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Confessions of an Honest Cracker

CyberMage

14 Dec 2005 11:46


The year is 1988. Interplay Productions released The Bard's Tale III this week, and someone from our team has borrowed a copy from where he works at a local software store. His company allows employees to "check out" software so they can understand what they sell. That is how we got most of our games without buying them.

Introduction


The four of us gathered around a little 14" TV that night and started the game. Unlike the vast majority of gamers, we had no interest in slaying beasts or completing quests. The challenges we sought were buried in 6502 assembly code, the language the game ran in.

The Bard's Tale III had a very annoying method of copy protection. Teleporting required you to enter a code from a strange spinning code wheel. We triggered the protection scheme four or five times, monitoring what the code did when we answered correctly and what it did when we were wrong. After a few lines of patched code - voila! Every answer would be right, regardless, which eliminated the need for the code wheel. An hour after first running the game, we had a working cracked version.

This wasn't the first game protection system we had cracked. Our oldest member was 17, and youngest was 14 when we started. Our resume of cracked games included at least 75 titles. No protection scheme had ever taken us more than a weekend to crack, and most fell within five minutes. It took longer to add our animated logo and animation to a game after ripping out inconsequential data so our loader screen could fit on the floppy. Even back then we would add cheers and jeers to the other cracking groups out there.


The More Things Change, The More They Stay The Same


Back to the present. Things haven't changed much. Copy protection schemes are still annoying to the purchaser. Sometimes they are downright cruel. Crackers, pirates, whatever you call them, they will still crack the protection scheme within a few hours of getting a copy with rare exception, while the legitimate owners who have purchased the games have to jump through hoops every time they want to play.


So what exactly does copy protection protect game publishers from? If you can get a pirated game such as Doom III online days before it's for sale in stores, complete with the protection cracked, where's the protection?

Copy protection schemes keep the average user from making a copy for his or her buddies at work or school. It obviously doesn't prevent the true pirates from spreading their "warez". It doesn't even keep the 12 year old kid from pirating a copy for his friends if he is really motivated, much less stop the financially minded piracy groups from pirating for profit.
Cracking For Convenience

This leads us to why I still crack games. Yes, I still do it, and I freely admit it. I'm also a consumer and buy all the games I play. If I want to "try out" a game, I don't download a pirated copy, I go play it at a friend's house, or convince the salesperson at CompUSA to install a copy on his demo PC so I can try it out. But once I've actually purchased a game, I often crack it.

I crack for convenience. I don't waste my weekends breaking protection like I did when I was in my teens because now I can simply go to a single website and find cracks for nearly ever game released. I let someone else do the hard work. I crack games I've purchased so I won't need the manual, map, spinning code key or even the CD in the drive like so many games require today. When I play a game I've bought, I want to just sit down and PLAY the game, not worry about proving I really do own my copy. My credit card statement is proof enough.

Unfortunately, in the strictest sense, I'm violating the DMCA. I'm bypassing or circumventing encryption or anti-piracy methods in the software I've purchased. I'm still as much of a criminal as I was at 14. More so because now I could be fined thousands of dollars and face jail time. This is not because I'm stealing money or sales from the publisher, but simply because I refuse to have the CD in my drive while playing a game I purchased. Sorry guys, but when I sit down to play Call of Duty, I don't want to hunt for my CD. I don't want my kids scratching the disc. I don't want to do anything but play the game. Somehow I doubt that a jury in a court of law would ever convict me - but then again, you never know.

Most of the "enter a word from the manual" or "name this place from your map" have disappeared and publishers are now using disk format protections such as SafeDisc, license numbers or key files to protect their product. In some cases these methods can be worse, or even cause a disc to be unreadable in some drives. A particular enterprise software package my company uses requires license key files for each module. When initially installing, the vendor incorrectly generated one or more key files. A few weeks after installation, certain parts of our software quit working without giving a clue as to why. I got so frustrated that I told the vendor that if I had not already spent my $15,000 on the software, I would be looking at a competing product.

Other companies use a required online activation. TurboTax did this a few years ago. Six years down the road if they are not supporting online activation, or worse the company doesn't exist anymore, how can I open my tax file if I need to reinstall and access it? I noticed last year's TurboTax seemed to have dropped this online activation requirement.

That's where pirated copies can easily become what is referred to as BTO copies, "Better Than the Original" because they are easier to use, less annoying and safer in the long-run. Some copy protection software will install special drivers that might interfere with other software on your computer, or cause instability. Cracked copies remove the reliance on those drivers, allowing the user to have a "cleaner" system. Other software requires constant Internet access every time you launch the program, even if there is no need for Internet access once it has started. With a laptop, I don't expect to always have Internet access.

Other software, typically in a higher price range, will require a dongle or gadget that must be connected to the computer for the program to work. In a few years, if you've dropped that dongle one too many times, you may suddenly find the software for which you have paid thousands of dollars no longer works.

Online Games Are Winning

Games that are primarily played online seem to have the edge. When you game online, you expect to enter a username and password at some point, and associating that with a unique license key in some hard-to-fake method seems like a natural thing to do. Online anti-piracy schemes are the best balance of providing the publisher with protections while adding no real inconvenience to the consumer. Unfortunately some games have both online key validation and still require the disc in the drive or some other method of protection.

As much as you might hear people complain about "Steam", Valve's software distribution, copy protection and network game play browser, Valve has the right idea. Steam has simplified their anti-piracy methods while giving Valve a way to conveniently pull statistics of what games are played the most, not just what games have been purchased. Valve can tell you at any given time about how many people are playing Counter-Strike, or Half-Life II online, and instantly globally ban a license key if found to be invalid. This still brings us back to the TurboTax scenario - what if Valve went out of business? I paid good money for my game, but will be unable to play. Early on there were similar problems when the Steam ticket server's were unreachable and there were hours or even days that many people could not play Half-Life or it's mods such as Counterstrike online.

The Future Of Copy Protection

Back in the late 1980s, some game publishers had come to realize that anti-piracy methods were doing more to hurt the consumer than saving their product from theft. Those companies stopped putting copy protection entirely on their products. I'm sure there is no report showing how that affected sales, but I'm doubtful that they lost much if any revenues by doing that. The common approach to "lost revenues" is "how many people have a pirated copy", rather than the more accurate but harder to track "how many people have a pirated copy but would have purchased one if they didn't?"

Software developers deserve to be compensated for the software they produce. They have worked hard to make a product, quality or not, and if you want that product then it goes without saying you should buy that product. There will likely always be software pirates. However, copyright protection schemes only protect the publisher from honest people. Should they thus continue to irritate honest buying customers?
The Future Of Copy Protection, Continued

Anti-piracy methods need to somehow rise above the cat-and-mouse game and get to the root of the problem. There are many people who don't believe it is stealing, others say they are angry at game publishers for charging $60 for games that "suck," while yet others just can't afford all of the games they want, and they resort to theft. Perhaps gaming addiction even plays a part. Perhaps the thrill of shoplifting without even having to enter a "shop" is the motivation for some.
As For Me, I Still Crack But I Don't Pirate

As a technically-minded consumer, I'm also a responsible consumer and I do buy my games and other software. I use Linux, OpenOffice, CheckBook Tracker and other open-source software for all my productivity applications since I can't afford to buy the latest office package or personal finance software and still afford to feed my gaming addiction. I program for both Linux and Windows using Open-Source tools because I can't afford big development kits. Even with emulators, running Half-Life 2 in Linux really isn't an option so I keep Windows around for much of my gaming. It's unlikely the computer game industry will change their practices anytime soon, so I keep my ear to the ground for the latest OSS games released, and crack those annoying protections for the games I do buy.