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Chances are if you've been on a torrent site before, you will have come across a Skidrow torrent or two but what happens when a rival pirating group steals from the other? Skidrow has recently learned what its like to be on the other side of the fence as a rival group beat it to a game launch by stealing its code.
Entertainment industries complain about piracy all of the time but its not often we see a pirating group complaining too. The story begins with the release of Redlynx / Ubisoft's latest release, Trials Fusion, once the game was out, it was a race between the crackers to remove the game's DRM protection and release the game for free. According to Torrent Freak, shortly after a group called ‘MoNGoLS' released the Xbox 360 version of the game and just over a week later, CODEX had released the Windows version.
CODEX, the new Skidrow rival, has only been around since February earlier this year but somehow managed to beat the other top pirating groups to release but it wasn't by playing fair or being smarter than the rest, apparently the group cheated its way to the top. Three days after the release of CODEX's version of Trials Fusion, Skidrow released its own and revealed that the new group on the scene had in fact pirated its work:
“While looking inside their emulation code, we discovered something that was about to shock us completely, It was OUR work, OUR emulator.” an announcement from Skidrow said. “CODEX must be stupid to think that we don’t mark our code, but we had it clean on our screens, that CODEX are thieves of our Ubisoft emu. 99 percent of all their API calls in the code are identical with ours.”
The above image acts as proof that CODEX stole Skidrow's code, apparently Skidrow plants several stealth API calls in its code that identify and tag the groups work. So the image above shows that CODEX directly copy and pasted the pirating group's work.
It's ironic that pirating groups are now stealing from each other but Skidrow had allowed this to happen. The group had previously protected its releases with its own form of DRM but had removed it to avoid ruining the release:
“In the past we used to protect our creations, but lately we have found out that even the most functional encryption tools have certain limits when it comes to preventing them from stealing CPU resources. Furthermore we have noticed that some people that use our releases, sometimes have issues with our work being notified as dangerous, when they run them on machines with certain antivirus, spam, spyware programs etc. Therefore we have decided to let our work, which is OUR work, be as clean and direct as you can get it.”
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KitGuru Says: So it turns out that pirating groups do get mad at each other for stealing bits of code. There's not really anything Skidrow can do about it though aside from spread the word but will game pirates really care?
Source: TorrentFreak
With information like this i doubt i’d download anything CODEX, even though it’s Arrrrrh! stuff, Skidrow still put alot of work in their releases. and they have not dissapointed me as of yet.
You should include CODEX’s response to the article
http://scenenotice.org/details.php?id=2224
it pretty much shows that skidrow are full of it
The irony. 🙂
People have to realize firstly groups are not releasing to make peoples lives easier by allowing them to play a game for free. Once it was very very difficult to receive any releases in the public as it was all done on BBS’s and in private and swapping, it was a way to test yourself and to show.. hey guys we did it.
Unfortunately since 2000 onwards more and more younger people (and some 20-30s also) think warez releases are designed to be released for people like them, but in the long run they will end up killing development on the PC as a viable platform. You only have to see the quality of the games being released today, very small amounts end up being something very nice, the rest are just short eye candy games.
Infact I wouldn’t be surprised in 3 years time, that the PC market will be saturated with F2P MMOs and Casual games.
Unfortunately people think they aren’t making a dent.. the olde excuses from the early 90s are still in use today to somehow forgive what they do on a daily/weekly basis, the “I wasn’t planning on buying it anyway… so they haven’t lost money”.. it’s one of the most idiotic responses ever… of course they have lost money you didn’t pay for the right to play the game, and when they retort “yeah they will miss my £/$xx hahaha”… yeah multiply that by hundreds of thousands, and in cases with AAA titles in the millions and you soon see the loss of revenue.
Thats why more developers prefer now to develop for consoles, because to play warez releases on the consoles requires hardware or some flashing of a BIOS/ROM chip to enable it, or some jailbreak device as seen for the PS3 (and that took a long time to be done).
What has this got to do with the groups? Children is why, they grow up expecting everything to be for free and they don’t care how they get it, which means if any are clever enough to learn Assembly and then be able to dump a full unwrapped binary, then they will use the same mindset and actually steal other’s work and claim it as their own… because that is the cool thing to show off to your mates.
Warez groups from the 80s and 90s are gone now, its all full with ungrateful and selfish kids and peeps in their early 20s. And it will get worse.
Skidr0w FTW!