quote: Original post by neurokaotix
Okay ladies and gentlemen, I''d like to point out one final time to all those who do not understand.

A HACKER is involved with infiltrating systems for the retrieval of information. Whether their motives are good or bad or whether they''re malicious or not has nothing to do with this term.

A CRACKER alters software on a machine to bypass things like 30-day trials.

Most of the people you hear about that are "Hackers" are actually 12 year old script kiddies doing things like DoS attacks and running code to get buffer overflows and crap.

No.

Yeah right, what can you tell me about this subject? If you''re so in-the-know (which you seem to not be according to your post), then why don''t you illuminate the subject a bit?

quote: Original post by neurokaotix
Okay ladies and gentlemen, I''d like to point out one final time to all those who do not understand.

A HACKER is involved with infiltrating systems for the retrieval of information. Whether their motives are good or bad or whether they''re malicious or not has nothing to do with this term.

A CRACKER alters software on a machine to bypass things like 30-day trials.

Most of the people you hear about that are "Hackers" are actually 12 year old script kiddies doing things like DoS attacks and running code to get buffer overflows and crap.

Shut up and go read the jargon file. There''s already at least one link in this thread.

Why are you telling me to shut up? Everything I posted was true, those are the correct definitions of what they are. Perhaps nowadays they''re scewing the meanings to fit whatever buzzwords the media has picked up on lately, but thats what they mean. An AP randomly just saying "No" to my post was ignorant.

shut up the both of you

the issure here is that if there are only a few ways the game mutates in response to a crack, after a few attempts, the cracker will recognise them more quickly

what diverse/obscure/subtle ways can you think of to make life difficult for someone trying to figure out if their crack worked?

********


A Problem Worthy of Attack
Proves It''s Worth by Fighting Back

I think that one of the best things to do is to make your crack checking only check for cracks say 75% of the time. or even make it so that it checks every 10 mins with a probobility of 25% of actually checking for cracks. If you make it time consuming for the cracker to determine if his crack has worked, it will take longer to make a good one. Also this way users that download cracked versions will get to try your game and see how cool it is but will find that it only works 10% of the time and the other 90% of the time it just gives nice messages telling them that the software has been cracked.

"The only thing worse than not having that new _______ , is when some rich kid has it, but can''t and/or doesn''t appreciate it."-me
Tazzel3d ~ Dwiel

Have checks through out the game, but don''t inline the function. Write slightly different checks, that do different things. Mix and match all the nasty in-game tricks you can think of, but keep them subtle for as long as possible.

quote: Original post by Kohai
Have checks through out the game, but don''t inline the function. Write slightly different checks, that do different things. Mix and match all the nasty in-game tricks you can think of, but keep them subtle for as long as possible.

Well, you could make a macro that takes a few parameters and then you could effectively make it different each time while not being difficult to maintain (tho it would be hard to debug... maybe make it a function at first and turn it into a macro when it works). Actually, I''m in favor of using the checksum to control things. If you can be sure the checksum of X (part of the executable, a dll, whatever) will be Y, you can use Y in some calculates somewhere. Do that all over the code and if something is changed nothing works again. You would need to comment the code well and it would take a while to make an update because all the calculations involving checksums would need to be changed. Maybe make a nice automated tool that takes a compiled exe and generates checksums and changes the source with the proper numbers by scanning comments.

I say forget the whole things, the word has two meanings and the meaning has to be decided based on context. what I think DOES need to be done is to have people realize there are two contexts

who gives a shit?
hacker, cracker, cookie, triscuit. nobody gives a flying fuck.



back on topic:
in order to figure out how to stop these triscuits, we need to
think like triscuits. i''d be really helpful if one of them defected
over to ''our side'', or if we could get some sort of documentation
on how they went about triscuiting our games.

i''m fairly sure they monitor the executables (debuging) to see
which variables are getting changed, and at what address.. perhaps
we could confuse them by changing random variables that are irrelevant
to our games?

i dunno. anybody know anything about this stuff?

-eldee
;another space monkey;
[ Forced Evolution Studios ]

Do NOT let Dr. Mario touch your genitals. He is not a real doctor!