Irdeto, the developers of the anti-piracy software Denuvo, announced a new tool that will allow game developers to easily track leaks back to its original source.
Update: it causes even more hung processes while corpo shills and fanboys argue online that Denuvo has zero negative effect to infected games which is immediately disproven or ignored by those with brains.
I can’t say I know anything about how they choose their beta testers, but if I were to guess, there is probably some kind of vetting process that includes looking at how reputable you are. It would take a long time to build up that reputation.
Publishers don’t seem to understand that Denuvo is detrimental to them as much as for gamers. That crap regularly breaks games. Ask Bethesda, they should know.
That’s a pretty pretty good set of suggestions and explanations, and i appreciate you taking the time to express them.
What is this list, that has no equivalent in Android/AOSP in general? Storage scope existed since Android 10, when GSF was introduced separately from native storage access. I have no clue when they claimed to “invent” contact scope, but a different user account (like work profile) segregates everything from storage to network tunnel to contact storage, and user accounts have existed for 10ish years. Disabling all userspace apps is possible on all Android phones as well, just not system apps, for which you need a computer and ADB/Shizuku API access, all of which can be done without rooting or a special “custom ROM”.
While the storage scopes ability has been there since Android 10, I have never seen the level of granilarity by app that GrapheneOS provides anywhere else, which justifies the mentiin of it on GrapheneOS. I never said that they invented Contacts scope, and I am not aware if this is their doing or someone else’s. The ability to choose scoped content by app is super convenient, and IMO more straightforward than using different accounts for this purpose. Now, having segregated profiles for the apps that I know I need and have no way of replacing with a “trackerless” alternative (such as my Aruba InstantOn app) is a Godsent, no doubt. Using ADB is not for the faint of heart, we all know the capacity of damage it has if used carelessly, and punching a hole with Shizuku does expand the vulnerable attack surface, specially since it enables those holes over WiFi.
CalyxOS. Even LineageOS is fine. Even not putting one of these things on your phone, and doing things non-rooted (my guide) via ADB/Shizuku on any Android phone in the past 5 years is going to be fine. An exceedingly more important (99% as you say) thing is the user, them forming a proper OPSEC, and not making OPSEC mistakes.
If you could shqre your guide, I’d appreciate it. I am paranoid about using Shizuku or any other type of hole punching method.
These AOSP forks are tools, and all of these open source tools are uncompromised, that is a common theme. Tools do not really matter at this point if you use any of them. It is like picking any Linux distro. You are pretty much safe from telemetry and spyware immediately compared to a vanilla Windows installation, the moment you pick a distro.
I’m 100% in agreement with you in this comment. Any Linux distro will remove almost all risk of telemetry or spyware when we choose to move away from Windows or Mac, unless you opt-in to some telemetry on avfew, like Ubuntu, and even then, the difference is night and day.
I never played that game, but I can only imagine the frustration. Sorry you went through that.
that’s an interesting idea. would they have to compile individual versions for the testers? will it work after final release and people stop having NDAs and can compare several copies with each other?
If I were building it, I’d do the watermarking on the individual assets & textures.
Your asset pipeline would publish these to the solution, which would pack it up ready for distribution.
Except, each beta tester logs into the game and the publishing system gives them a personalised set of assets with a unique noise filter thrown over the top.
Mr leaky beta player publishes a video or screenshot of the gameplay, and then the studio can just reverse the noise algorithm to get their unique ID.
Absolutely terrible for large scale content delivery. But for a small closed beta, probably not an issue.
Wouldn’t capturing in high-res, then scaling down or compressing the picture/video defeat the noise filter? Or if you threw a bit of noise on it yourself?
Steganography is a (fascinating) bitch. There are a lot of ways to hide a message in an image which is very resilient to manipulations like resizing, compression or even the loss of information by actually filming a screen versus taking a screen capture.
If you adjust your approach to not rely on a single picture to reliably convey a short message, but part it out over tens or hundreds of frames in a video, it’s basically impossible to make sure that the message was erased without knowing the algorithms used or rendering the video unwatchable.
They could do it without recompilation, but something like changing the obfuscation and recompiling for every copy would likely make it much harder to get rid of the watermarks even if you can compare several different copies
(though they could also have multiple watermarked sections so that any group of for example 3 copies would have some section that is identical, but still watermarked and would uniquely identify all three leakers. The amount of data you need the watermarks to contain goes up exponentially with the amount of distinct copies, but if you have say 1000 review copies and want to be resistant to 4 copies being “merged”, you only need to distinguish between 1000^4 combinations so you can theoretically get away with a watermark that only contains about 40 bits of data )
That’s ridiculously tiny, especially considering that the game itself is likely around 100GB. They could probably watermark every single copy that ever goes out.
Unpopular opinion, but I don’t really get the amount of hate Denuvo receives tbh. I actually do reverse engineering for a hobby and a living, and honestly there are so many much worse DRM schemes game publishers could be pushing on consumers. People act like Denuvo is the most invasive, terrible DRM ever lol. It lets you activate the game offline, and also gives you a huge amount of machine activations per day, more than any reasonable person would need.
All the performance issues people complain about are just the game developers being dipshits in how they integrate it, by not reading documentation, etc., but that’s not Denuvo’s fault. Like, yes by all means blame the publishers for forcing their developers to slap Denuvo on as an after-thought 2 days before launch, but let’s not pretend it’s Denuvo that is the problem. They’re providing a solution to publishers, and if it wasn’t them it would be some other company with probably even worse tactics. I don’t think its unreasonable for a company to want to protect their IP, when without it games would be getting cracked and pirated on day 1. I also don’t think its unreasonable for pirates and crackers to do their thing, but to be so entitled as to expect that you should be able to easily pirate every new game the second it comes out is silly.
ehh, without hesitation I would choose Denuvo over being forced to install and run yet another third-party always-online launcher (Uplay, EA client, etc.) just to start the game.
While I’m no fan of the crippleware, I don’t think this product from them would effect your average gamer. It looks to be focused on beta testers and reviewers.
But, knowing the human’s facility for laziness, odds on it will filter into general release.
fighting piracy would be easier if they Develop a working and final build of the game - We are no paying full 70 usd price to be an Alpha tester
instead of 70 usd make it 50 usd more people will have a second thought when pirating with a lower price Do not include core in-game function as DLC ( New Game Plus as dlc? )
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Update: it causes even more hung processes while corpo shills and fanboys argue online that Denuvo has zero negative effect to infected games which is immediately disproven or ignored by those with brains.
I don’t worry, my 4090 Ti Super can handle it!
/s for the whoosh
And it only needs 400W+! What a bargain
How long can I run that on my car battery‽
That’s a fuckin keeper right there.
It’s a game of cat and mouse again.
One leaker caught and account got banned … Another account created.
the leaker in question is about people like a qa tester or someone who got an early access review.
I can’t say I know anything about how they choose their beta testers, but if I were to guess, there is probably some kind of vetting process that includes looking at how reputable you are. It would take a long time to build up that reputation.
Publishers don’t seem to understand that Denuvo is detrimental to them as much as for gamers. That crap regularly breaks games. Ask Bethesda, they should know.
deleted by creator
That’s a pretty pretty good set of suggestions and explanations, and i appreciate you taking the time to express them.
While the storage scopes ability has been there since Android 10, I have never seen the level of granilarity by app that GrapheneOS provides anywhere else, which justifies the mentiin of it on GrapheneOS. I never said that they invented Contacts scope, and I am not aware if this is their doing or someone else’s. The ability to choose scoped content by app is super convenient, and IMO more straightforward than using different accounts for this purpose. Now, having segregated profiles for the apps that I know I need and have no way of replacing with a “trackerless” alternative (such as my Aruba InstantOn app) is a Godsent, no doubt. Using ADB is not for the faint of heart, we all know the capacity of damage it has if used carelessly, and punching a hole with Shizuku does expand the vulnerable attack surface, specially since it enables those holes over WiFi.
If you could shqre your guide, I’d appreciate it. I am paranoid about using Shizuku or any other type of hole punching method.
I’m 100% in agreement with you in this comment. Any Linux distro will remove almost all risk of telemetry or spyware when we choose to move away from Windows or Mac, unless you opt-in to some telemetry on avfew, like Ubuntu, and even then, the difference is night and day.
I never played that game, but I can only imagine the frustration. Sorry you went through that.
Their games are broken even without denuvo
True, but without it, at least they just run, haha!
that’s an interesting idea. would they have to compile individual versions for the testers? will it work after final release and people stop having NDAs and can compare several copies with each other?
If I were building it, I’d do the watermarking on the individual assets & textures.
Your asset pipeline would publish these to the solution, which would pack it up ready for distribution.
Except, each beta tester logs into the game and the publishing system gives them a personalised set of assets with a unique noise filter thrown over the top.
Mr leaky beta player publishes a video or screenshot of the gameplay, and then the studio can just reverse the noise algorithm to get their unique ID.
Absolutely terrible for large scale content delivery. But for a small closed beta, probably not an issue.
Wouldn’t capturing in high-res, then scaling down or compressing the picture/video defeat the noise filter? Or if you threw a bit of noise on it yourself?
Steganography is a (fascinating) bitch. There are a lot of ways to hide a message in an image which is very resilient to manipulations like resizing, compression or even the loss of information by actually filming a screen versus taking a screen capture.
If you adjust your approach to not rely on a single picture to reliably convey a short message, but part it out over tens or hundreds of frames in a video, it’s basically impossible to make sure that the message was erased without knowing the algorithms used or rendering the video unwatchable.
It’s an awesome field and nothing new.
They could do it without recompilation, but something like changing the obfuscation and recompiling for every copy would likely make it much harder to get rid of the watermarks even if you can compare several different copies
(though they could also have multiple watermarked sections so that any group of for example 3 copies would have some section that is identical, but still watermarked and would uniquely identify all three leakers. The amount of data you need the watermarks to contain goes up exponentially with the amount of distinct copies, but if you have say 1000 review copies and want to be resistant to 4 copies being “merged”, you only need to distinguish between 1000^4 combinations so you can theoretically get away with a watermark that only contains about 40 bits of data )
That’s ridiculously tiny, especially considering that the game itself is likely around 100GB. They could probably watermark every single copy that ever goes out.
Unpopular opinion, but I don’t really get the amount of hate Denuvo receives tbh. I actually do reverse engineering for a hobby and a living, and honestly there are so many much worse DRM schemes game publishers could be pushing on consumers. People act like Denuvo is the most invasive, terrible DRM ever lol. It lets you activate the game offline, and also gives you a huge amount of machine activations per day, more than any reasonable person would need.
All the performance issues people complain about are just the game developers being dipshits in how they integrate it, by not reading documentation, etc., but that’s not Denuvo’s fault. Like, yes by all means blame the publishers for forcing their developers to slap Denuvo on as an after-thought 2 days before launch, but let’s not pretend it’s Denuvo that is the problem. They’re providing a solution to publishers, and if it wasn’t them it would be some other company with probably even worse tactics. I don’t think its unreasonable for a company to want to protect their IP, when without it games would be getting cracked and pirated on day 1. I also don’t think its unreasonable for pirates and crackers to do their thing, but to be so entitled as to expect that you should be able to easily pirate every new game the second it comes out is silly.
So you work for Denuvo…
Lmao, that’s news to me. Where is my pay check, Denuvo??? Nothing I said is incorrect, even if you don’t like it.
Denuvo unveils new tech that reinforces my zero desire to pay for ANY game that uses it.
Nobody kills a boner to buy like Denuvo
ehh, without hesitation I would choose Denuvo over being forced to install and run yet another third-party always-online launcher (Uplay, EA client, etc.) just to start the game.
Even when stuff eventually goes on sale, if I see Denuvo on the game it’s a hard pass.
While I’m no fan of the crippleware, I don’t think this product from them would effect your average gamer. It looks to be focused on beta testers and reviewers.
But, knowing the human’s facility for laziness, odds on it will filter into general release.
fighting piracy would be easier if they Develop a working and final build of the game - We are no paying full 70 usd price to be an Alpha tester
instead of 70 usd make it 50 usd more people will have a second thought when pirating with a lower price Do not include core in-game function as DLC ( New Game Plus as dlc? )