Windows Marketplace's newest anti-piracy measures already thwarted
By Ross Miller 
posted Nov 12th 2009 8:21PM
posted Nov 12th 2009 8:21PM
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MS will get it eventually
I doubt it. MS is to big, and to stuck in their ways. They need to split up, and start over.
These stuff can never be completely secure. No matter how hard ANY company tries, it still wont be able to stop piracy. The hacker community is too large for every market to be able to properly combat it.
As long as steal other people's work isn't the goal, I'm glad that almost every device could be hacked to customize it anyway you want and do unofficial stuff that didn't get put in since it would "confuse the user" or for "replicating features."
Well cracking the iPhones program ipas isnt as difficult, and we even have websites dedicated to the distrbution of said ipas. Isnt the human race grand.
@fanboy, they can't stop pirates, but they can piss off loyal customers by treating them like thieves and pissing on the concept of ownership. That's all the satisfaction they apparently need.
Although I realized content protectors were born yesterday, when did Engadget fall off the turnip truck? This afternoon? This is the second recent reference I've seen to DRM being good for developers here. WTF?
Yes I agree. The App Store is very, very flawed if you don't know. VERY FLAWED. And Apple hasn't taken a huge step to solve it. Some steps include in-app purchase, but it still doesn't help to stop piracy.
Exactly, one team of developers cannot combat the hundreds of teams of hackers. There is always somebody better.
@what a surprise:
they kind of have... zune hd and w7 are both far ahead (imo) of the competiton and yes i own them both.
If you secure it, they will come.
nintendo fanboy hater @
"MS will get it eventually"
Doesn't matter. Beside fanboys who the heck cares about the app store with
less than 300 apps? Anyone wants to guess how much download MS got
from the Marketplace? Let's see the Marketplace can match the 2 billion
downloads from Apple's App store. :)
At a time they said that Cubase would never be cracked again due to various reasons like better dongle encryption and even a rumor that they paid some members of the hacking community so they wouldn't patch it.
A few weeks ago Cubase 5.1 was finally cracked and many people were $700 better in pocket.
Where there's a price tag, there's a will and a way...
@ Adderz : Where the hell does an iPhone hacking bash come from? And it seems all your pc fanboys voted you up for bashing the iphone in an unrelated troll post?
@fanboy
The PS3 is doing a pretty good job holding off hackers though. It's been hack-free since the day it was launched and it seems like it will be for a long time (unless you believe the hundreds of fake "PS3 custom firmware" vids on YouTube, those have been around for ages now).
Microsoft became the enemy around the year 2000. They will be paying for it from now on.
Thank God Microsoft isn't a bank.
Do you really think banks are safe?
http://news.cnet.com/8301-1009_3-10393170-83.html?tag=mncol;title
I got money in the bank, shawty whatcha drank?
i'd rather have a bank(microsoft) that upgrades their protection than a credit union(apple) that leaves a gapping hole in their protection wide open and doesn't even acknowledge that it is there
They're not banks, but bank run on them.
Put WGA on ther- Oh wait, never mind.
Fiddlesticks.
As the chinese saying goes,
"legality goes a meter high, evil goes a mile tall"
so true!
At least they made an attempt to fix it. As far as I know, piracy is still rampant on the App Store too, no?
You're right, even more so rampant in the Apple App Store. Apple has been touting how much more secure/reliable they are than M$ and how there aren't any viruses on their system , et al. Whatdaya know, once you actually become popular to more than a small portion of the global user-base you become a target. The iPhone has been hit from day one, first cracking apps & releasing all constraints put on it, now there's a small virus or two, albeit only for the jailbroken ones. Just wait and see if it ever spreads to untainted ones.
The problem with trying to secure anything digital is just that, you can't. Once it's released to the wild it all boils down to bits, you can try but all you do is breed a more determined hacker/cracker. At least they try to fix things, but I'd say the majority of people using the WM platform & iPhone don't delve into the grey area and the people that do probably wouldn't have bought the app anyway. Vicious cycle!
um, wat? show me. i haven't seen any iphone or app store exploits. sure people jailbreak their phones, just to jump carriers. that only bothers ATT. but when has someone's phone been compromised, unwillingly, from outside?
i don't want theories, i want to hear about actual exploits in the wild.
@gunther: How about that one in Holland(I think?) that gets in through ssh and puts a pop-up on the unlock screen that demands payment in order to make it go away?
http://smellslikedonkey.com/wordpress/?page_id=274
Case in point. Except imagine that on the scale of hundreds, if not thousands, of apps.
@mark
That requires a jailbroken phone, right? So right away, you're outside the realm of AAPL's security by jailbreaking and enabling SSH.
Like leaving your key under the doormat. The lock company can't help you there.
@gunther
There have actually been two accounts of people mucking with other others jail-broken iPhones. One in the Netherlands where the guys replaced people's lock screens with his "ad" to tell them how to fix their security and the other in Australia where what is being called an "iPhone worm" made it's rounds vandalizing, again, jail-broken units replacing their wallpaper and then searching for other iPhones in the area to continue on. Link --> http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2009/11/iphone-worm/
While not truly malicious and devastating, they are both an annoyance at best but also a sign of things to come. Once the more malicious people come along that really want to f* people up, well... things could get bad for the jail-broken community. On the other hand, this opens up a new field AV companies looking to market on a new platform. I think it would be a simple matter to avoid this is Cydia and The Rock disabled SSH by default and have it set to only turn on when physically requested by the user. I toggle mine off when not in use, but a re-boot kicks it back to active status and if I forget... well, my bad.
So you see, not theory any more but actual practice. Again, this is only the jail-break community but give the wily hackers that don't want to take the easy route through an unlocked door a little while and you will see more, I don't care what the platform.
That's exactly why I want apple to keep selling computers then everybody will see their flaws
Piracy is still a factor on the App Store - but you have to ALSO jailbreak your phone to use pirated applications, which limits how many people can actually pirate. So as a developer, I consider this the best world - casual users really can't pirate, whereas hard-core people that were going to pirate anyway can. You cannot stop piracy totally, you can only contain it.
Furthermore as a developer it's really easy to check and see if your app is running on a Jailbroken phone, and if it has been pirated. The fact is that developers choose to do nothing about that generally, because piracy is not affecting actual sales much.
As the saying goes - "The better the lock, the better the lockpick"
..the better the lockpick, the better the lock to lock the lockpick, the better the lockpick to pick the lock that locks the lockpick, the better lockpick to pick the lock the lockpick picks the lock that lock the lockpicks pick lock....
i'm not buying it. look how sharp the skull&bones image is compared to the rest of the screenshot. shitty PS job, losers.
that said, it wouldn't be a surprise to me at all if the exploit were real. microsloth fails.
TARD ALERT!!!!
* ducks and covers *
Read the article next time. Someone didn't hack the store and replace everything with a pirate flag, they found a way around the encryption on purchased apps, so that once purchased someone can extract the .CAB file and distribute it freely.
You. Fail.
@Brad
i have only so much time in the day for nerds. reading the article would have immediately surpassed my quota. i'd rather jump to conclusions and be called a Tard.
Looks like someone got told.
FAIL with a capitol "P"
'nough said.
@gunther
You have no time to deal with nerds and reading the article would surpass your quota???
You have managed to find enough time to comment 6 or so times?
By my calculations you could of read the article 3.45 times.
You, my friend, are the defintion of FAIL.
(my spelling is shocking today :S)
Seriously, why do they even bother?
Is 1227 the new 1337 ??
Yet another MS fail rofl
Oh, right! Apple has no issues with cracking and piracy of their apps...
http://smellslikedonkey.com/wordpress/?page_id=274
@loocas
so who made the stupid image? engadget? kinda misleading. makes it look as if the marketplace itself was compromised.
btw, we prefer the term "delayed". tard is very 90s.
maybe you'll read the damn article next time
@uncontrol
not likely!
;)
The time you spent replying bullshit like this could have been spent reading the article, understanding it and going "Ahaaaaa....".
No, wait, the "understanding" part would have probably taken twice as long... Nevermind...
LOL. I'm starting to take pity on MS. It's like whatever they tried (activation, WGA, and now this) are quickly cracked in record time.
Just like the iPhone....cracked hours after it is released.
On and yes...you simply need to download a simple file for the Cydia source and you installed ANY crack app you want...
stop picking on m$ for no reason. Any type of protection will get cracked.
Look at poor apple...they are trying sooooo hard....invest soooo much time in protection and yet we sill jailbreak and crack apps as we wish....
@CT: WTF are you even talking about troll. Are you a hypocrite Apple hater that you have to mention iPhone on an MS related topic?
Yet another quality piece of work from Redmond! I can't believe the quality of products and quality of people that produce it. This company has really fallen down over the last 10 years and the floor is nowhere to be found. There is so much fat there that they can lay off 20% of the company and not miss a beat.
Oh geez relax! You make it seem like Microsoft did nothing. They implemented the code they thought would be okay, but someone bypassed it - is that really any shock? With your comment, you probably believe that nothing else has ever been broken. Apples App Store IPAs - cracked, Blu-Ray - cracked, Consoles/Portable Game Systems - cracked, DRM Video/Audio - cracked, Mac/PC Software, PC Games - all cracked. Everytime someone cracks DRM/Anti-piracy measures doesn't mean that the company that implemented it was lazy or the quality was shit. At the end of the day - it is just one persons coding against another.
Psshh this was the same person who cracked it before. If he isn't going to release it than there is no reason for him to exclaim that he found it but isn't going to release it I doubt Microsoft will bother to contact him so what's the point?I found a way to get around the Xbox live console bans but I am not going to tell anyone how to do it -_-
No wonder Y microsoft is still microsoft :P
Hahahahah Microsoft fails yet again
looks like nobody wants to pay for crap
It's amusing to see all these MS fanboys and their kind trying to justify the poorly constructed MS App store by attempting to compare it with the Apple App Store.
The MS app store is barely new and it's already going down the toilet. Much like WinMo and the Zune.
Hmmm.... so you compare the new and cracked marketplace to the more mature and still cracked App store and your conclusion is that marketplace is going down the toilet??
I think the logic flows are messed.
So many people complain about a pro Apple bias but an article about windows marketplace leads to several comments about Apple and iphones.
"The hack itself won't be posted"
HOW DICK OF THEM.
it is the same to say, i found something incredible but i wont tell you what it is.
Maybe just maybe someone like chainfire of xda_dev fame knows the effects of releasing a hack and dumping on the devs that have worked hard to get their apps on the marketplace.
I know for one that there are marketplace apps out there you can download and install the .cab simply with a google search. He let people know about this and MS have just release updated methods to secure apps to which he has cracked again.
What is wrong with him cracking it and let MS be aware that it needs to be improved. After all chainfire and others from xda_devs dont want to see a major component of WinMo fail, they'd rather see it improve.
The endless cycle of hacking/securing will always be.
First... the website is setup as a honeypot to monitor where the fixes are to be addressed, then the hack attempts begin. Why throw all the time/money into the intial code when the hackers will teach them for free?
It's all business 101
cost/benefit ROI
This wouldn't have made news if they didn't use the words "advanced anti-piracy measure." The minute you claim you have secured something it's taken as a challenge to the hacking community.
Cracked in 2 hours... wow!!! Everything that can be locked, can be unlocked (as the Greeks say hahaha!!!). Antonis @ http://coinmad.wordpress.com