Many years ago, I worked on a product that provided a bunch of old emulated games. We properly licensed them, but many of the license holders no longer had the original ROMs, ripping the game data off of some of the really old consoles was quite difficult, and the only ROMs available publicly were cracked copies with demo's added. That was the birth of the demoscene, which was awesome, but bad for us trying to legitimately provide these games. So we ended up cheating. We used the cracked versions of these games, but we always loaded the games from a state just past when the demo would play, making them look normal and legit. Thank God all those early cracks put their demos only at the start and not, like, between levels 1 and 2, or we'd've been screwed.
It would be kind of sad/funny if one of the games had a bad crack and the game itself was broken and not caught by QA. For example, Earthbound has one final check that would cause the game to freeze and delete your save at the final boss.
The crack for The Colonel's Bequest worked by hardcoding the RNG in the interpreter to always return the same number. This broke every random element of the game, which is undetectable on a single playthrough.
This is the case for many "cracked" DOS games. You can find archives that say "we checked all the games to make sure they're really cracked", but I obtained a copy of Spaceward Ho! from such an archive, and the developers had pre-defeated this assurance measure by not invoking the copy protection until several turns into the game.
I think this was the case for one version of King's Bounty: The Legend on GOG (not the current version it sounds like?), which had a bug where you couldn't talk to an NPC at one point when you needed to do so to advance the game. At least, I recall someone mentioning somewhere when I looked after encountering the bug years ago that this was an issue of a random crack posted to the net that someone (the publisher I'm guessing, maybe GOG or the developer) had applied to produce the GOG version.
The game shown here, Midnight Club II, required the CD to be in the drive to play it. With the advent of Steam and companies releasing older games on Steam, they needed a way to bypass that check. Bypassing a CD (commonly called No-CD) was a very common crack/DRM bypass back in the day. Rockstar didn't want to bring up old source code and find someone who understood it enough to remove the check, so instead they just installed a No-CD crack into the existing EXE and uploaded the thing to Steam.
This is a great example of how today's "piracy" is tomorrow's "only working copy left". I wish there were a more formal way to explicitly allow this, though I'm probably just pining for shorter copyright terms. This game was released 20 years ago, longer than the original U.S. copyright term of 14 years.
Disney lawyers, meanwhile, are looking to extend copyright to 50 years beyond the life of the author's 3rd generation descendant or the heat death of the universe, whichever comes last.
A No-CD crack might not be transformative enough to warrant copyright protection as derivative work in the US. But they could sue in a jurisdiction that is more likely to give them a favorable outcome. Handling of derivative works and the minimum threshold for copyright varies considerably between countries.
I know what cracked means, but this didn't communicate anything to me. It seems that you'd need to both know what cracked means and know who "RAZOR 1911" is in order to get what's going on here from context alone.
Not necessarily. You could understand that a cracked PC game means its copy-protection has been removed by someone illegally but not have a detailed enough understanding of the process to understand the tweet. Personally I'm not familiar with Razor1911 so I wouldn't have understood the significance of that string in the hexdump if it weren't for the context provided by other comments here.
This seems like a weird hill to die on? yes it's obvious that rockstar (apparently) uploaded a cracked version of their game to steam. It's not obvious why they chose to do that (ie "what is going on")
pirating software (movies, and music) is a term from the 90's by the MPAA, Riaa, and Games industry in attempting to link the act of simple copyright infringement, a civil non-criminal violation of the law to violent robbery on the high seas...
Cracking is a method of removing undesired features or inclusions from software, often licensing controls, or other anti-consumer features.
Many many many people "cracked" their software who where not eganged in the act of copyright infringement, they legally owned the software but for a number of reasons has no desire to run the invasive software bundled with the game or content they purchased.
That was the scariest term they could come up with? The romantic swashbuckling seafarer, antagonising empires and declaring his own rules? Surely they could have done better.
'software fraud', 'software theft', 'forgery'... hmm well there's a reason I don't work in marketing obviously.
They did those as well, and they also paid for extensive marketing material to make it seem like buying a cracked game was directly contributing to a mafia that was planning on killing your granny.
Do you not remember the ads? The "you wouldn't steal a car"?
Piracy is just what they were able to get. Should have hired the bank's PR managers, who turned "failing to do due diligence on a customer's identity" into the customer's problem.
> Many many many people "cracked" their software who where not eganged in the act of copyright infringement, they legally owned the software but for a number of reasons has no desire to run the invasive software bundled with the game or content they purchased.
Yes, many people. But not “many many many” people. You try to make it sound like cracking to pirate was minority use case.
It was a valid use case, sure, but as big as using torrents to download Linux ISOs.
I seem to recall that for some games the community recommended fix for performance problems was to install a crack so that the game wouldn't try to read stuff from the CD, which might be slow depending on the drive you have, and would be very slow if the CD has some scratch so the drive repeatedly attempted to read the same spot until it succeeded.
Sure, and I don't question that. But at the same time - 99% of people outside of western countries had pirated copies of games (because it was legal in many countries, plus paying normal price was often month+ salary for a single game). Tons of teenagers from western countries (main gamers back in the days) had pirated games, unless they came from a rich family.
Cracks helped to fix some serious usability issues (as DRM removal nowadays also helps with), but let's not rewrite history to pretend that was what majority of people used them for.
The use of "piracy" to describe unauthorised publication of a copyrighted work dates back to the 18th century, it's not something the MPAA came up with.
You're right! Etymonline traces it back to 1706 (without a source) [0], and I found it in the original Webster's [1]:
> A bookseller that seizes the copies or writings of other men without permission.
> PI'RATE, verb transitive To take by theft or without right or permission, as books or writings.
EDIT: I just got out my OED, and sure enough:
> 1668 J. Hancock
Brooks String of Pearls (Notice at end), Some dishonest Booksellers, called Land-Pirats, who make it their practice to steal Impressions of other mens Copies...
[0] https://www.etymonline.com/word/pirate#etymonline_v_16375
my favorite use was for software that required a USB dongle. if you lost the dongle, you lost access to the software. there is not "back up" option. so the cracking community came up with a way to emulate those dongles. the obvious abuse followed. we used the software for legit 1:1 installs to physical dongle on blade servers where all of the dongles could not be installed
My favourite failure case of this is dongles on hardware devices, like lighting controllers. Especially when the dongle does in on an exposed edge of the device and can get knocked loose.
I've heard stories of them getting disconnected because they were bumped, and the whole unit goes dead five minutes later. At least it's not immediate.
I nursed my Lightwave dongle through my early career as an animator. I've lost so many pairs of glasses, several wallets, a couple of phones, but I know exactly which drawer that usb stick is sitting in now. Not that I reckon I'll ever touch LW again.
Another alternative to cracking was to use something like DAEMON Tools to emulate the CD in the drive with an .iso so you could legitimately play multiplayer games without having to deal with stupid CD checks.
Nintendo used the same file format as used for pirated ROMs, so people assumed Nintendo simply used downloaded ROMs. As it turns out one of the people working at Nintendo for emulation previously worked on emulators outside Nintendo, so it's likely that just the file format was reused. The Nintendo leaks showed that Nintendo has extensive internal archives and the likelihood of them needing to download ROMs of the Internet is low.
> Apart from where mentioned above, filenames seem to match GoodSMS names (commonly found on the internet) with almost all non-alphabetical character removed. This suggests that all of the ROM images were obtained from the internet rather than from Sega's internal archives.
> This explains the myth of the retail MC2 crashing on Vista - the game is most likely innocent, as the demo works great out of the box. IT WAS AGAIN THE CRACK breaking it.
Myth? Innocent? That game was totally unplayable when it first came out (for 98/ME?) so I doubt Razor made anything worse. I'd get most of the way through any race before the game randomly crashed.
It would be funnier if it weren't so absurd, since I'd have to go through finding the opponent in the world, chasing them to the starting line and doing the race itself each time.
He commented on that comment, it wasn't the crack.
> This gets better - Razor's crack is fine, the reason both Midnight Club 2 and Manhunt crashed when these cracks were in use was the fact that Steam DRM included a .bind section that was code not marked as code - thus tripping Data Execution Prevention
There's probably an even stronger claim. It is not that Razor is not making things worse, rather a release from a reputable group is a strong indication that it works and that it will continue to do so many years in the future after activation servers are long gone/DRM methods are deprecated/etc. Quality and reliability is probably the reason why Microsoft used DeepzOne's Sound Forge [1] and Turner Classic Movies used subtitles from Karagarga [2] :-)
Related story, I remember years ago as a kid I bought a Prince of Persia PC game at a yardsale (on a CD), but early on in the game there was a riddle where you needed a password to get through this door, it was some cryptic message of a few numbers.
I don't remember the exact format but it turned out the riddle was instructing me to go to page X, line Y and character Z of the manual for the game!
I remember being so sad that I couldn't play anymore because I didn't have the manual but in retrospect I wonder if this was an anti-piracy strategy
GTA IV has something similar, if you play a cracked copy eventually the camera starts to wobble and it makes it impossible to play, and it makes it look like a bug. I remember thousands of players asking in the forums why their camera was shaking without knowing they're telling everyone they had a pirated game. Hilarious move from Rockstar.
For those wondering, yes it happened to me, it was absolutely infuriating like "man this fucking game is full of bugs", lol.
The original Settlers 1 game, released in 1993, had ingenious copy protection built in. It had multiple levels of copy protection, that would activate, if the copy protection was attempted circumvented, i.e. cracked. It would not let you complete levels due to some characters missing/never appearing and the likes, if you used a cracked version of the game. Much like you describe with GTA IV, users thought this was a buggy game, while in reality it was a buggy crack.
Sim Earth had the same thing! It would ask you a question like "How many moons does Saturn have?" and the manual had some fact sheets at the end with all the numbers. Wikipedia was not around yet, and their fact sheets having slightly different numbers than encyclopedias due to different sources and publish date (moon counts change often, and measurements in meters for anything astronomical have randomness due to imprecisions).
I remember when I was young getting a game from my older sister's college boyfriend. Gave me the game on disks, and also a photocopied manual just for this same purpose. Used to be super common for games to use these kinds of checks for anti piracy. I thought it was super funny though, because the game was pretty old, and I was confused why this guy didn't know how to find a cracked version of the game to avoid having to pull out a 60 page manual just to play.
This was even more confusing for me, because the versions of those games I played were usually already cracked and accepted any input. So I was wondering what's the point.
I remember doing this for the original X-COM: UFO Defense. Actually I wonder how the Steam versions of these games work? Do they just include a PDF of the original manual?
Note that, as mentioned later in the twitter thread, the executable in the screenshots (testapp.exe) is not used. It was briefly used like a decade ago but has since been replaced; they just haven't removed it from the distribution, for some reason.
I don't have examples handy, but I'm pretty sure I recall something similar being done for some CD-ROM re-releases of games with floppy-based copy protection.
I'm betting even at the time of the game's release, it was so fragile that someone breathing wrong on the build machine would cause the build to fail. Any time the Windows machine displayed the numeral 1 in the systray, it would be unbuildable. And on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Fridays it would just fail to compile. That there were only 3 employees who could get it to work at all the last 3 months of development... and they all quit years ago.
Now? Now it won't build on Windows 11, or even on the old XP machine they dug up. It's so riddled with Denuvo or whatever, that they'd have to spin up a team of 12 for two months just to delete that, and only for them to discover it won't build afterwards.
And, whatever else, they sure as hell don't have anyone who's good enough at assembly and IDA Pro to crack themselves. Probably too cheap to even get the single seat license for IDA Pro.
At least some did. CD Projekt Red got started as a cracking and translation group. At the time (Poland before the fall of the iron curtain) there wasn't actually anything illegal about what they were doing; copyright wasn't really a concept in their legal system at the time, particularly for software.
> At the time (Poland before the fall of the iron curtain) there wasn't actually anything illegal about what they were doing; copyright wasn't really a concept in their legal system at the time, particularly for software.
They were successful because they actually stopped when it became illegal and started calling game publishers offering localization and distribution services.
It's actually kind of like a bizarro version of open source: someone or some group may be the initiator of a project but some of the community that grows around the project also contribute back to it, making it a symbiotic relationship. Just, in the bizarro version, there's an even more complex ecosystem filled with people who get to play a game where they hunt down some of the members of this community and make angry faces at them and sometimes put them in jail.
You need to either be or represent the copyright holder. I'm 99% sure most warez groups have no interest in exposing themselves to any legal systems when it comes to what they do.
In Russia, developers of a Minecraft crack called TLauncher have targeted other developers of other Russian Minecraft cracking projects with takedowns and trademark complaints. How did they do it? They registered a company in the Seychelles islands to protect their identity. And of course, they're relying on the fact that the Russian government is uninterested in protecting the intellectual property of Mojang.
If I say I represent such a group, then; is it likely that anyone will disagree? DMCA cases seem to be about who has the scarier looking letterhead anyway.
To whom would I have to prove or disprove my standing to take Rockstar games down, I wonder? Does Steam have any right to refuse such a request just because it's patently absurd?
>DMCA cases seem to be about who has the scarier looking letterhead anyway.
This is only true of Youtube, where their "DMCA" process is entirely extralegal, which is why there is no penalty for an incorrect takedown request.
If you file a DMCA, and Valve ignores it, you have to take it to court, where a judge will decide whether you prove you are the rightful copyright holder. As in the case with google, a company is free to take down content for any reason, including for bogus DMCA claims.
Imagine you did this and ended up in court. If you admit you lied on the DMCA request, you'd be admitting to perjury. If you continue to claim to be the cracker, Rockstar could sue you for damages from IP theft.
Perjury is only if you make a statement under oath knowing it to be a lie. The DMCA doesn't require you by statute to tell the truth. As long as you tell the truth under oath on the witness stand, if it got that far, then you'd be fine from a criminal prosecution perspective.
Of course, you'd probably get counter-sued for a number of civil torts for being a fuckhead.
> If I say I represent such a group, then; is it likely that anyone will disagree? DMCA cases seem to be about who has the scarier looking letterhead anyway.
If you say you represent them, all the scary letter heads will go to _you_.
Razor 1911 ! I had completely forgotten about them. They cracked games in the 1990s, and if memory serves well, there was a nice ascii art logo that came with games.
Apparently they’ve been active again since 2010, but in my ( much older ) mind, steam has made piracy mostly obsolete.
I think the appeal of cracks is still there for the technically minded. Learning reverse engineering, understanding how to circumvent technologies.
That seems to be the real point for these groups. Reputation from reverse engineering. I certainly enjoyed my time writing them. I don't know of any group that does this and doesn't support the developers of the IP in question. You still end up buying the software.
As good as Steam might be, it’s still required for the games you purchased to run, and that doesn’t align with some people. You own your games on Steam as much as you own your music on Spotify. So priacy is still alive and well, and a lot of the arguments I see for it is stripping DRM and ownership.
I prefer Steam over other platforms because multiplayer is effortless, with a friend or at a LAN party that means means more time actually playing the game. But if it’s not on Steam or not everyone can afford it, we’re probably playing a cracked, portable copy.
Maybe Rockstar has former, maybe even current members of Razor 1911 among their staff.
I mean, the scene is not a reliable way to pay the bills. You need to find a "real job" at some point, and the skills you get by cracking software and making demos could find good use in the video game industry.
I've been waiting for ~23 years for the copyright system to grapple with the implications of 1. having a copyrighted work A 2. taking someone else's "patch" (mod/crack/whatever, I call it "patch" as a general term) B and 3. combining them on your local computer to produce a final work C. We techies have been arguing about who has what rights, who can block who from doing what, who's responsible for what, etc. in that situation for at least that long, when the mood strikes us. I'm still unaware of any really clear precedent on this and I'm pretty sure legislation remains utterly oblivious that such a thing is even possible, or how powerful it is. I've been on the lookout for even a hint of this for a long time and there's hardly been anything.
I guess the economics just haven't worked out to produce a true showdown. Game mods are in my opinion the clear favorite for where this would finally rise to a court-level problem, and clearly there's been a lot of conflict in this space, but nobody yet has been foolhardy enough to build a large enough business on selling some mod that when the owner tries to shut them down they actually go to a full-on, precedent-setting legal battle. (After all, economically, when you get to that level of capability, why not make your own game that you clearly own? That path has been trod many times.)
So, my best answer to your question is, honestly nobody really knows what kind of rights Razor may or may not have to the final product of their crack, especially since it is not the crack itself being distributed.
A much better analogy would be how writing code in an open source editor, compiled by an open source tool chain does not make the resulting binary open source.
They are also (arguably) selling software written/designed/intended for the express purpose of bypassing copyright protections, which as I understand is in and of itself a no-no under the DMCA regardless of underlying ownership.
I ANAL of course.
edit: per the sibling comment the crack might not be included, so this might not apply.
a no-no under the DMCA regardless of underlying ownership
The "regardless" part is wrong. It is permissible for the owner of the software to include software for the express purpose of bypassing the protections they themselves placed on their software. Why would you think that the software owner isn't allowed to do that?
It would be permissible, if the "software for the express purpose of bypassing the protections they themselves placed on their software" was their own software.
It's not permissible for them to make available other people's "software for the express purpose of bypassing the protections they themselves placed on their software" without the express permission of those other people.
Neither statute nor case law sets a lower limit on the size of software that is protected by copyright... but if there were a lower limit, then it is clearly down towards the hundreds (or even dozens) of bytes. The crack certainly doesn't sit underneath that lower limit.
It'd be like purloining just one source code file, including it in your commercial software and relying on the defense "hey, it was only a few hundred lines long".
The copy protection wars were a blast back in the day. A decent number of games had methods of copy protection that were more interesting than the games themselves. I still remember the Wizardy IV copy protection (Mordor Charge Card). The game came with a book of thousands and thousands numbers printed on very dark brown pages that were difficult, if not impossible, to legibly photocopy on the machines of the day. I still have the book, and it takes a very bright light and (in my old age) a magnifying glass to make out the numbers for the copy protection challenges (which only come after completing a somewhat challenging first level).
This reminds me of a (popular) iOS game that had a little bug. I reported it hoping for a quick fix and they replied that the developer was no longer available to fix it, but they can refund me the app price..
Honestly, it's fair game. I don't expect every studio to have the source code handy and someone who knows how to build and modify the game anymore. If the crack does the job, I can empathize.
Inversely, it's not like the crack was made just out of educational curiosity. At one point it might have hurt sales... now somehow it helps.
Not like the group would have a moral high ground to claim their copyright was violated. Though the idea is fun.
Rockstar owns the copyright, they can do whatever they want with their games.
It is rather odd however, and paints Rockstar in a very negative light as a trustworthy purveyor of binary distributed software. Do you want to receive l33t warez when paying for software?
I expect reproducible binaries produced by a controlled toolchain from a responsible developer. Linux distributions have higher standards for binaries they distribute for free ffs.
It's not like windows game developers are universally incompetent. They have their source so they can reproduce their binaries at will. They understand the risks of malware and how embarrassing it would be to unwittingly ship some, so they should know better than to be shipping releases built using their personal machine they also browse the web with.
For Rockstar to be shipping pirated cracked binaries as their own demonstrates a profound lack of responsibility and professionalism as software developers.
But I'm sure there's a non-zero amount of windows game developers being careless/sloppy in general too.
Reproducible builds and controlled toolchains are not really things you are going to realistically have, shipping games for Windows - even in 2023. That does not necessarily mean the final build is coming out of Mikes office PC, however.
You're taking what I said to mean a very pedantic definition of "reproducible builds" that even Linux distros largely only aspire to achieve.
By reproducible I meant they can recreate their binaries from source code, not necessarily bit-for-bit.
There's zero reason to ship a Warez group's cracked version of a game when you're the copyright holder in possession of the source and ability to simply build an executable without the copy protection crap the crack is bypassing.
30 years ago, when I worked at a computer shop, the manager had an original Atari ST game with a bad disk. He didn't want to throw it away, so I reformatted the disk and copied a cracked version of the game onto it using XCopy on Amiga. The cracked version didn't have any intro btw... lolz
> One could presumably then archive the directory and go DRM-free
Bypassing Steam DRM requires just replacing a single DLL in the game directory. There's even whole full-featured Steam Emulator DLLs that you just drop in and get to play the game for free with working online play over Valve's servers.
I wonder if they're like the Bourbaki group in mathematics – an anonymous group where members elect other members, with a trivial amount of cloak-and-dagger secrecy from the public.
That's exactly so. Many of the groups know each other, have their private comm channels, and select insiders that release things out to the broader public. There's obviously drama around people leaking releases, stealing cracks, etc. Fun little sub-culture!
While not too big a deal on its own, if the binary was doing something it wasn't supposed to (which was/is common with cracked games from untrustworthy sources) it would open Rockstar up to a mountain of liability.
I'm guessing this is some subcontractor taking shortcuts rather than an official company policy approved by legal.
Why is this hex dump being used as a verification rather than just showing the two (supposedly the same) hashes of the entire executable themselves? Should be a quick 20 minute job for whoever call themselves "journalists" today.
I suppose it's possible for that particular string to get into the binary by some other means. Maybe failed anti-circumvention that checks for known strings in its own directory or something similar?
First problem: You presume this person has another executable of provable provenance to check against.
Second problem: There could be many different official executables for this game. Each would have a different hash. Provenance proving applies here too.
Third problem: Two hash values doesn't communicate the actual story as well as what this person (who may or may not be a journalist, that appears to be your assumption) chose to do.
First solution: Yes, finding the PC CD for this game took me like 20 minutes, both new/old in even my country for something like 20 EUR. If the author wanted to, I'm sure they could have found it equally easy.
Second solution: Not really, when you do CD releases you have a "gold master" which is the final burned CD that the other CDs are copied from. That's the one you use as the official one, as that's the one most people on PC actually have.
If the game had multiple regions (something PC games usually don't), you have multiple executables. But this happens mostly for console games, but again wouldn't be difficult to acquire a specific one for one of the ~4/5 regions there is.
Re third problem, you're probably right about this. But I'd still argue that verifying information after a finding would add more credence to the story itself and cement it better, it wouldn't take anything away from the story (unless it proved that there isn't actually any story).
What responsibility do you feel this person has to you to spend money to validate this in the specific way you would prefer?
> Not really, when you do CD releases you have a "gold master"
This is an oversimplification. In the late 90s / early 00s when 3D APIs were more fragmented than they are today, many games had different releases built to support different GPUs. There's also versions distributed with hardware that include checks that the PC contains the specific hardware.
MC2 had separate NA and EU releases, there is at least the chance of multiple versions from internationalization.
I don't see any reference to them being a journalist, anywhere? Why are you expecting some random person who saw and got frustrated with something and shared it, to be a journalist?
Are you a journalist because you're frustrated that this person isn't being a journalist...? That's kind of the same logic.
The location of the string is pretty telling: right after a 256 byte header, and occupying the first few bytes of a long run of zeroes. This isn't how you'd expect to find a constant embedded by a compiler or linker as part of code implementing a check for the presence of a crack.
First time I hear someone suggest that hashes might be a superior form of journalism. The cracking group signature is a smoking gun. Hashes would only show that the steam binary isn't bit-wise identical with the original release, which any solution to "steam release can't require a CD check" would imply.
(well, "smoking gun" in quotes, because I don't really see Rockstar doing anything wrong here. Would it have been better if they had zeroed out that string?)
The crack for The Colonel's Bequest worked by hardcoding the RNG in the interpreter to always return the same number. This broke every random element of the game, which is undetectable on a single playthrough.
The original game from Steam won't run on Linux but if I change the .exe for one that is cracked, it works.
I've been keeping that .exe for years.
Why did you do this? Fame? Money? Challenge?
I didn't know enough to so it myself and no one would teach me.
It would be ironic if Rockstar was in violation of Razor1911's copyright.
I wonder if they did assign someone all that and they took a shortcut.
And I can't find any non-crack iso to load into the VM. (Can't rip it myself, due to not having a cd drive anymore)
Linking twitter has become worse than your average paywalled site, which you can look up on archive.something if it seems interesting.
https://www.npr.org/2023/03/20/1164654551/twitter-poop-emoji...
Cracking is a method of removing undesired features or inclusions from software, often licensing controls, or other anti-consumer features.
Many many many people "cracked" their software who where not eganged in the act of copyright infringement, they legally owned the software but for a number of reasons has no desire to run the invasive software bundled with the game or content they purchased.
'software fraud', 'software theft', 'forgery'... hmm well there's a reason I don't work in marketing obviously.
Do you not remember the ads? The "you wouldn't steal a car"?
Piracy is just what they were able to get. Should have hired the bank's PR managers, who turned "failing to do due diligence on a customer's identity" into the customer's problem.
Yes, many people. But not “many many many” people. You try to make it sound like cracking to pirate was minority use case.
It was a valid use case, sure, but as big as using torrents to download Linux ISOs.
Cracks helped to fix some serious usability issues (as DRM removal nowadays also helps with), but let's not rewrite history to pretend that was what majority of people used them for.
> A bookseller that seizes the copies or writings of other men without permission.
> PI'RATE, verb transitive To take by theft or without right or permission, as books or writings.
EDIT: I just got out my OED, and sure enough:
> 1668 J. Hancock Brooks String of Pearls (Notice at end), Some dishonest Booksellers, called Land-Pirats, who make it their practice to steal Impressions of other mens Copies... [0] https://www.etymonline.com/word/pirate#etymonline_v_16375
[1] https://webstersdictionary1828.com/Dictionary/Pirate
I've heard stories of them getting disconnected because they were bumped, and the whole unit goes dead five minutes later. At least it's not immediate.
Anti what features? Piracy?
Like parent says, cracking and piracy pair well, but I've had to do it many times just for compatibility reasons, on software I had purchased.
The Windows port of Marc Ecko's Getting Up: Contents under Pressure being sold on Steam is the DEViANCE crack.
Open the game's exe in a hex editor and you can plainly see "DEViANCE".
https://www.techrepublic.com/forums/discussions/windows-uses...
> Apart from where mentioned above, filenames seem to match GoodSMS names (commonly found on the internet) with almost all non-alphabetical character removed. This suggests that all of the ROM images were obtained from the internet rather than from Sega's internal archives.
https://www.smspower.org/Development/NintendoWiiVirtualConso...
GoodSMS is a community/pirate naming scheme for identifying the different ROM dumps.
Myth? Innocent? That game was totally unplayable when it first came out (for 98/ME?) so I doubt Razor made anything worse. I'd get most of the way through any race before the game randomly crashed.
It would be funnier if it weren't so absurd, since I'd have to go through finding the opponent in the world, chasing them to the starting line and doing the race itself each time.
> This gets better - Razor's crack is fine, the reason both Midnight Club 2 and Manhunt crashed when these cracks were in use was the fact that Steam DRM included a .bind section that was code not marked as code - thus tripping Data Execution Prevention
[1] https://boingboing.net/2006/07/19/windows-xp-sounds-cr.html [2] https://torrentfreak.com/turner-classic-movies-airs-a-film-w...
I don't remember the exact format but it turned out the riddle was instructing me to go to page X, line Y and character Z of the manual for the game!
I remember being so sad that I couldn't play anymore because I didn't have the manual but in retrospect I wonder if this was an anti-piracy strategy
There's a big list on mobygames here: https://www.mobygames.com/group/9360/games-with-manual-looku...
For those wondering, yes it happened to me, it was absolutely infuriating like "man this fucking game is full of bugs", lol.
https://archive.org/details/code-wheels
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_wheel
Oh dang, these are fun, I remember the classic Monkey Island "Dial-A-Pirate" wheel [3]
FYI you can use these without downloading the whole collection:
- Under Download Options, click "SHOW ALL" to see the list of files [1]
- Find the zip file for the game you want and click "View Contents" [2]
- Click the "HTM" file listed [3]
Kudos to the kind soul who took the extra effort to package them as single-file self-contained html docs!
1: https://archive.org/download/code-wheels
2: https://ia904503.us.archive.org/view_archive.php?archive=/22...
3: https://ia904503.us.archive.org/view_archive.php?archive=/22...
Totally, and exceptionally common. It was popular in the '80 and the early '90.
Who could have thought what a company with billions of revenue would use the cracks from RAZOR1911 for IP they are selling to the end users?
Shocking!
I'm betting even at the time of the game's release, it was so fragile that someone breathing wrong on the build machine would cause the build to fail. Any time the Windows machine displayed the numeral 1 in the systray, it would be unbuildable. And on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Fridays it would just fail to compile. That there were only 3 employees who could get it to work at all the last 3 months of development... and they all quit years ago.
Now? Now it won't build on Windows 11, or even on the old XP machine they dug up. It's so riddled with Denuvo or whatever, that they'd have to spin up a team of 12 for two months just to delete that, and only for them to discover it won't build afterwards.
And, whatever else, they sure as hell don't have anyone who's good enough at assembly and IDA Pro to crack themselves. Probably too cheap to even get the single seat license for IDA Pro.
They were successful because they actually stopped when it became illegal and started calling game publishers offering localization and distribution services.
To whom would I have to prove or disprove my standing to take Rockstar games down, I wonder? Does Steam have any right to refuse such a request just because it's patently absurd?
This is only true of Youtube, where their "DMCA" process is entirely extralegal, which is why there is no penalty for an incorrect takedown request.
If you file a DMCA, and Valve ignores it, you have to take it to court, where a judge will decide whether you prove you are the rightful copyright holder. As in the case with google, a company is free to take down content for any reason, including for bogus DMCA claims.
Of course, you'd probably get counter-sued for a number of civil torts for being a fuckhead.
If you say you represent them, all the scary letter heads will go to _you_.
No requirement such as that is part of the DMCA, and there is no penalty in statute for making illegitimate notices.
Apparently they’ve been active again since 2010, but in my ( much older ) mind, steam has made piracy mostly obsolete.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Razor_1911?wprov=sfti1
That seems to be the real point for these groups. Reputation from reverse engineering. I certainly enjoyed my time writing them. I don't know of any group that does this and doesn't support the developers of the IP in question. You still end up buying the software.
I prefer Steam over other platforms because multiplayer is effortless, with a friend or at a LAN party that means means more time actually playing the game. But if it’s not on Steam or not everyone can afford it, we’re probably playing a cracked, portable copy.
I mean, the scene is not a reliable way to pay the bills. You need to find a "real job" at some point, and the skills you get by cracking software and making demos could find good use in the video game industry.
I guess the economics just haven't worked out to produce a true showdown. Game mods are in my opinion the clear favorite for where this would finally rise to a court-level problem, and clearly there's been a lot of conflict in this space, but nobody yet has been foolhardy enough to build a large enough business on selling some mod that when the owner tries to shut them down they actually go to a full-on, precedent-setting legal battle. (After all, economically, when you get to that level of capability, why not make your own game that you clearly own? That path has been trod many times.)
So, my best answer to your question is, honestly nobody really knows what kind of rights Razor may or may not have to the final product of their crack, especially since it is not the crack itself being distributed.
I ANAL of course.
edit: per the sibling comment the crack might not be included, so this might not apply.
The "regardless" part is wrong. It is permissible for the owner of the software to include software for the express purpose of bypassing the protections they themselves placed on their software. Why would you think that the software owner isn't allowed to do that?
It's not permissible for them to make available other people's "software for the express purpose of bypassing the protections they themselves placed on their software" without the express permission of those other people.
Neither statute nor case law sets a lower limit on the size of software that is protected by copyright... but if there were a lower limit, then it is clearly down towards the hundreds (or even dozens) of bytes. The crack certainly doesn't sit underneath that lower limit.
It'd be like purloining just one source code file, including it in your commercial software and relying on the defense "hey, it was only a few hundred lines long".
Inversely, it's not like the crack was made just out of educational curiosity. At one point it might have hurt sales... now somehow it helps.
Not like the group would have a moral high ground to claim their copyright was violated. Though the idea is fun.
It is rather odd however, and paints Rockstar in a very negative light as a trustworthy purveyor of binary distributed software. Do you want to receive l33t warez when paying for software?
I expect reproducible binaries produced by a controlled toolchain from a responsible developer. Linux distributions have higher standards for binaries they distribute for free ffs.
I would estimate the number of videogames published for Windows PCs matching all of these critera to be roughly 0.
For Rockstar to be shipping pirated cracked binaries as their own demonstrates a profound lack of responsibility and professionalism as software developers.
But I'm sure there's a non-zero amount of windows game developers being careless/sloppy in general too.
By reproducible I meant they can recreate their binaries from source code, not necessarily bit-for-bit.
There's zero reason to ship a Warez group's cracked version of a game when you're the copyright holder in possession of the source and ability to simply build an executable without the copy protection crap the crack is bypassing.
It's pathetic on Rockstar's part.
People had standards at the time, which wasn't that long ago either.
(I am talking with the context of current games using denuvo, not this specific case)
One could presumably then archive the directory and go DRM-free
Bypassing Steam DRM requires just replacing a single DLL in the game directory. There's even whole full-featured Steam Emulator DLLs that you just drop in and get to play the game for free with working online play over Valve's servers.
I was thinking that since the binary seems largely unchanged... that the presence of DLLs and such wouldn't really matter.
The cracked version wasn't aware of Steam, so I wonder if it's even checking
analogous to free work-for-hire
I'm guessing this is some subcontractor taking shortcuts rather than an official company policy approved by legal.
I suppose it's possible for that particular string to get into the binary by some other means. Maybe failed anti-circumvention that checks for known strings in its own directory or something similar?
Second problem: There could be many different official executables for this game. Each would have a different hash. Provenance proving applies here too.
Third problem: Two hash values doesn't communicate the actual story as well as what this person (who may or may not be a journalist, that appears to be your assumption) chose to do.
Second solution: Not really, when you do CD releases you have a "gold master" which is the final burned CD that the other CDs are copied from. That's the one you use as the official one, as that's the one most people on PC actually have.
If the game had multiple regions (something PC games usually don't), you have multiple executables. But this happens mostly for console games, but again wouldn't be difficult to acquire a specific one for one of the ~4/5 regions there is.
Re third problem, you're probably right about this. But I'd still argue that verifying information after a finding would add more credence to the story itself and cement it better, it wouldn't take anything away from the story (unless it proved that there isn't actually any story).
> Not really, when you do CD releases you have a "gold master"
This is an oversimplification. In the late 90s / early 00s when 3D APIs were more fragmented than they are today, many games had different releases built to support different GPUs. There's also versions distributed with hardware that include checks that the PC contains the specific hardware.
MC2 had separate NA and EU releases, there is at least the chance of multiple versions from internationalization.
Are you a journalist because you're frustrated that this person isn't being a journalist...? That's kind of the same logic.
(well, "smoking gun" in quotes, because I don't really see Rockstar doing anything wrong here. Would it have been better if they had zeroed out that string?)