov 2012.

  1. brumgrunt

    brumgrunt What's a Dremel?

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  2. [USRF]Obiwan

    [USRF]Obiwan What's a Dremel?

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    This is outrageous! You have designed hundreds of sprites for your latest game, taken months to create in Photoshop and other tools. And then some A-holes from which you use their software decides that you are a pirate and completely destroy your work.
     
  3. Nikumba

    Nikumba Minimodder

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    And if you dont have a backup of all that work then your total idiot
     
  4. ChaosDefinesOrder

    ChaosDefinesOrder Vapourmodder

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    DRM in "doesn't work" shocker. The pirated version probably has that watermark replaced with a transparent image or removed completely already...
     
  5. greigaitken

    greigaitken Minimodder

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    false possitives en-masse could easily be avoided if checked against a database of keys + mac address and allow for say 10 mac addresses per key.
     
  6. Gareth Halfacree

    Gareth Halfacree WIIGII! Lover of bit-tech Administrator Super Moderator Moderator

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    Changing your MAC address on Linux is but a single command; doing the same on OS X or Windows is barely any harder. Any security system tied to MAC addresses is doomed to fail.
     
  7. Rich_13

    Rich_13 What's a Dremel?

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    Agreed/.
     
  8. Gradius

    Gradius IT Consultant

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    Time to sue for BILLIONS!
     
  9. .//TuNdRa

    .//TuNdRa Resident Bulldozer Guru

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    That DRM system seems like a Dick maneuver. Why not just have it self-destruct a few key files inside of the program? Sure; It means a reinstall, but it does mean that false positives won't be nuking people's projects.

    I accept the reasons behind DRM, and why it's not going away anytime soon, but that doesn't mean I have to appreciate completely arse-backwards methods like this.
     
  10. Optimaximal

    Optimaximal What's a Dremel?

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    Correction. Any security system tied *solely* to MAC addresses is doomed to fail.

    It's a good guaranteed out-of-box UID for a system. Spoofing is a problem, but you have to *know* to do it.
     
  11. Gareth Halfacree

    Gareth Halfacree WIIGII! Lover of bit-tech Administrator Super Moderator Moderator

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    I'd argue that any security system at all is, given enough time and incentive, doomed to fail. You can hire 100 top-end engineers to design your DRM, but you're pitting them against heaven knows how many thousands of top-end hackers. That's not an fight you're going to win.
    Guaranteed? Only when manufacturers don't cut corners. Place I worked at once had to bin a thousand or so cheap network cards they'd bought to move from thinwire to Ethernet, 'cos every single one had an identical MAC address...
     
  12. stone

    stone What's a Dremel?

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    Yes, because that code has absolutely no possibility of containing a bug or getting overlooked in an update, plus you never ever hear of people using virtualized systems in content creation, let alone ones with virtual network cards that can change their mac virtually on a whim. Also there are no other tools this could have bad interactions with. For instance, some ISPs only issue different IPs via DHCP for different MAC addresses, so there are tools that change the MAC so you get issued a new IP (for whatever reason you need that). As a sane human, would you expect your copy of the software to suddenly trash your work after 10 times of doing that, but not before?
    I'm not sure how much this software phones home usually, but an extra database check and online requirement for something as stupid as a MAC database is a bad idea in its own right.

    You know how this could be easily avoided? Yeah. Don't treat your customers like crap. Don't saddle them with DRM. And if you absolutely positively have to have them bend over just a little further, do something non-destructive. Like quitting the application.
     
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