StarCraft cracked, again??!

[Lumine]

well.... blizzard has already sued starcrack....


http://www.patentarcade.com/2010/04/...k-hackers.html

it's kinda old news already.... from april

[IvanVankata]

Once again - Russian hackers, I salute you ! Game Cracked and ready to play before the releas ... how DO you do it ?

[dustinbrowder]

Its not going to affect the sales of the game, at least not by much.

Maybe 2% lost sales globally, but that's hardly noticeable when it will sell 20 million copies globally.

[Hammy]

I'm mostly amused by the fact that the people saying "it'll take months at least", as though they had the slightest idea what they were talking about, were proven wrong.

Other than that, well... dunno if this will have much of an impact on sales or on the game. Emulated servers always lag behind real servers a bit, and patching is a bit of a mess often times. Maybe some people will play there, but I doubt any of those people would have bought the game from blizzard anyways, regardless of whether these servers exist or not.
IMO blizzard's job is just to keep them to a bare minimum since eradicating them would take too much effort for little gain.

[sandwich_bird]

Just a reminder that you can talk about the fact that they are cracking it but distributing information about how to play a cracked version will not be tolerated.

[Norfindel]

WTF?!?! They could reverse-engineer it so fast?!?

Still, most people will want to go to BN2. There's no easier way to find similarily skilled players. Blizzard did a quite good job at that.

[dejai]

There is nothing illegal about responding to packets in a systematic way. The game is sending packets out into the wild and they are simply taking those packets and analyzing them you have to prove they actually reverse engineered the game to sue them. What is illegal is the ability to use such a system without the verification of the game. A great example is http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bnetd pretty much the same stuff happened in SC1.

he lawsuit alleged copyright infringement, trademark infringement, and violations of their games' End User License Agreement (sometimes referred to as a clickwrap license) and DMCA anti-circumvention prohibitions, in what would become an important test case for portions of that law.

They wanted to shut them down, they did but then the project just changed its name and they could do nothing to stop it. If you are on a linux system it is still in all the repos as it is legal to use the "server software" (just to make clear BNetd is not illegal software but that name infringes on trademark. ). Other server systems do stuff like this all the time legally for example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PvPGN these are not illegal programs they are legal they simply respond to packets they are completely external from the application and do not infringe on any intellectual property (unless the packets are IP, now that is another grey area).

So being able to play SC2 on your own private BNet server probably cannot do that much about except maybe try get you through their EULA and claim that you don't have the right to use the software to achieve that purpose. Then again I am not a lawyer but from a "tech" standpoint they can't really stop it now it is in the wild. The act of actually cracking the game is not such a grey area since that is just straight up ip infringement.

It is all really complicated now with all these judgments being made etc as to what they can actually do. Stupid law systems. (I am trying to be impartial between the russian programmers and blizzard). I can see why blizzard would not want this they are basing their business model on BNet. So we will see what happens. As for legality it is really grey and murky. They obviously reversed it but you have to prove that to sue them for "hacking" your system. Otherwise you can sort of just scare them off with complex legal battles they cannot pay for.

Personally I will buy the game because I want to play in a competitive environment and have a reliable service provided to me which I hope Blizzard can pull off. Also I write indie games and so I like supporting the wider gaming community (hard work == reward in my book).

[Norfindel]

How can Blizzard sue them, if hacking and cracking isn't illegal in Russia? Or i'm mistaken?

When a pirated StarCraft 2 game client connects to the StarCrack server, however, the StarCrack server allegedly bypasses the authentication process and unlocks the online multiplayer mode in the pirated StarCraft 2 game client.

Where they so silly as to have the servers send an "ok to run" response to the client? That's not even trying to make it secure. Did they put the newbs on the BN2 team, or something?

[dejai]

That is also true they have to actually get them to come to America And in any case it is a civil and not criminal matter so they cannot hold them in America.

[hyde]

Blizzard had to send the bnet 2.0 software to AT&T and resective server centers across te world. Doesn't take much for someone with authority+bad ethics+a USB key to steal some software. Guys this is bnet, not your major bankings security infrastructure. Government and Google gets compromised and software gets reverse engineered. I am too surprised it took a few months ( they couldve started way before public beta even started mind you) but it was coming