Fidel Gastro’s

Just had a very sad conversation on Microsoft and piracy after the DOJ cracked down on ISONEWS. Read and weep gently.

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Screw you hope. Windows 3.0 was the r0×0r.

Microsoft are losing around $150 per machine sold. Any killer apps to fuel the software sales to reclaim this money? Halo and Splinter Cell. Yet Xbox Live will provide on-line PC style gaming for the masses before the PS2. Will people uptake? Will your 35 year old neighbour be heard shouting ’screw you n00b camping f4g’ on the voice over ip chat roomz? Will we see an uptake on online communities for the masses?

Only time will tell.

Their purchase of Rare is questionable. What was the last good Rare game? Goldeneye.

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MS understand the benefit their OS dominance gave them - it meant everyone bought the cash cow that is / was Office

It meant they had massive leverage on other software manufacturers since they could / and did just render their stuff unworkable if they wished to also enter that market segment.

Computer/console Games is a bigger market than hollywood. MS want to be a part of it but they also want to be in the comfort zone they know and love of having a serious amount of leverage in the market. I’m not knocking them for this it makes good business sense.

The XBOX is a *relatively* cheap entrant to the market for them (lower risk by building on existing technologies) and the upgrade path is a very sweet proposition since everything is programmed to API’s not to the metal (no much chance the PS3 will run almost any PS2 game) very good chance the XBOX2 will.

They can absorb th hit - use it as a learning experience (windows 2000 pro was a wonderful business OS but still couldn’t be for consumers even though that was the original plan. Along came XP with a massive GUI change and pretty/simple layers ontop of all the complex stuff.

Remember how crap windows 3.0 was…

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Central media station for the home, games, dvds, tivo, mp3z, movies on demand etc etc.

Unless kids/parents fight for the single screen.

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Why though?

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Subject: RE: Warez scene

Xbox 2 is on it’s way intergating a TiVo style recorder, media station etc etc.

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Subject: RE: Warez scene

You are ignoring the main fact that Microsoft doesn’t manufacture chips, Intel, NVIDIA etc. do for them. This is just where things start to get complicated in terms of inclusion all on one die…

We are of course assuming MS make another Xbox. Why would they? It hasn’t be that successful, and continues to be underwhelming. I’ve got one, and its OK, but its nothing special.

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Subject: RE: Warez scene

>Palladium has already been tried under the guide of Secure PC and it
>failed miserably then. The idea that they could successfully engineer a
>piece of hardware that was secure with no bugs is a bit absurd in
>itself.

The trick with such things is to see if they are learning from their mistakes The idea of having all code running on a machine signed with strong crypto and it not being cracked by a software hack of some kind years after lauch would have been absurd a decade ago. The current generation of tamper proof Financial processors are now only really vulnerable to insider attacks by API attacks - you really don’t stand a chance of getting inside one. It isn’t absurd to imagine that they could build the rom and GPU together - it is after all a case of putting the two well understood designs on the same die. Start up the CPU and io from outside and the GPU says go away I’m not displaying that…

>Also, why would Xbox go to single chip architecture? The whole basis of
>their hardware is that it uses cheap and very standard components (i.e.
>it’s a PC).

Because they have to if they want to be secure? Sure they would rather stay with components but all they really need to do is put the rom in the GFX and that would do it

Microsoft don’t care about single user piracy. My friend used to work for them and said they know you are running warez copies of Windows OS’s once you connect to the internet and that was back in 1998. They just bust a nut if a corporation has bought Windows XP Home and stuck it on 32 PC’s.

What’s quite funny is the at xboxlinux project have asked microsoft to sign their code to let them run it on an unmodded Xbox and claim the 2nd half of the 200,000$ prize.

What Nintendo also have done is created there own media - those little disks aren’t even DVD’s. Anyone pirating gamecube games? No. However, anyone wanting to? No.

The whole Palladium thing scares me. The fact that Longhorn - the next XP build will only work on Palladium is wack - we’ll need new hardware and actually buy the OS.

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Subject: RE: Warez scene

Microsoft are less worried about the number of cases of piracy and more about there being any.

You may have heard about their Palladium strategy / technology

In essence this amounts to having strong encryption and security built into the machine so as to ensure that it can only be used by authenticated programs - Any effective DRM requires hardware backing, but so far has always been broken by sufficient push to crack it.

Microsoft are using the Xbox as a testbed for this security stuff. The only known weakness is that it is spread across multiple chips and so insertion of additional chips to fake the others is possible.

Once microsoft do what the game cube is moving towards and put all the rom / graphics / CPU / IO in a single chip the mod chips will be rendered obsolete.

Given the push behind finding an alternative to the modchip based solutions to run unsigned code on the xbox from the xboxlinux project and its spectacular lack of progress (work out how to do it and you make 100K USD!) I would say that console piracy’s days are numbered until quantum computers let us brute force the codes (and that will prob be illegal by then)

Microsoft want to grind the people pushing mod chips intyo oblivion so as to make it appear that their palladium strategy can succeed even when everything is not on one chip.

Matt

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Subject: RE: Warez scene

The small difference being, I’ve tried to kill someone with a mod-chip and it didn’t work! After all, the video game industry is now the biggest entertainment industry in the world, so how much does it really hurt them? I don’t see Micro$oft folding due to the Xbox mod-chip being released…

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Subject: RE: Warez scene

If that thinking involves writing it down it does…

The interesting thing is that it closely maps to the gun control argument: Guns don’t kill people - people who USE guns with bullets kill people.

Mod chips don’t increase piracy - people that use mod chips to play warez increase piracy

Thought for the day.

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Subject: RE: Warez scene

Its amazing that in the US companies can make it illegal for people to reverse engineer proprietary software, or create an electronic box to circumvent built-in protection. It almost equates to making it illegal to think about performing copyright theft.

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Subject: Warez scene

In a action of comedy last night the isonews.com site was taken over by the US Department of Justice.

www.isonews.com
http://www.isonews.com/release.htm

And the owner charged with various crimes against society

However as reported heere http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story2&ncid=1212&e=5&u=/nm/20030226/wr_nm/crime_copyright_dc&sid=95573503

-the FBI were a little lax in their takedown methods as they only redirected the DNS entry to their site and the actual server is still up and being updated with new games after the takedown at http://66.201.243.170/

Lolo hahah. Isonewz pwn FBI.