Not a pirate, just curious.

July 3, 2013 3:10 AM

I was reading an article about software companies modifying games in clever ways in order to annoy pirates - essentially rendering the game unplayable. How does this work - how does the game identify whether the copy is pirated or legit in terms of triggering the mod? And are non-game programs doing something similar ie. erasing files or making software non-functional?
posted by mippy to Computers & Internet (7 answers total)

The easiest thing to do is to upload a modified version of it to bittorrent sites themselves.

At least one company uses fake scratches in the CD to prove that it's a legitimate copy.

The cutesy degrading of game-play isn't really a new thing -- Zak McKraken and the Alien Mindbenders from the 80s put your character in jail while you got lectured about the evils of software piracy if you put in the wrong code from the manual in the copy-protection check.
posted by empath at 4:21 AM on July 3, 2013

IIRC there was a copy of AutoCAD which needed a dongle to work, pirates hacked the program to emulate (or something) the dongle, but didn't quite catch everything, so the AutoCAD program reacted by slowly, over time, corrupting your model by adding extra nodes, and such. Brilliant and sneaky....
posted by alchemist at 4:40 AM on July 3, 2013 [3 favorites]

how does the game identify whether the copy is pirated or legit

Where a CD key or activation code is used, the company can detect keys that have been shared around a lot so if you tried to validate your install using a valid key that 200 other people had already tried to use (instead of a valid but unique key that no-one else had used), they could tell that you weren't a legitimate user. However nowadays this is often circumvented with "key-gens" - small programs that generate valid and unique activation codes to save having to share a single code with all the other pirates.

Games can also detect if no-CD cracks have been installed, or the game company can pro-actively release a "modified" version onto bittorrent (under the guise of it being a real pirated copy).
posted by EndsOfInvention at 5:50 AM on July 3, 2013

If you used a known pirated copy of Stata (software for analysis of quantitative data), it would randomly drop variables from your regressions without alerting you. Devious--and a great impetus for even the poorest of grad students to pony up for a legit copy.
posted by jtfowl0 at 6:16 AM on July 3, 2013 [2 favorites]

It depends on the platform and the support, but in my code base, we have infrastructure that ensures that the code itself is signed and validates to a signed license. The signed license contains information that indicates under what circumstances the code can be used, and if it is evaluation, any image saved through our code gets watermarked heavily. Rather than be devious, we prefer to be up-front about it and make it as easy as possible to get a valid license rather than trying to make it harder to defeat the license.

Whenever we discuss licensing (which, honestly is some of the most complicated code in our code base), I ask if we're willing to remove it entirely. The reason being that we sell code that gets used by programmers, not an application. When you pay for a license, what you really are paying for is technical support.
posted by plinth at 7:00 AM on July 3, 2013 [1 favorite]

IIRC there was a copy of AutoCAD which needed a dongle to work, pirates hacked the program to emulate (or something) the dongle, but didn't quite catch everything, so the AutoCAD program reacted by slowly, over time, corrupting your model by adding extra nodes, and such. Brilliant and sneaky....

I am torn between a slow golf-clap of admiration for subtly screwing up work product for thieves and my deep, abiding hatred for dongles, having had more than one hardware upgrade stymied by the fact that the new PC didn't have whatever now-out-of-date port needed for the dongle, and the problems with USB emulators...
posted by randomkeystrike at 7:39 AM on July 3, 2013 [1 favorite]

At least one company uses fake scratches in the CD to prove that it's a legitimate copy.

To elaborate: A fairly common scheme with CD/DVDs is/was to deliberately put "bad" data blocks on the disc, in areas not normally used. The software looks for the existence of these bad blocks as proof of the original disc being present.

DVD copy protection works similarly. Bad blocks are put on the disc in an area not used by the video stream, so a (naive) direct disc copy is defeated.
posted by neckro23 at 3:18 PM on July 3, 2013