Atari Founder Claims Chip Already In PCs Will End Game Piracy
If I told you the answer to PC game piracy involved planting a "stealth encryption chip" in your PC that would really-really-no-kidding-this-time-really slam the door on hackers and dodgy file sharing outlets, what would you say? That's actually more or less what Atari founder Nolan Bushnell told conference attendees at Wedbush Morgan Securities' annual Management Access Conference, reports Gameindustry.biz.
According to Bushnell:
There is a stealth encryption chip called a TPM that is going on the motherboards of most of the computers that are coming out now… What that says is that in the games business we will be able to encrypt with an absolutely verifiable private key in the encryption world -- which is uncrackable by people on the internet and by giving away passwords -- which will allow for a huge market to develop in some of the areas where piracy has been a real problem.
In Bushnell's view, the primary reason it'll work is because games are logistically completely different animals compared to movies and music "because games are so integrated with the code."
Color me skeptical, of course, as I know most or all of you'll be. We've seen scheme after scheme tried year after year, but nothing ever sticks, be it lack of standardization among key publishers or virus-like "rootkits" or compatibility-breaking, performance-throttling disc-based debacles like SafeDisc, SecuROM, and StarForce.
Even assuming (a) consumers accept this the way they "accepted" Microsoft's online activation process and subsequent validation tools for Windows, and (b) the chip's encrypted authentication algorithms are somehow threaded through the code, what's to stop people from creating "mod" chips or setting up mod shops? I don't know schnitzel about this TPM solution, but I do know that one of the biggest problems with securing encrypted data is that once it's decrypted, you can do anything with it. When was the last time you actually read the encrypted version of an email sent with PGP?
That's right -- around the same time you last played a game using only 1s and 0s.
Re-Play
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What Nolan Bushnell failed to mention is that he is on the board of Directors of Wave Systems Corp., a small, failing software company that makes software to control TPMs. If TPMs don't catch on real soon, the company will likely go out of business. So he was biased in making that statement.
I'm always dubious of control schemes of any kind. The computer culture has yet to see anything perfect in the sort that we use daily, I don't expect to see it now. If there's a way in, there's two ways out.
Since this technology is in on the motherboard, what's to stop people from going low level and modifiying the BIOS, resorting to physical hacking, or possibly finding a way to bypass the functionality of the TPM chip with something like assembly. All just vague ideas, but if you've got something that people might want to pirate, I don't think much barriers hold up over time.
agreed. we...*ahem* --They will fight fire with fire.
anywho, there are better things to do in the world anyways....
there is not a computer program or embedded chip that cant be modded or hacked or cracked, decrypted, unzipped, erased, or just generally fooled around with. i dare them to say that itll be a year before someone comes up with a way to beat this system, because it will be about 1-2 days before it gets released.