Uninnovate

Gears of War is latest DRM fiasco

ageitgey — Fri, 30 Jan 2009 23:59:48 +0000

We’ve already written about how Digital Rights Management (DRM) software in the computer game “Spore” caused consumer outrage. Instead of preventing piracy as intended, quite the opposite happened. Customers who legally purchased the game were often locked out of the game by mistake while those who pirated the game did not face those problems. In fact, Spore ended up as the most pirated game of 2008.

Now customers who legally purchased the Microsoft published PC version of “Gears of War” are facing even worse problems:

It seems that the DRM on Gears of War came with a built-in shut off date: the digital certificate for the game was only good until January 28, 2009. Now that the game fails to work unless you adjust your system’s clock, what’s Epic’s response? “We’re working on it.”

Gears of War DRM screwup makes PC version unplayable at Ars Technica

In fact, the only way to play Gears of War on the PC right now is to manually set your computer to a previous date to fool the game or…. to pirate the game. Great job, Microsoft!

Media companies give up millions to spite YouTube

ageitgey — Sat, 20 Dec 2008 22:04:20 +0000

YouTube’s popularity is continuing to grow. Searches on YouTube now account for over 25% of all searches done on Google. That means that if YouTube searches were counted separately from Google, YouTube would be the second most popular search engine on the internet ahead of both Yahoo and Microsoft.

Despite the popularity of YouTube, media companies continually send take-down requests to get their videos removed from YouTube. Most famously, Viacom sued YouTube for $1 Billion for making Viacom media available on YouTube.

When the Viacom-produced movie Tropic Thunder was released, the stars of the movie produced a mock viral video and posted it to YouTube in order to generate publicity for the movie:

Jack Black, Ben Stiller & Robert Downey, Jr. at 2008 MTV Movie Awards by Robert Downey Jr

The stars in the video state that they are producing the video to post on the internet for publicity, which generated positive buzz in advertising circles for its originality. Despite this, Viacom sent a take-down request to YouTube, claiming that they were illegally using Viacom property and forced them to remove the video from the site.

Despite popular belief, it it is not the case that media companies not being paid for their content. Today, Warner Music Group announced that it was pulling all of it’s music videos off of YouTube despite a previous deal that paid them whenever their music videos were watched. It is even speculated that Google was losing money on the deal while Warner was being paid millions.

While YouTube search is more popular than Yahoo search and a potentially lucrative profit stream, content providers are still removing their material from YouTube. No company would request to be removed from search engines like Yahoo since it is so vital to their online presence. In fact, the opposite is true. An entire new industry of search engine expertise has developed to help these companies rank higher in searches. Yet when even better opportunities for free publicity exist, they let their fear of industry change take precedence over making money.

RIAA to cut off internet access of file sharers

ageitgey — Fri, 19 Dec 2008 21:54:49 +0000

According to the Wall Street Journal, the Recording Industry Association of America is abandoning lawsuits against file sharers who trade music online:

“The decision represents an abrupt shift of strategy for the industry, which has opened legal proceedings against about 35,000 people since 2003. Critics say the legal offensive ultimately did little to stem the tide of illegally downloaded music. And it created a public-relations disaster for the industry, whose lawsuits targeted, among others, several single mothers, a dead person and a 13-year-old girl.”

Wall Street Journal - Music Industry to Abandon Mass Suits

We’ve previously covered some of the the reasons why suing your customer base may not be the best long-term business strategy. But given that the music industry has a history of pursing any strategy to prevent piracy no matter how self destructive or pathetically futile, it comes as no surprise that they are launching a new anti-piracy strategy. The RIAA is forming partnerships with internet service providers who will scan their customer’s traffic for illegal file sharing and then warn them, slow down their transfer speeds, or cut them off altogether:

“If the customers continue the file-sharing, they will get one or two more emails, perhaps accompanied by slower service from the provider. Finally, the ISP may cut off their access altogether.”

Wall Street Journal - Music Industry to Abandon Mass Suits

One alarming problem with this approach is that the RIAA has a horrible track record for identifying pirated material being transferred online. As far back as 2003, the RIAA almost succeeded in having Penn State University’s astronomy and astrophysics department disconnected from the internet. After a RIAA network scan found a folder called “usher” on an astronomy department server and assumed it contained pirated music by the musician Usher, they sent a cease and decist letter to the university. The university threatened to cut off access to the department until they proved that the material had nothing to do with the musician Usher.

The RIAA has had to apologize for many other similar incidents over the years, including harrasing the Amigascne.org Amiga Computer fan site:

The RIAA’s form letter sent to Speakeasy last Thursday alleged the Amigascne.org site illegally “offers approximately 0 sound files for download. Many of these files contain recordings owned by our member companies, including songs by such artists as Creed.”

ZDNet - RIAA apologises for more mistaken warnings

Given the track record, it is alarming that the RIAA will be given power to cut off the internet access of individual users. And given the RIAA’s history of continuing to litigate in piracy cases where there is no valid evidence, it is unlikely that they will be forgiving to users who are innocently caught in the dragnet. Meanwhile, the large scale pirates will continue to use advanced tools that encrypted file transfers and are unlikely to be caught.

If you disagree with this move, let your ISP know how you feel. If your ISP supports this program, switch to another provider who values user privacy. Without full cooperation from the ISPs, the RIAA would have no ability to implement this program.

More evidence that software copy protection is completely useless

ageitgey — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 03:55:59 +0000

Copy protection for computer games is as old as computer games themselves. Software companies have long believed that if they don’t come up with ways to stop games from being copied, consumers would wildly copy games between themselves for free and the software company would lose sales and not make any money.

In the 1980s and early 1990s, game companies came up with increasingly outrageous copy protection schemes. VintageComputing.com has a great run-down of some of these methods:

Many games — X-Com: UFO Defense included — would ask the player to type in a code that appeared on a given page. Other games took it a step further and would ask for a specific word from a given line in a given paragraph on a given page: “Type in the fourth word of the first line of the last paragraph on page 254 to continue.”

While the copy protection methods have changed, the idea remains the same. Instead of looking up words in a manual, computer games these days will require online activation or use specially-modified cds that must be inserted in order to play.

While piracy is rampant in the computer gaming world, the very idea of copy protection is completely broken. At first, it might seem like a reasonable idea to force game players to prove that they bought the software, but it is actually counter-productive due to the nature of software.

Think about it: Once a single person figures out how to bypass copy protection, every other pirate in the world can get a copy from the first person who copied it. At that point, the software pirates have a modified version of the game that doesn’t include the hassles of copy protection. In fact, the only people who have to deal with annoying copy protection are the very people who actually paid for the game. With today’s high speed internet connections and bittorrent download sites, is actually easier in many cases to pirate a game than it is to go to the store to buy it.

But while there hasn’t been a single* moderately popular computer game ever released that wasn’t successfully pirated despite copy protection, game publishers still think that they can stop pirates. Spore, one of the most highly anticipated releases of the year, is the latest victim.

The publishers of Spore went to great lengths to prevent the game from being copied - possibly greater lengths than any game before it. The publishers instituted a system where the game had to be activated online every 10 days in order to be played. That means that even if you don’t play on the internet, you still had to log in once every 10 days to keep playing. In addition, the game counted the number of times it was installed. After the third install, the player was forced to call the publisher and prove that they didn’t pirate it in order to install it again. Even worse, the copy protection would occasionally malfuction and cause problems for players who didn’t violate any of the numerous rules.
This resulted in widespread outrage from gamers. Amazon was flooded with poor reviews decring the copy protection (the game current has 1.5 out of 5 stars), forums were swamped with protests from players, and gaming blogs were full of stories from dissatisfied players.

So clearly copy protection managed to destory the reputation of the game. But did it at least keep people from copying the game illegally?

In the first two weeks after release, Spore had already been pirated over 500,000 times, more than any other game ever tracked. And it gets worse! According to TorrentFreak, here are the most pirated games of 2008:

Spore - 1.7M downloads
The Sims 2 - 1.15M downloads
Assassin’s Creed - 1M downloads
Crysis - 0.94M downloads
Command and Conquer 3 - 0.86M downloads

So if you are keeping track at home:

Spore’s copy protection outraged players, which resulted in wide-spread consumer outrage and one of the worst Amazon review scores ever recorded for a major game
Spore was still pirated more than any other game ever
The only users who were harmed by the copy protection were players who purchased the game legally.

So clearly the publishers of Spore and the rest of the industry will learn from their experience and not make the same mistake again, right? Don’t count on it. In fact, they should have learned over 20 years ago, when Game Guru was released:

It shipped on a 3.5″ floppy, but the program was restricted to only three installs. In order to install it, the write-protect tab on the floppy had to be disabled, and the software would supposedly write a marker to a file on the disk every time it was installed. Once that count reached three, poof! No more installs for you. Hmmm…I wonder why that technique never became popular.

So it shuts down after three installs just like Spore.

Here’s a little more history/trivia: Game Guru was published in 1996 by 3DO Software. 3DO Software was a spin-out of EA Software started by the founder of EA Software, Trip Hawkins. After 3DO Software went out of business, many of it’s assets were bought by UbiSoft. Since 2004, UbiSoft was been partially owned by EA Software. EA Software of course publishes Spore. Small world, huh?

* No, really. Not even one. Try to find a counter-example.

How to not win customers in the ultra-competitive Computer Enthusiast market

ageitgey — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 03:34:36 +0000

Creative Labs, makers of the SoundBlaster line of add-on computer sound cards, have been the kings of the sound card market for years. However, sound cards are a shrinking niche market battered by a consumer shift to laptops with integrated sound cards and the commoditization of sound card technology in desktops.

Last week, Creative Labs reported an expected operating loss for the quarter. While they will still make a net profit, this only due to the sale of their headquarters building to a third party for $144 million. Their stock has been taking a beating and pundits have been negative on the company and its lack of vision.

Even within Creative’s core customer base, things have not been going smoothly. Creative Labs has received repeated criticism for not providing driver updates for its products. After a year of customer complaints, Creative still has not provided Windows Vista-compatible drivers for SoundBlaster X-FI sound cards.

A user by the name of Daniel_K took up the challenge and started working on making the Creative SoundBlaster X-FI cards work with the Windows Vista-compatible drivers. This would allow owners of the X-FI cards to use their hardware with Windows Vista instead of being limited to using the older Windows XP.

Daniel_K was doing this in his spare time at no cost to Creative and he was very clear that his work was unofficial and unsupported by Creative. In effect, Daniel_K was using Creative’s existing drivers as a base and extending them to support hardware that Creative did not want to spend the time to support.

Friday, Creative Labs posted a public notice to Daniel_K on their forums ordering him to cease and desist. Based on logic that must only make sense to Creative, Daniel_K was accused of stealing by enabling Creative’s hardware to work on Windows Vista:

“By enabling our technology and IP to run on sound cards for which it was not originally offered or intended, you are in effect, stealing our goods.“

Phil O’Shaughnessy, VP Corporate Communications, Creative Labs Inc.

While Creative Labs may be able to use their copyright on the existing drivers to prevent Daniel_K from doing any further work, they are commiting commercial suicide. Over the weekend, hundreds of people have posted in protest. Sites all across the internet have picked up the story and a protest site has been created.

Instead of spending time and money properly supporting their product line, Creative has decided to use their copyright to anger their most loyal core customer base.

I guess Creative has put a new spin on the old model:

Step 1: Release a product, but refuse to provide up-to-date drivers
Step 2: Silence customers who provide the driver updates for free
Step 3: ?

Let’s just stay that Step 3 isn’t “Profit.”

Good job, guys.

AT&T raising the cost of text messages to absurd heights

ageitgey — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 18:24:32 +0000

In March, AT&T is raising their rates for sending and receiving standard text messages to an astronomical 20 cents per message. MMS (Picture messages) are going to be more expensive at 30 cents per message.

AT&T has started informing customers that unless they’re subscribed to a messaging plan, they’ll be paying 5 cents more for both text messages and picture / video messages — now up to 20 and 30 cents per, respectively. The change takes effect March 30, so we’d recommend you either tell all your peeps to cut it out with the messaging or sign up with a package by then.

AT&T boosting pay-per-use text and MMS rates — again - Engadget Mobile

This is even more insulting because it costs AT&T nearly nothing to send these messages. Text messages are limited to 140 bytes in size - a minuscule amount of data. So if you do the math, that works about to about $1,500 a megabyte. A blogger named gthing carried out this math to the extreme and figured out how this compares to sending data via your normal internet connection:

When calculating SMS charges, most people don’t take into consideration that the message is really being paid for twice! If I send a message to another AT&T user, I am paying to send it AND they’re paying to receive it! This should probably be illegal, but that’s for another discussion.

So how much does an SMS message actually cost? Not 20 cents - but 40 cents! This doubles all of my numbers above. Furthermore, my above figures estimate that people actually use all 160 characters available to them. Say people on average actually only used half of that (which is still being generous) - then their price of data has again doubled from the numbers I gave above!

Making adjustments for both of the above statements, we realize that our above number isn’t even close to correct! Corrected, the comparison looks more like this:

COSTS OF TRANSFERING 2,560 MP3s:

via my ISP: $1
via SMS: $61,356,851.20

Phew! THAT is premium data! It’s no wonder that SMS texting alone is a 100 Billion dollar a year industry!

The True Cost of SMS Messages » a gthing science project

So while it’s not likely that you are going to start sending files over text message any time soon, this clearly illustrates the gouging that the phone companies are doing. By sticking to closed systems like SMS instead of adopting standard text messaging platforms, companies like AT&T are able to wring huge amounts of money out of their customers.

This has strong echos of the early days of the internet. The large existing online services like CompuServe charged several dollars per hour and were reluctant to provide their users unrestricted access to the internet. Well, we all know how well that worked out for them. Does anyone even remember CompuServe? This is the wrong time for cell phone companies to be afraid of new business models.

Tags: at&ttext messaging sms cost mobile spectrum auction compuserve

MyPhone: Share your iPhone’s music collection via WiFi

ageitgey — Wed, 01 Aug 2007 22:39:06 +0000

Released in late 2006, the Zune mp3 player was Microsoft’s attempt to establish itself in the portable music player market. This market has been dominated by Apple’s iPod since the initial release of the iPod in 2001.

The Zune was similar to the iPod in terms of price, size and capacity. However, it offered a unique wifi-based song sharing feature. Zune owners could “squirt” a song to another Zune owner. Unfortunately, the shared song was mired in DRM and could only be played three times before being inactivated. The feature was not a hit and the Zune failed to capture a significant share of the market.

Many called the Zune’s overly-limited wifi song sharing feature a missed opportunity. Apple’s new iPhone has also wifi support but it offers no access to music via wifi. I set out to fix this.

To address this, I’ve written an application called MyPhone. It runs on the iPhone and serves up the contents of the iPhone’s music library to any web browser on the same network. Using this application, you can listen to all of the music stored on your iPhone from another computer on the same wifi network. For example, you could take your iPhone to work and listen to its music library on your desktop or you could even listen to your music collection from another nearby iPhone.

Using MyPhone is very simple to use once it is installed and running:

From your desktop computer or other internet-capable device, point your web browser at http://your_iphone_address:1111/ . The “your_iphone_address” part should be replaced with the current ip address of your iPhone. You can find this by clicking on the wifi settings page on the iPhone.
Browse the list of music available on the iPhone. Music is sorted by Artist and Album.
Click on any song to listen to it in your web browser.

Unfortunately, installing applications on the iPhone is still very complicated at this point. If you are not experienced with iPhone hacking, you might want to wait until better tools are created to install iPhone applications. But if you want to try, here are the basic steps:

Follow instructions on the web to get ssh running on your iPhone.
Install iphone-binkit and python on your iPhone.
Download MyPhone and copy it to /usr/local/bin on your iPhone.
Log into your iPhone via ssh and run MyPhone with this command:

nohup python /usr/local/bin/MyPhone.py&

Test out MyPhone from your desktop or laptop!

Warnings:

MyPhone is written to encourage further development of applications that allow legal use use of your personal music collection with portable devices. It is not a fully-polished application and is meant for experienced users only. It is not meant to be a piracy tool, so please don’t use it for that.
MyPhone is NOT secure and is meant for your own personal use and experimentation. Be careful what wifi networks you join when MyPhone is running.
MyPhone is released as open source under the GNU GPL 2.0 license.

Pictures:

Picture: Listening to the iPhone’s music collection on a desktop via a wifi connection.

Picture: Wireless sharing of a music collection between two iPhones on the same wifi network.

iPhone hacks enable ring tones, menu customization, and file access

ageitgey — Sun, 15 Jul 2007 21:42:11 +0000

Custom Ringtones

While many modern cell phones allow users to upload and use custom ringtones, the iPhone does not have this ability. Users are limited to the default and rather limited set of ringtones that ship with the phone.

Apple’s future plans for custom ringtone support are not clear. Some users say that a “ringtone” option was visible in iTunes during the original MacWorld iPhone demo and predict that this feature will be added in a later update. Others say that AT&T or record labels may be discouraging Apple from adding this ability. Whatever the real reason, this is an essential feature that any phone in the price range of the iPhone should support.

Luckily for iPhone users, programmers gathered in the #iphone irc channel and around the globe have figured out how to use the recovery mode of the iPhone to access the file system and upload custom ringtones. Step-by-step instructions have been provided for both Mac users and Windows users.

Using the iPhone as a hard drive

Although Steve Jobs has often referred to the iPhone as “the best iPod we’ve ever created”, it lacks the ability to be used as a hard drive to shuttle files from one place to another. This ability was enabled in ever other iPod model.

Two workarounds for this limitation (both currenty Mac-only) have been developed:

Ecamm Network’s iPhoneDrive is a $10 program that allows files to be copied to and from the iPhone. It is easy to use, but the iPhone’s contents can only be accessed within the iPhoneDrive application and only files added with the application can be accessed.

iPhoneDisk is an open-source, developer-orientied application that allows the iPhone to be accessed as a regular hard drive directly from Finder in OSX. While this is much more powerful than iPhoneDrive, it is in the earliest stages of development and is not really meant for end users at this point.

Customize the iPhone’s main menu

Hackers have also discovered how to add, remove, and rearrange the icons on the iPhone’s main menu. The process is similar to adding ringtones.

Microsoft stuck in endless DRM battle with Hacker: Part 3 of Many

ageitgey — Sun, 15 Jul 2007 20:06:21 +0000

In September 2006, Microsoft’s PlaysForSure DRM, used by online music stores like Rhapsody.com and Napster.com to prevent unauthorized copying of music, was cracked. A program called FairUse4WM was released that allowed users to unlock purchased music and copy it without restriction.

Microsoft quickly patched the vulnerability and sent updates to their PlaysForSure business partners. But before Microsoft’s partners were able to deploy the fix, an updated crack was released that nullified the fix and again left Microsoft’s partners with no effective copy protection.

In an attempt to slow the patch/crack cycle, Microsoft comically filed a lawsuit against against “John Does 1-10″ because they had no idea who was authoring the cracks. The author was only known by his or her online pseudonym - Viodentia. Unable to track down Viodentia, Microsoft was forced to give up and quietly dismissed the lawsuit.

Today, a user known as “Divine Tao” (clearly an anagram of Viodentia) posted a new version of FairUse4WM with an add-on application called “mirakagi”. The new version cracks music purchased from Microsoft’s Zune Marketplace and adds compatibility for Windows Vista. This will be especially upsetting to Microsoft because the Zune Marketplace’s optional subscription-based plan would allow a user to download thousands of tracks at very low cost and then unlock them with FairUse4WM and keep them forever.

Microsoft will no doubt respond quickly because they believe that their business model depends on having effective DRM in place. However, there is good evidence to refute this claim, at least for pay-per-track downloads - the largest part of Microsoft’s business . Emusic.com doesn’t use DRM to protect the music it sells, yet it has been far more successful in the marketplace than any store that uses Microsoft’s PlaysForSure DRM system or the Zune Marketplace.

Once again, let’s go back to December 3, 2003:

None of this technology that you’re talking about’s gonna work. We have Ph.D.’s here, that know the stuff cold, and we don’t believe it’s possible to protect digital content.

What’s new is this amazingly efficient distribution system for stolen property called the Internet — and no one’s gonna shut down the Internet. And it only takes one stolen copy to be on the Internet. And the way we expressed it to them is: Pick one lock — open every door. It only takes one person to pick a lock.

- Steve Jobs, The Rolling Stone Interview

Dear iPhone: Give me my data!

ageitgey — Thu, 12 Jul 2007 02:45:55 +0000

Apple’s iPhone allows users to input notes, bookmarks, contacts, and all sorts of other data. However, the user is only allowed limited access to a portion of this data via iTunes. For example, the only way to get notes off the phone is for the user to email the note to himself or herself.

However, all data is available on the user’s computer in the form of an iPhone back up. An iPhone back up is made whenever an iPhone is synchronized. This backup contains everything from the user’s web history, bookmarks, and cookies to their contact lists and SMS chat history.

In order to spur further development of iPhone data extraction tools, I have created a script that will extract all files from an iPhone backup into a format that is easily readable. This script, called extract_iphone_backup.py (source code here), will look for any iPhone back ups, process them, and dump the data files. Note: Currently, this script will only run on OSX.

To use the script:

Download the script and save it to your Home folder.
Run Applications > Utilities > Terminal in Finder.
In the terminal window, type:

python extract_iphone_backup.py

Watch as all the settings files from your iPhone are extracted to a folder called “iphone_backup”. Inside of that folder, there will be a folder for each iPhone. The name of the folder will match the phone number of the iPhone.

So what’s inside?

Here are some of the interesting things you can do with your iPhone’s files. To make the most use of these files, you will want to download Sqlite Database Browser.

Review your call history

Open the file Library_CallHistory_call_history.db with Sqlite Database Browser. Click on “Browse Data” and choose “call” from the table drop-down. This table contains the last 100 calls you have made.

Read logs of your SMS (Text Message) chats

Use Sqlite Database Browser to look in Library_SMS_sms.db in the table “message”.

Access notes written on your iPhone

Use Sqlite Database Browser to look in Library_Notes_notes.db in the table “Note”.

Access your raw contacts list

Use Sqlite Database Browser to look in Library_AddressBook_AddressBook.sqlitedb in tables “ABPerson” and “ABMultiValue”.

Look at your web bookmarks, cookies, and history.

Try opening Library_Safari_Bookmarks.plist, Library_Cookies_Cookies.plist, and Library_Safari_History.plist in Text Edit.

And there is a lot more…

While all of this may not be very useful for the average user, there is a wealth of settings information here from all the basic iPhone apps for developers to look at and play with. Using this information, it will be easy for developers to write user-friendly tools to access or update all of the data stored in the iPhone back ups. Have fun!