Re:Chaff Bugs: Deterring Attackers by Making Software Buggier
by Boulth on Sunday August 05, 2018 @03:53PM
(#17693149)
It reminds me of the old "protection" in Settlers: when using an illegal game everything would work as normal except the iron smith would produce pigs instead of iron bars. That'd be surely missed by early crackers but definitely not by users.
Re:Chaff Bugs: Deterring Attackers by Making Software Buggier
by MrEldritch on Sunday August 05, 2018 @08:12PM
(#17694305)
Earthbound had a particularly punitive bit of hard-to-notice copy protection - it would be exactly identical up until right before the final boss, and then immediately crash and delete your save.
At which point it isn't so much copy protection, but copy ... karmic punishment?
Re:Chaff Bugs: Deterring Attackers by Making Software Buggier
by brokenmachine on Monday August 06, 2018 @02:42AM
(#17695545)
Probably the users just thought the game was buggy normally and were relieved they didn't buy it.
Re:Chaff Bugs: Deterring Attackers by Making Software Buggier
by your-nanny on Saturday August 04, 2018 @08:56PM
(#17689146)
funny at least
Re:Chaff Bugs: Deterring Attackers by Making Software Buggier
by WalterBright on Sunday August 05, 2018 @06:25PM
(#17693905)
The trick was to corrupt memory at a slow enough rate that the crackers wouldn't notice it (and so wouldn't defeat it), but their users would.
On my game, it would check to see that the copyright notice was intact. If it wasn't, it would, at random times, overwrite a random byte in memory with a random value. The idea was for the "rebranded" game to appear to be uselessy buggy.
I have no idea if it was effective or not. Probably not.