Will Wright's SPORE makes customers angry (DRM inside)

[me262]

Remember those codewheels... wow.

How about some special printing on the CD that shows up only on a red color filter? ^_^ Now that would be interesting. You'd need the real disc, because scanners and pictures would screw up the coloring.
"What symbol appears in the 3rd row, column 4?" And you'd hold the disc against the red filter, pick the right one, prompts to insert the disc...
Now THERE'S a new twist on an old idea. ^_^

[Dragonlord]

Sorry, no deal. The code wheel is a fancy boolean check. At one point in the code there is a CMP call and a JNE or JE call. The solution is like always the NOP ( To quote the G-Man: A NOP in the right place can make all the difference in the world ).

[Kano]

That's clear if the code is not obfusticated, I did the same to fgrlx_drv.so as Xserver 1.4 patch, a nop or a normal jmp instead of a conditional jump is what to change.

[Dragonlord]

Obfuscating makes it harder... but not much. Games nowadays are still mostly cracked with the same NOP trick, no matter how obfuscated this is.

[Kano]

Well using a debugger it seems to be more easy than doing a static analysis like for fglrx. But at least the symbols had nice names

[me262]

Ouch...
Looks like EA's paying the price BIG time...

EA gets class-action sued over Spore DRM: http://www.afterdawn.com/news/archive/15499.cfm

http://www.simprograms.com/images/games/Spore%20-%20DRM%20Class%20Action%20Lawsuit.pdf

The related articles too... ouch...
EA threatens forum users with ban for DRM talk: http://www.afterdawn.com/news/archive/15485.cfm
Amazon deleted Spore user reviews?: http://www.afterdawn.com/news/archive/15403.cfm

[xav1r]

DRM seems like those tags that stick out of those blankets with a warning not to remove them, and serve no purpose, other than to annoy, and thus everybody does remove them.

[Dragonlord]

It's not going to help anything. EA has deep pockets and they care shit about their customers ( as seen tons of times before ). It's causing some rattling but that's all. They are not going to be sued and they are not going to change... unless people "actively stop being their shit". You can hit such companies only over their moneybag. But people seem to take DRM and moan instead of boykotting the company by not buying their products.

[Chris]

They are not going to be sued and they are not going to change... unless people "actively stop being their shit". You can hit such companies only over their moneybag. But people seem to take DRM and moan instead of boykotting the company by not buying their products.

I think that's part of the problem. Those that do know about it don't buy it. But not everyone knows, or cares, or knows just how bad it is. They'd only know something's wrong when things start breaking, and at that point they either just bring in the system for repairs, or just wipe/reinstall the OS because "Windows broke".. then go over to consoles because they don't have to deal with this crap there. :P

[deanjo]

Attempted boycotts won't ever work, it's just not logistically possible to reach that many people that share the same view that it will make a real dent in their sales. You cannot measure people "actively boycotting" because for every 1 person that says they will not buy because of a issue there will be 20 others that pipe in saying "me too" even though they had no real intention of getting it in the first place and the publishers know that.