Hey Marc, MC> I think it's due to the current underground culture. As the traditional MC> crackers went pro (many of the people who cracked games now work in the games MC> industry), the new breed didn't understand how to do the more complex MC> cracking (reverse engineering the copy protection). Instead, they focused on MC> generating serial numbers. MC> Call it a degradation of skills over time, if you will. I would not prematurely judge the quality of the work here. The game cracking scene is more or less dead as most games use some silly plug-in protection such as CDilla etc. So some individuals create universal unwrappers which are never released, and the game releasing groups use those to crack their releases. I have seen work which bordered onto to professional cryptanalysis in the field and would not dare to describe it as dead. MC> The cracking scene died with the demo scene though... it was more about fame MC> than piracy, Unfortuneatly, people started ignoring the skilled ones and just MC> got the software. The incentive for inventive cracks is no longer there, so MC> all that remains are the people who just do the piracy... It will definitely see a re-surge with Digital Rights Management MC> A little bit of history for you: MC> Some developers used to leave hidden messages in the code for the more well MC> known crackers. In return for this fame, the crackers would help the MC> developers imporve the copy protection (so the cracker would have a greater MC> challenge). Sigh...those were the days :) Cheers, dullienat_private
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Fri Jun 15 2001 - 13:37:27 PDT