DRM Thread

[alanschu]

I certainly won't dispute that Steam's method isn't for everyone.

[alanschu]

I did some quick late night looking around.

 

 

According to Wikipedia, there's only been two incidents of false positives with VAC (Valve Anti-Cheat), and they were both immediately rescinded when they were discovered.

 

Also, according to Valve directly, being caught cheating by VAC will only prevent you from playing on VAC Secure servers. Quite frankly, I do not consider this a negative at all. If you happened to have cheated on a multiplayer only game, I certainly don't feel sorry for you for being a selfish twit and ruining the online experience of everyone else playing the game.

[Syraxis]

Except for the ones that do, including some that have no limits when bought off-the-shelf.

 

Oh?

Crysis: Warhead retail version

Crysis: Warhead steam version

 

Yep, so if anything happens to that account you're ****ed. Nice system if you're willing to put all your eggs in one basket.

 

Only risks would be if you get suspended/banned for cheating or if you're dumb enough to give out your password to anyone online.

 

Hummm... Doesn't the fact that you even need to put this show that it has a DRM issue?

 

I said that because because people like to complain about "having to be online", though you're most likely online anyway if you use a high speed connection.

[Mamoulian War]

Yep, so if anything happens to that account you're ****ed. Nice system if you're willing to put all your eggs in one basket.

 

Only risks would be if you get suspended/banned for cheating or if you're dumb enough to give out your password to anyone online.

 

 

Or someone steals/hi-jacks/phishs your account... Are these people dumb aswell? Happened a lot...

[Syraxis]

Or someone steals/hi-jacks/phishs your account...

 

Since most games have an online component these days, I'm sure everyone here has seen warning messages such as "[Company Name] staff will never ask for your password or personal information."

 

It just so happens that Valve is the same.

 

Steam Support does not contact users over the Friends network - decline Friends requests from users you do not know.

 

Steam Support will never need your password for any reason. Ignore any password request you receive.

 

If somehow your account gets hijacked, you can get it back if it hasn't been banned for any sort of reason.

Edited April 12, 2009 by Syraxis

[Mamoulian War]

Or someone steals/hi-jacks/phishs your account...

 

Since most games have an online component these days, I'm sure everyone here has seen warning messages such as "[Company Name] staff will never ask for your password or personal information."

 

It just so happens that Valve is the same.

 

Steam Support does not contact users over the Friends network - decline Friends requests from users you do not know.

 

Steam Support will never need your password for any reason. Ignore any password request you receive.

 

If somehow your account gets hijacked, you can get it back if it hasn't been banned for any sort of reason.

 

You realy think that most of the account hijacking is done because people giving away their passwords???

 

If people have no problem with stealing accounts, they have no problem with different types of cheating... Your account can be banned before you even notice that somebody has stolen it...

Edited April 12, 2009 by Mamoulian War

[Deadly_Nightshade]

Oh?

 

Yep.

 

Clear Sky Link #1

Clear Sky Link #2

Clear Sky Link #3

Clear Sky Link #4

 

 

If you're going to jump down someone's throat everytime they make a comment that they like something that you hate, then get a ****ing life.

 

Oh I "jumped down someone's throat" did I? That's odd. I can only find Syraxis mentioning that he would like a Steam version, me mentioning I would not like it to be Steam-only, and Syraxis jumping up and trying to prove how great Steam is.

 

Anyways, I'll write more later.

[Syraxis]

Yep.

 

You got me there

 

I would not like it to be Steam-only, and Syraxis jumping up and trying to prove how great Steam is.

 

Now where did I ever type that anything should be steam only?

Edited April 12, 2009 by Syraxis

[alanschu]

You realy think that most of the account hijacking is done because people giving away their passwords???

 

How is it done then?

 

 

You say it has happened a lot? What exactly are the numbers of people that have had their steam accounts hacked and manipulated to a point where it permanently affected their ability to play their games (which seems to me only can happen if there was a VAC ban)?

 

 

Looking closer at the VAC Ban, this isn't even so much a DRM distribution issue, but rather a way of dealing with the rampant amounts of cheating that was occurring in their games (Counterstrike especially) and is akin to Battle.net's Closed Servers for Diablo II.

 

Get caught cheating, you lose your access to VAC validated servers.

Edited April 13, 2009 by alanschu

[Mamoulian War]

You realy think that most of the account hijacking is done because people giving away their passwords???

 

How is it done then?

 

 

 

Biggest troyan threat is from keyloggers specialy made for getting your login data from your PC. In one of my previous WoW guilds, one of our officers who is pretty much one of the most paranoid people about computer security, got stolen his account with such troyan... 3 or 4 days after he lost his account his antivirus found the troyan who were the reason... AV software is always few days outdated, something new pops up and you can loose everything...

 

If it happens when you are on vaccation, you are pretty much ****ed and long time without the stuff you paid for... Happened to my close friend who was 4 weeks in Italy, and when he came back he had to wait almost another 6 weeks to get it back, because he found that his account got hijacked after he came back...

 

I got stolen my CD-key from Counterstrike (Retail version), they told me to buy new copy, because my purchase ticket was nonreadable after scannig... I never have told anyone my CD-Key...

[Moatilliatta]

I seem to remember some of you guys arguing that most pirates are such because they wouldn't buy stuff even if they couldn't steal it. I read a small article on Sweden's IPRED law and bring numbers:

 

CDON.com reports a 20 percent increase in music sales in the first week of april.

Storytel, a company selling audiobooks, report more than a doubling of users and a 50 percent increase in traffic.

Ameibo, a movie sharing site that rents and sell movies over the intertubes, report a 30 percent increase in sales.

iTunes doesn't want to comment on sales numbers in individual countries.

 

Other numbers where it is harder to make precise conclusions:

The Pirate bay apparently has 20 million users.

100.000 of these users have used a anonyminization function in order to keep using the site. The PB dudes thinks that around 80 percent of these are swedes.

 

 

It seems a significant number of pirates will stop stealing if it becomes too much trouble. Alternatively they are incredibly clueless about laws and have only now figured out that it is illegal. I'm leaning to the former.

 

Another significant group seem to care less about ease of use and more about getting stuff for free. This is my conclusion obviously though I doubt that those 80.000 are all about linux distros that can only be gotten on TPB.

 

I wonder if the death of DRM will not be acomplished because of "righteous" consumer anger and instead because of hamfisted bureaucrats finally doing something.

[alanschu]

You realy think that most of the account hijacking is done because people giving away their passwords???

 

How is it done then?

 

 

 

Biggest troyan threat is from keyloggers specialy made for getting your login data from your PC. In one of my previous WoW guilds, one of our officers who is pretty much one of the most paranoid people about computer security, got stolen his account with such troyan... 3 or 4 days after he lost his account his antivirus found the troyan who were the reason... AV software is always few days outdated, something new pops up and you can loose everything...

 

If it happens when you are on vaccation, you are pretty much ****ed and long time without the stuff you paid for... Happened to my close friend who was 4 weeks in Italy, and when he came back he had to wait almost another 6 weeks to get it back, because he found that his account got hijacked after he came back...

 

I got stolen my CD-key from Counterstrike (Retail version), they told me to buy new copy, because my purchase ticket was nonreadable after scannig... I never have told anyone my CD-Key...

 

 

I am decidedly NOT paranoid about getting keyloggers and trojans on my computer, and have never gotten one, despite my computer being ridiculously open and unprotected. Keyloggers don't just randomly appear on people's computers, and if your officer was truly as paranoid as you claim he was, it would never have gotten on there. It is not hard to prevent trojans from being installed on your computer.

 

I do however, know someone that had his WoW account hacked and stolen. All of his gear was sold to vendors and he was basically naked, and several characters were deleted. Upon reporting it to Blizzard, a few days later all of his items were returned to him, and his deleted characters restored. The account was compromised when he used a friend's computer to login to WoW, which had a keylogger running on it. Though he didn't blame anyone other than himself for using his friend's computer.

 

 

As for your ticket being unreadable after scanning ... get a better scanner. On the plus side, with the digital distribution of Steam, you don't need to scan anything anymore. It's even easier to prove your purchase if you buy it online, and downtime will be minimized.

[Moatilliatta]

Isn't the primary metod of avoiding key-loggers/trojans to not read spam mails and not visit dodgy porn sites or am I simplifying it too much?

[Purkake]

Isn't the primary metod of avoiding key-loggers/trojans to not read spam mails and not visit dodgy porn sites or am I simplifying it too much?

 

An anti-virus program along with anti-spyware/malware helps as well.

 

@alanschu: how do you know that you have never had a keylogger or a trojan? They don't exactly pop up and say hello.

Edited April 14, 2009 by Purkake

[alanschu]

I do still check my system from time to time.

 

The only time I got a trojan which nuked my computer was when I was stupid and ran a .exe file from a friend. This was in 2000.

 

 

But fair enough, I've never been burned by it, despite ample opportunity. You also don't find me running unknown applications off the internet or from email.

[Mamoulian War]

Isn't the primary metod of avoiding key-loggers/trojans to not read spam mails and not visit dodgy porn sites or am I simplifying it too much?

 

You are simplifying it too much. If you don't do the stuff you have mentioned your chance of getting troyan will decrease dramaticaly but you can get one from friends email, if he got troyan and never cleaned him, you can get him from USB, you can get troyans even remotely if you have bad/none firewall... You can get him even if you do not apply security patches to your windows, browsers and another programs which are connecting to the internet... All that attacker need to know is your IP and doing port scan...

 

If you don't have dynamic IP, it's even easier for attacker to compromise your PC...

[Moatilliatta]

Aren't those emails send from friends by key-loggers usually very easy to spot?

 

HeLlO X

I just seen that image on 汉语/漢語 and I think you might enjoy.

 

Ni Hau

yourfriend

 

1 file is attached to this message

funnypic.jpg.exe

 

I wouldn't ever open a .exe file from someone that I can't sue for megabucks.

 

It also helps not to have friends. Maximum security.

 

I guess you can't argue against stuff like attacks through USB drives but that seems kinda like being afraid of terrorist attacks.

[Deadly_Nightshade]

If a .jpeg is even in the same place as an .exe I would not open it as you can easily make it so opening one triggers the other.

[alanschu]

you can get him from USB, you can get troyans even remotely if you have bad/none firewall

 

Still waiting for that one to happen.

 

 

I don't follow the development of trojan horses, but historically the definition of them (and why they differ from computer viruses and worms and whatnot) is that they are an application that gets run with the expectation of one thing happening, and another (usually bad) thing actually occurs.

 

I am unaware of Trojan Horses that don't require user action to take effect. Which ones do? It's news to me.

 

 

 

I keep hearing stories that people post on the internet about how they left their firewall down for mere minutes and in that time people already started to attack them. I set up a network connection and port scanner and was a bit disappointed that I didn't seem to be getting persistently attacked

[Deadly_Nightshade]

you can get him from USB, you can get troyans even remotely if you have bad/none firewall

 

Still waiting for that one to happen.

 

The USB one or the firewall one? I do not think I've seen the latter but I have helped people rid their boxes of the USB-carried infection (it's really bad on campus PCs as most of them have crappy anti-virus programs and there are plenty of idiotic users, although that's not too hard to fix as all of those -or almost all of them- use a deep freeze system that enables you to re-set the system to it's default state with a simple re-start).

[Mamoulian War]

you can get him from USB, you can get troyans even remotely if you have bad/none firewall

 

Still waiting for that one to happen.

 

 

I don't follow the development of trojan horses, but historically the definition of them (and why they differ from computer viruses and worms and whatnot) is that they are an application that gets run with the expectation of one thing happening, and another (usually bad) thing actually occurs.

 

I am unaware of Trojan Horses that don't require user action to take effect. Which ones do? It's news to me.

 

 

 

I keep hearing stories that people post on the internet about how they left their firewall down for mere minutes and in that time people already started to attack them. I set up a network connection and port scanner and was a bit disappointed that I didn't seem to be getting persistently attacked

 

I do have at least 2 - 3 attacks per day, in my firewall log and i have dynamic IP And i do get at least one per month or two remote shutdown on my PC, through one of the ports i have opened for communication

 

My record was over 100 attacks in one day blocked by my firewall, but that was more than year ago...

[alanschu]

Attackless for months.

 

What are you and I doing differently?

[skuld1]

In other news, the lack of DRM in Demigod is causing serious issues for paying customers as there have been some extreme server issue at release. From this 1UP Story: (bold added by me)

 

Few things annoy me more than a promising looking game that I can't play, so we sent a quick WTF to Stardock president Brad Wardell, who's actually pretty open about their present difficulties. Interestingly, at least part of the problem seems to be the fact that people have been stealing the hell out of the game over the weekend.

 

"The challenge we're running into is that our NAT facilitator servers are getting hammered by the number of requests. That's the most significant issue as it results in users not being able to connect to each other. The solution to this is partly more servers (which we're doing right now) and partly a code update to connect users without using so many resources. We expect to have this largely resolved in the next 24 hours or so.

 

The other thing we have to do is isolate the warez users off the main server branch so that legitimate customers aren't competing with the 100k+ warez people playing the game for database resources.

[WILL THE ALMIGHTY]

I thought there you always needed a legit copy to play online?

[Purkake]

I thought there you always needed a legit copy to play online?

 

Not always, but that stuff goes way deeper than your average pirate wannabe.