On 25/01/2011 04:12 AM, Darren New wrote:
> Orchid XP v8 wrote:
>> I love the way that Steam won't let you log in twice, so you can
>> install the same game on two PCs, but you can only play it on one at
>> once...
>>
>> ...unless you put Steam into offline mode. *facepalm*
>
> Sure. Steam keeps the honest people honest. It's sufficiently easy to
> bypass that nobody really feels the need to *crack* it. But it's hard
> enough to bypass (in that you actually need the steam account that
> bought the game to play it) that it keeps them earning money.

More to the point, Steam does genuinely *useful* stuff. If you could 
remove it, you probably wouldn't want to. It doesn't stop you copying 
stuff (actually, it *assists* you in copying stuff). It just stops you 
(or rather, everybody you gave the copies to) from using more than one 
copy at once. And since all your online activity is linked to your user 
account anyway, you probably wouldn't *want* to let other people use 
your account anyway.

In all, it works rather nicely.

>>>> (This of course leads directly to high quality content no longer being
>>>> made, which would be very sad.)
>>>
>>> But that's my point. High quality content used to be made before it was
>>> easy to make copies at all.
>>
>> Given that copying becoming easy is the problem... what's your point
>> here?
>
> That presenting things only in forms that are impossible to copy does
> not spell the end of high quality content.

The problem isn't that companies are making stuff impossible to copy. 
The problem is that companies *cannot* make stuff impossible to copy.

>> Yeah, pretty much. I gather zero-day cracks are a relished challenge
>> for some people. (Then again, most of the DRM I've seen surely can't
>> be *that* hard to crack in the first place...)
>
> You would be surprised. Almost every crack of modern DRM requires
> someone to void their warranty.

Heh, like a cracker is going to give a damn about a warranty.

Seriously though. Assassin's Creed II requires an Internet connection or 
it won't play. Somebody runs it in a VM and pokes the page tables a bit, 
and figures out how to get it to run. Where have they voided a warranty? 
(Other than expecting to get any product support out of Ubisoft...)

>> So the encrypted link from the graphics
>> card to the monitor is a completely seperate cryptosystem from the
>> encryption on the disk (or whatever).
>
> Yes? And your point is?

Your monitor doesn't decrypt the disk. Your PC does.

>> Ultimately, what it all boils down to is that the piece of electronics
>> in front of you knows how to decrypt the video data. Which means that,
>> in theory, you can do this too. The keys must be stored somewhere.
>
> Sure. If they're stored in the silicon, that's not going to be easy to
> get out.

Not easy, for sure. But still possible, in essence.

>> People paying money for computer systems that purposely prevent them
>> doing stuff? Not gonna be popular. :-P
>
> Game consoles? Blu-ray players? DVD players? No, none of those are
> popular at all.

Last time I checked, a DVD player isn't a "computer system".

Oh, you and I know there's a computer in there. But to most people, it's 
just a player, like a cassette machine is just a player.

(FWIW, *my* cassette machine actually has a computer in it. Not joking.)

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