Gaming miscellany

I'm starting to lose track of all the boneheaded blunders coming from Ubisoft.

The latest fiasco? Apparently their pointless DRM software - aka UPlay - includes a security hole so huge that it must be some kind of record. With this software installed on your Windows PC (required if you want to play any of their more recent games), your computer is wide open to attacks from any web site. No special hacking skills required. Immediate and complete access to your computer.

Luckily for Ubisoft, this particular hole was easy to fix, and they issued a patch right away. Of course, you have to install the patch to fix the hole. But there's a larger issue: if Ubisoft feels it necessary to force you to install their DRM crapware, they should really hire competent programmers. Who knows how many other holes exist in this software? I'll bet the black hat hackers are looking at the UPlay code right now, rubbing their hands together gleefully.

Anyone who's been reading this site for a while may remember that I previously recommended boycotting Ubisoft games for the PC. Needless to say, that recommendation has not changed.

Additional details:

• Slashgear
• Seclists

If you needed yet another reason to avoid Ubisoft games completely, they have just provided one. Apparently they are moving some of their services to new servers, and during that time, certain games will not function. At all. Even if you only want to play single-player games. That's because those games won't run unless they can access those Ubisoft servers. Behold the supreme idiocy of DRM.

They haven't even bothered to estimate the duration of the outage, so all you can do is keep trying until your game finally starts working again. So lame.

As if that's not bad enough, many in the tech industry (including myself) are scratching their heads, wondering why moving a critical service to new server hardware would be planned to involve more than a few seconds of downtime. This is not rocket science: get the new hardware up and running, flip the switch, then when everything looks okay, pull down the old servers.

The details are in this Ubisoft announcement:
http://static2.cdn.ubi.com/transition/details/

Wow. I thought Ubisoft was bad. EA's new Origin gaming service - which you'll need to use if you want to play any of EA's new games (including Battlefield 3) - wants access to everything on your hard drive. If you install one of the new games, you agree to the use of Origin, which means you also agree to its terms of use, one of which allows EA to root around in your computer, using what it finds in any way it chooses.

Let me think about this for a moment... it seems I have a choice: play EA games and give EA access to my computer, or stop buying EA games. Seems like a no-brainer to me. I'm officially boycotting EA games (for PC/Windows) until they come to their senses (unlikely).

Here are the details:
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/2011...data.shtml

Et tu, Blizzard? Abandoning your single player, LAN gaming base is going to be a costly mistake. Sure, plenty of Diablo fans will buy Diablo III despite being required to have an always-on Internet connection, but those of us who still fondly remember Diablo LAN parties will shake our heads sadly and give D3 a pass. Blizzard, what do you think made Diablo so huge in the first place? Do you really think you lost any sales because of LAN gaming? No. Even if a dozen people at a LAN party all played with one copy of Diablo, the promotional value made up for any imagined loss in ways you clearly have never imagined possible.

To make matters worse, the real-world-currency market in D3 is going to give wealthy people a distinct advantage in the game. Yes, that's what the world needs: more advantages for rich people.

Screw you, Blizzard, and screw your accountants and lawyers who pushed for these changes. You just lost a customer. And speaking of promotional value, don't forget that it comes in negatives as well.

Ghastly details: http://games.slashdot.org/story/11/08...tion-House

UPDATE: Blizzard responds to the outcry with more bullcrap. Details below.

UPDATE 2012Jul26: The backlash against Diablo 3's senseless DRM ramps up in Germany:
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/2012...ents.shtml

UPDATE: As of August 18, Ubisoft has started panicking about all the backlash. In a move that will surprise few, they have decided to 'remove' the always-on Internet requirement for its new games - by actually leaving it firmly in place. Which leads to the obvious question: say what? Here's what they've actually done: you still need an Internet connection to start the game, but you don't need one to keep playing once you've started. In other words, this change will only be helpful for people with dial-up and intermittent Internet connections. All twelve of them. Attaboy, Ubisoft! Way to listen to your customers.

You may recall that Ubisoft has a history of making some very poor choices in trying to prevent what they still view as 'piracy' of their games. In this not-so-fine tradition, they have once again implemented a seriously misguided DRM system for their most recent games, including Driver: San Francisco. This despite having earlier stopped using this same kind of DRM, which requires an always-on Internet connection, in response to widespread complaints. Ubisoft seems doomed to repeat its failures and never to learn from them.

What Ubisoft astonishingly fails to realize is that their copy protection efforts only really hurt legitimate, paying customers. All copy protection schemes are defeated, some within hours of being made available. People who want to get a game for free are going to do it anyway. Meanwhile, people who pay for the game are getting something that is less useful than the same game without the draconian copy protection. In fact, more and more legitimate, paying customers are getting fed up with these measures and downloading unprotected versions. Some of these people will buy the DRM'd-to-the-point-of-uselessness game, but play the unprotected version to save their sanity.

There is a large and growing amount of evidence showing that 'anti-piracy' efforts are doomed to failure; that they only hurt legitimate customers; that they don't prevent 'piracy'; that people who 'pirate' games are actually the people who spend the most money on games; that basic economics show that the best way to reduce 'piracy' is to reduce price; and that the backlash from customers to particularly nasty forms of protection can be seriously damaging. Ubisoft, pull your heads out of your collective asses and get with the program.

To demonstrate just how backward Ubisoft's thinking is, try not to facepalm as you read this PCGamer post about Ubisoft's new DRM.

Sony doesn't want anyone to be able to fiddle with their own, legally-purchased PS3, so they're going after anyone who posts the code required to "Jailbreak" the console. Well, here it is again, Sony. Do your worst. The notion that you can survive as a business by treating your customers like criminals is simply idiotic.

erk: C0 CE FE 84 C2 27 F7 5B D0 7A 7E B8 46 50 9F 93 B2 38 E7 70 DA CB 9F F4 A3 88 F8 12 48 2B E2 1B
riv: 47 EE 74 54 E4 77 4C C9 B8 96 0C 7B 59 F4 C1 4D
pub: C2 D4 AA F3 19 35 50 19 AF 99 D4 4E 2B 58 CA 29 25 2C 89 12 3D 11 D6 21 8F 40 B1 38 CA B2 9B 71 01 F3 AE B7 2A 97 50 19
R: 80 6E 07 8F A1 52 97 90 CE 1A AE 02 BA DD 6F AA A6 AF 74 17
n: E1 3A 7E BC 3A CC EB 1C B5 6C C8 60 FC AB DB 6A 04 8C 55 E1
K: BA 90 55 91 68 61 B9 77 ED CB ED 92 00 50 92 F6 6C 7A 3D 8D
Da: C5 B2 BF A1 A4 13 DD 16 F2 6D 31 C0 F2 ED 47 20 DC FB 06 70

UPDATE: Here's the code embedded in the notorious "Free Speech Flag" image's colours:

I've played more hours of Battlefield 1942 than any other game on any platform. I even run a Battlefield 1942 co-op server called Tanks 'n' Planes Unlimited. But as good as BF42 is, BF2 is better in almost every way. Keep reading to find out how.

Oh boy, here we go again. When will game publishers finally realize that copy protection is a waste of money. It doesn't prevent games from being cracked and distributed worldwide to those who don't want to pay for them, but it does annoy the hell out of paying customers, such as myself. If a game publisher persists in using particularly lousy protection, I tend to do one of two things: avoid buying their games in the future, or download a version without copy protection for free from just about anywhere.

Hooray!

Check out these sites and mainstream news articles:

http://www.boingboing.net/2006/01/30/...ware_.html

http://www.glop.org/starforce/

I've reported StarForce as malware to the StopBadware site (http://www.stopbadware.org/) and suggested publicly on various forums that StarForce should be examined in the kind of detail as the SonyBMG rootkit. It remains to be seen whether someone like Mark Russinovich will take up that particular challenge, but I sure hope so.