Reverse Code Engineering RCE CD +sandman 2000/ReverseCodeEngineeringRceCdsandman2000.iso/RCE/Corleone/pcpirates.txt

Text File | 2000-05-25 | 23.3 KB | 251 lines

 gamespot article on warez scene, piracy...:


 Pirates pay nothing for software, and some get titles in advance of everybody else. So why isn't everybody doing it?

 Several months ago, I was invited to dinner with a couple higher-ups from a well known game-development company (which
 will remain unnamed for reasons you'll soon discover). As we neared the end of the meal, the conversation turned
 to the games we'd been playing lately and the ones that impressed us the most. "I think Half-Life is pretty impressive,
 " one of them said casually.

 I almost spit out my beer, but being a consummate professional, I managed merely to grimace a bit as the brew went
 down, before smiling at the guy who'd just spoken. "Hey, wait a minute," I said."I thought that only a dozen or so copies
 of the OEM version had been sent out to the media. Apparently Sierra didn't think enough of me to shoot one my way, so how
 did you guys manage to scrounge one up?" My dinner companions looked at each other for a second, then one turned and faced
 me with a grin that could be used in the dictionary to illustrate the adjective "sheepish." "Well, we were actually
 a little surprised we managed to get a copy," he said dryly, then not-so-subtly shifted the subject in fairly short order.

 But the whole affair boomeranged several weeks later when the retail version of Half-Life finally shipped. One of my
 friends bought a copy as soon as it came out, and a few days later he called to talk about the game. Mixed in with his
 undying praise were several references to something he called the "Juarez" version of the game. Puzzled, I asked him what
 it meant. "You know, a pirated version you can download off the Internet," he replied. "But maybe I'm pronouncing it wrong.
 It's spelled 'w-a-r-e-z.' Hell, there were a lot of people playing the OEM version before it even shipped. Some of them
 even generated key codes that let them play online. When legal owners tried to enter the key codes on the back of the
 jewel case they got a message saying the code wasn't valid because someone had already used it to validate their play."

 It didn't take me long to put two and two together: The odds were good that my software-developer buddies had been playing
 a warez version of Half-Life. But with that revelation came only more questions: How many warez versions of games are out
 on the Net? Is it easy to find them? What about games that require you to have the CD in the drive? How could someone with
 a dial-up connection download a game that barely fits on a CD? How much money are software publishers losing because people
 are playing the warez version instead of going to the store and buying the game? And what do those publishers plan to do
 about all this?

 I set out to learn everything I could about warez, and I can tell you now,it was no easy task: The warez guys like to
 keep a low profile, and software publishers don't like to talk about it because they're afraid it'll only make the
 phenomenon grow faster. But if you look at the history of PC software - and in this story the focus is on warez versions
 of PC games, not emulator software and console games - you'll see that illegally copying and distributing software has
 been with us from day one.


 A Bit of History
 ----------------
 Back in the days when computer games shipped on floppy disks - or on a single disk, if you go back even further - pirating
 software was a no-brainer: All you had to do was make copies of the original disks and hand them out to friends (or
 repackage and sell them). Software publishers were painfully aware of just how easy it was for users to duplicate their
 products; some tried to prevent it by including code that kept key components of the program from working if the
 installation diskettes were merely copied rather than installed on a hard drive. But the process of installing a game and
 watching the files being transferred tipped off users about how to counter that move: Just install the game, then copy the
 files back onto floppy disks - a process made even easier with the emergence of compression programs like PKZIP and LHARC.

 To counter this, game publishers came up with a new plan: copy protection. In order to play a game, be it on floppies or
 installed on the hard drive, you had to input some type of information that supposedly only someone who'd purchased the
 game would have access to. At first, copy protection schemes were relatively simple -typing in a number or word that
 appeared somewhere in the manual,for instance. But all it took to get past that hurdle was making photocopies of the
 manual, a step that actually made it even easier for people to play an illegally copied game since they now had instructions
 to go along with their pirated game.

 This ushered in a period where copy protection schemes grew so complex -forcing consumers to align bizarre symbols
 on coded wheels, pore over charts with black type on a red background that were impossible to photocopy (and nearly
 impossible to read), slide cards under colored gels - that legitimate users began to roundly complain of having to
 jump through hoops just to play a game they'd bought. It got so bad, in fact, that a couple of companies created
 software that automatically skipped the copy-protection routines for hundreds of popular games,provided you entered
 the correct data once. Game publishers thought such a product blatantly encouraged piracy - but the  companies who
 made the software were quick to point out that people were making illegal copies of their software, too. And at least
 those companies were legitimate: There were a lot of hackers who could rip the copy-protection routines of games in
 less time than it took to install the game.

 But just when it seemed there was absolutely nothing game publishers could do to keep people from duplicating their
 games for friends or for profit, technology came to the rescue. With the arrival of CD-ROM technology in the early
 1990s, games started to become so huge that making copies on floppy disks was essentially impossible, even with
 compression programs. Naturally, there were still big-time software pirates who could afford incredibly expensive
 CD-ROM burners to make duplicates. But that sort of equipment was far beyond the reach of the vast majority of people
 buying PC games, and gradually the whole issue of end users distributing illegal copies of games faded away - until
 the technological tables turned once again.


 Back With a Vengeance
 ---------------------
 There's no way of knowing how many copies of games people made for their friends during the heyday of the floppy disk,
 but at least game publishers could take solace in the fact that each person duping games probably didn't know many
 people who had the computer hardware - or the interest - to play them. A bigger potential problem was the rise of
 computer bulletin board systems (BBS), where cracked copies of games were made available for download; this expanded
 frontier meant that people who wanted to sell or give away games had the world as their neighborhood, with no need to
 even slap the stuff on floppies for their buddies. These cracked applications were dubbed "warez," while the guys
 doing the cracking were the "elite." (More on these phrases later.)

 But dialing into a BBS wasn't something Joe Six-Pack could do very easily: Many BBS users had to deal with staggering
 long-distance charges as slow modems struggled to download stuff, and in some cases there were hourly fees involved
 as well. So for game companies, the real issues were black-market versions being manufactured and sold in retail outlets
 as the genuine article and, of course, the problem of people making physical copies of games for their friends.

 Now that prices for CD-ROM burners have dropped dramatically, and the Internet is a daily part of gamers' lives, the
 whole question of piracy is back with a vengeance - and, just as in the days of floppy disks, software publishers seem
 more concerned with people burning ROMs for their friends than people downloading warez. "The biggest problem with pirate
 software comes from illegal copying of the CDs, whether it's done by big organized duplicators or the one-offs passed from
 friend to friend," says Doug Kubel, vice president of external development at Interactive Magic. "Most people don't
 currently have the bandwidth necessary to download an entire game from a warez site, but warez site piracy will climb
 dramatically with the rise of low-cost high-bandwidth connections such as ADSL."

 It seems that a lot of game companies believe that the mammoth size of today's games,coupled with the tiny bandwidth
 available to the vast majority of computer gamers, means that downloading just isn't a viable option. "I don't think
 that many people download too many games because they are so huge," notes Alan Pavlish, head of Interplay's Tantrum
 Division. "But it only takes one person with a CD-ROM burner to make a bunch of copies. It's been shown in Europe that
 the CDs that are protected sell better than those that aren't protected." Doug Lombardi, project manager at Sierra
 On-Line, concurs. "Given the size of these files, one could certainly assume that more people would be inclined to
 try their luck at swapping discs before downloading several hundred megs of content," he says. "And in many cases,
 even after you've downloaded a pirated version, you may still be left with a game that requires that you have the CD in a
 drive in order to play."

 Another reason game publishers focus on people burning CDs for friends is that trying to track down warez sites is just
 too time consuming to be cost effective. "As far as monitoring distribution on the Internet, that's a pretty big job and
 realistically not really possible to do," Pavlish says. "If we have good protection, we can stop the casual pirate who
 has access to a burner and makes a few copies for friends." the operative word in Pavlish's analysis, though, is
 friends - and there's a whole subculture of friends out there who believe in the old age "share and share alike."

 MeET tHe EliTe
 --------------
 Go to your favorite search engine and enter "warez + games + download," and the sheer number of matches will shock you -
 especially since the companies whose games are being distributed as warez can find these web sites just as easily as you
 did. Who'd have thought that people giving away pirated software would proudly proclaim the fact on the Web?

 But when you actually try to visit one of these sites, you'll find that you've stumbled into a world of smoke and
 mirrors where getting to a warez site is essentially impossible; instead, all you get are ad banners (usuallyfor adult
 sites), multiple browser windows, and scores of dead links. Even finding a web page that explains what the warez scene
 is all about is almost hopeless: Most web pages take the attitude that if you don't already know everything about warez,
 then you're a lamer and don't need to know anyway.So to find out the real deal I tracked down someone who really does
 have warez that can be downloaded. Crisis (a pseudonym, of course) is a college student with a double major (operations
 management and management of information systems) and a minor (systems analysis), who does contract programming and works
 in the IS department of a Fortune 500 company. He's been into warez since the glory days of the Commodore 64. He currently
 does some cracking of programs he's bought legitimately, but he says he also gets a lot of his warez from the major cracking
 groups. "Right now I'm pretty involved in it," he says, "so I spend a good amount of time each day doing warez."

 I didn't need Crisis to tell me that the notion of getting warez off the Web was a joke, but he was able to clue me in as to
 why there are so many sites that take you on wild-goose chases. "There used to be a day where you could get some legit warez
 on warez web sites,but now they're mostly run by lamers trying to make money off the scene," he says. "That's where all the
 porno comes in: You have to click banners and links to try to get to the warez, and the porn sites pay the warez sites for
 each banner click. The dead link pages are pages from people that don't want the responsibility of having live warez on their
 space, so they just link to some FTP. The FTP probably closed down a long time ago, so all the links are now dead.It's not
 unusual to see many web sites all with the same FTP links that haven't been updated in years."

 Another thing I noticed during my bootless attempts to download warez from the Web was the prevalence of mixed-case
 spellings - and here again Crisis likes to distance himself from the unwashed warez masses striving to be cool.
 "Some call it 'L33T,' or 'Elite,' and there are many variations on it. Basically it's just people trying to be different,
 but I don't think I know anyone who's actually elite that stilltypes like that."

 Warez It At?
 ------------
 So if it's not on the Web, then where's the warez? "If you really want to get warez, the best way is from FTPs or IRC," says
 Crisis. "It's best if you have your own FTP - then you can just trade accounts with people who have good sites, and you can
 usually get what you need. If you don't have a site, hop on IRC and hit up the warez chans [channels]. You'll probably find
 some good FTPs with no ratio [see the glossary]; it just might take awhile before you can get in. There are also chans that
 play DCC adds, where the major distros [distributors] will be offering certain warez."

 But it's not quite as simple as joining an IRC channel and finding out the address of an FTP site that has every single game
 you wanted but didn't want to pay for. Ask Crisis what the worst part of the warez scene is for him, and he says, "It's
 probably when you're really looking for something, and none of your contacts has it, so you have to resort to going to IRC
 and looking like a momo going, 'Does anyone have a copy of XYZ?' That's the worst." And what about the huge size of gaming
 software? Does someone with a dial-up connection really have the ability to download an entire game? Crisis says that
 "mostwarez groups follow the latest 10-point program from The Faction [a consortium of warez groups] that says releases may
 be no larger then 50x2.88MB (144MB) and must include every level, all sound effects, and be completely playable. Some things
 that are usually cut out to save space are videos, music, and cutscenes; sometimes those are released separately as optional
 add-ons. So the size can really vary, but it's often quite small." [To read the entire 10-point program, continue to the end
 of the story.] How small? I decided to ask my Half-Life buddy to download a couple games and let me know how big they were
 and how long it took for the download - and when he came back with the answers,I've got to admit I was pretty shocked. In just
 over four hours of download time with a 56.6Kbps modem, he managed to download both South Park and Sierra Sports Skiing 1999
 Edition; each weighed in at around 30MB. Just like Crisis said, the videos of Picabo Street were missing from Skiing 1999, but
 otherwise it was a complete version of the game. The warez version of South Park,from a group called Paradigm, even featured a
 homemade intro of Kenny being killed by the group's logo!

 What motivates people like Crisis to go to all the trouble and risk of cracking games and putting them on FTP sites? If they're
 that much into games, the chances are pretty good that they've got friends they could trade games with in person, rather than
 online. The reason is that it isn't merely about acquiring games; it's about being one of the elite. "The best thing about
 warez," Crisis says, "is the opportunity to check out software the day it comes out, or even way before it comes out, without
 having to pay anything. I love getting my hands on some new game that everyone has been hyping and giving it a run, or having
 someone say to me, 'Man, did you see that game? It looks real cool - I can't wait till it comes out,' and being able to reply,
'Yeah, I have it, but it's not that great.'"

 The Industry That Cried Wolf?
 -----------------------------
 The Software and Information Industry Association, or SIIA (formerly the Software Publishers Association, or SPA), doesn't have
 solid figures on how much illegally copied software costs the PC gaming industry. (SIIA originally agreed to participate in this
 story, but the organization never responded to requests for input.) Its latest report on piracy of business software, which
 covers 1997, claims that $11.4 billion was lost due to piracy  of business software worldwide,compared with $17.2 billion in
 revenues generated from legitimate sales.It is problematic to assume these numbers translate to the gaming industry. For one
 thing, the prohibitive costs of high-end business software applications mean that people are more inclined to seek out illegal
 copies of those apps than they would if they were looking to acquire much-lower-priced games. It also means that a great many
 users would simply be unable to afford those business apps even if there were no pirate versions available.According to the
 study (which can be viewed at the SIIA site in PDF format), "The difference between software applications installed (demand)
 and software applications legally shipped (supply) equals the estimate of software applications pirated." Demand was estimated
 by the number of new and replacement PCs shipped in a year and any legally distributed software that came with them. This
 methodology also raises questions. Is it accurate to assume that every pirated copy of a high-end business application represents
 a lost sale? Common sense would imply that this is not the case. Even for relatively lower-priced games, this assumption is
 difficult to support. Piracy, especially within the warez scene, has too much status attached. People pirate applications they
 don't want or need, and it is nearly impossible to estimate just how many lost sales are actually represented.

 Of course, this doesn't mean software piracy isn't a genuine problem, especially for publishers of business apps. And very few
 people would dispute the fact that selling or distributing illegal copies of software is wrong. There's a whole slew of reasons
 put forth by warez groups to justify what they do; some ring very hollow, while others seem to have at least a kernel of sincerity,
 even if you view the whole scene as not only illegal but immoral as well.

 Right and Wrong
 ---------------
 One of the more tired excuses is that prices for computer games are too high - which overlooks the fact that just because something
 is out of your price range doesn't justify stealing it, and that it only takes a little effort to find legitimate secondhand copies of
 games at drastically reduced prices. Another justification is that no one's hurt by downloading warez, something that Doug Kubel finds
 almost amusing. "The lamest excuse I've heard is 'We're not stealing from people, just some big companies,'" he says, "as if
 big companies aren't a collection of people!" Alan Pavlish says that he's heard users claim that "they're backing up their PlayStation
 CD," while Doug Lombardi says that "when Day One appeared on the warez sites, they all said, 'Sorry - it's so good, we couldn't wait!'"

 Still, some of the arguments put forth by the warez guys point accusatory fingers at the game industry. The SIIA says that one
 reason software piracy is even more dangerous than piracy of movies and music is that each copy is "perfect." But pirates are
 quick to point out that the perfect duplicate is of an imperfect product - in other words, so many games are released with bugs and
 without promised features that it's only reasonable for someone to want to check them out for free before making a trip to the store
 and shelling out cash only to have to return the games later. If a publisher says these people should try a demo first, the warez guys
 respond by noting that many bugs can't be found during the short period of play afforded by a demo; if someone says they should check
 out game reviews, they'll note that for a variety of reasons most reviewers don't mention bugs. And some warez groups at least pay lip
 service to this notion: At the end of the information file included with the warez version of South Park, for instance, there's a
 message that says if you like the game then you should go out and buy it.For Crisis and a lot of other guys seriously into warez, though,
 the crux of the issue is whether you give warez away or try to make money off illegal copies. "Selling pirated games is illegal and
 immoral for sure, and I think pretty much anyone from the scene will agree with that," he says. "We're about giving people a chance to
 check out software without paying large amounts of money for it. Personally, I pay for very little software, but if there's something I
 use regularly, and it's priced right, I may buy it. I had Quake II warez for a long time, and I played it so much I went out and bought
 a copy. I will not, however, pay thousands of dollars for MS Developer Studio Enterprise Edition just so I can write apps in C that I
 don't make money off of. Basically, most people in the warez scene are out there to give people an alternative to paying big bucks and
 making software developers realize that consumers don't have to pay full price if they don't want to. I think a lot of developers keep
 this in mind now when they set a sticker price."

 And the Beat Goes On
 --------------------
 While many companies are in the process of taking steps to prevent the burning of game CDs, others see the problem as going even deeper
 and much closer to home. Doug Lombardi says that when warez games go online before the final product has shipped,then someone the company
 trusted and sent code to has obviously leaked it in one way or another. "Tracking down the source of the leak is something of an exhaustive
 effort and one that must be thought out in  advance - after all, we are talking about  piracy on the Internet," he says. "Unfortunately,
 this is going to cause publishers and developers to be even more cautious about releasing code, and it's likely that less code will be given
 out during development because each CD must be watermarked (if you will) with a unique ID of some sort that must be logged into a tracking
 file. Then, if someone has posted the code given to them, the owner can track it by the mark." Most software publishers probably take the
 attitude that while this is a war they must fight, it's not one in which they'll ever see final victory: For every scheme devised to prevent
 illegal copying, there's someone who'll find a way around it, and the only people truly put out will be gamers who have to plug a dongle into
 their parallel port to play a game. Perhaps a new approach is in order: A few very successful game publishers (who will remain unnamed) have
 told me off the record that they don't mind people distributing pirated versions of their games because it generates a larger fan base -
 which in turn has the effect of increasing sales for the company's next product.

 Don't expect the issue to go away anytime soon, though. And until it does, perhaps we should modify that old saw about the only things
 in life that are certain are death, taxes, and warez.


 .taken from www.gamespot.com
 .www.corleone.net