The highly controversial SOPA & PIPA bills currently being rushed through Congress by Big Media are encountering ever more opposition from minor and major players alike, such as Google. Now gog.com, owned by parent company CD Projekt RED, has come out against these bills too and are one of many games companies to do so. They address the questions of "will it work?" and "will it stop piracy?" with the answers being sort-of and no.

Today Kotaku is reporting the top 5 games pirated for major platforms this year according to TorrentFreak. As usual the PC platform is the most guilty almost doubling in pirated copies then its competitors.

Some of the titles listed are not surprising but the lack of a certain title filled with dragon slaying is. Why Skyrim didn't make the top five is anyone's guess. Either Steam is in fact the most user friendly DRM or people just love Skyrim. Either way this is just a small glimpse into the world of pirated software.

Top Five Pirated PC Games

1. Crysis 2 (3,920,000) (March 2011)
2. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 (3,650,000) (November 2011)
3. Battlefield 3 (3,510,000) (October 2011)
4. FIFA 12 (3,390,000) (September 2011)
5. Portal 2 (3,240,000) (April 2011)

We have brought you the potential perils of the upcoming UEFI Forum-implemented - www.uefi.org - Windows 8 secure boot feature here, here and here. However, it appears that it may not be so 'secure' after all, since there appears to be a surefire way to circumvent it, at least for the moment, while it's in development.

Softpedia has scored an exclusive interview with security researcher Peter Kleissner, who has created various Windows (XP, Server 2003 etc) "bootkits", which allow OS infection at the highest privilege level, giving unrestricted access to the whole of the PC. His latest one, called Stoned Lite, shows how the Windows 8 secure boot process, still in development, can be subverted, as it stands. He is planning to release details of how the code works at the upcoming International Malware Conference (MalCon) - malcon.org - that will take place in India on November 25th. It appears that the real vulnerability exists in the legacy BIOS boot procedure, not in Microsoft's implementation of secure boot, as Kleissner said:

The problem with the legacy startup is that no one verifies the MBR, which makes it the vulnerable point. With UEFI and secure boot, all the boot applications and drivers have to be signed (otherwise they won't be loaded). You can compare it to TPM, although Arie van der Hoeven from Microsoft announced that the secure boot feature is mandatory for OEMs who want to be UEFI certified. It is a good message that security is not an option.

You've got to laugh at the hypocrisy of big companies sometimes. It's a well known fact that Apple operates a very closed and controlling walled garden eco system with all of their products, courtesy of the late Steve Jobs. Examples include the iPhone, which can only purchase apps from the official Apple apps store and the iPod, which can also only sync with iTunes, both due to deliberate vendor lock-in using a combination of hardware and software DRM (Digital Restrictions Management). Apple claims that this is to ensure a seamless, consistent and high quality user experience. Savvy users know this to be only half the story, instead it's there to shut out competition and lock you in to Apple for everything in order to charge high prices for allegedly "premium" product. The only way to avoid this, is to jailbreak the devices (break the DRM) which conveniently (for Apple) voids the warranty on these expensive gadgets. Thankfully, this process is no longer underground, due to a recent court ruling that said jailbreaking was legal, much to Apple's displeasure.

However, the equally closed Valve, with their Steam gaming platform and it's account-based DRM has accused Apple of being a closed system! They are also "concerned" about it. This happened in an interview between Bellevue-based Valve's Gabe Newell and leading games investor Ed Fries at the WTIA TechNW conference. This has been reported in The Seattle Times in Brier Dudley's blog.

Rice University and Duke University are the latest in a long line of educational institutions to fund research on the effect of using restrictive Digital Rights Management (DRM) to try and control levels of so-called "piracy", which is allegedly reducing sales of content-only, infinite goods/virtual products, such as music, movies, computer games and books. (Some observers writing about DRM replace the word "Rights", giving us the phrase Digital Restrictions Management, which seems a more accurate description of what it's really about and removes the veneer of legitimacy from it. When buying DRM'd content, you are buying digital handcuffs, nothing more, nothing less.) The universities sponsored a study called Music Downloads and the Flip Side of Digital Rights Management Protection and what it found is that contrary to popular belief amongst the big content companies, removing DRM can actually decrease levels of piracy and increase sales. The fact is that DRM is always broken by hackers and pretty quickly too, often within a day or two (there isn't a single one still standing) leaving legal users who work within its confinements with all the restrictive hassles that it imposes, while the pirates get an unencumbered product to do with as they please. How is this progress?

While PC gamers are getting understandably excited about one of the year's biggest releases, which is guaranteed to have standards-setting graphics at least, there's a kick in the teeth waiting just around the corner. EA and Virgin Gaming have teamed up to launch a massive BF3 contest with $1.6m in cash and prizes - for consoles only. Yes, you read that right. And the reason? Consoles are the "gold standard". That's the aging console platforms reported on TechPowerUp a few days ago. GameStop's president Tony Bartel said in an interview with IndustryGamers:

We continue to believe that the console is a strong platform and will continue to be the gold standard.

Proposed changes to the Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) firmware specifications would mean PCs would only boot from a digitally signed image derived from a keychain rooted in keys built into the PC. Microsoft is pushing hard to make this mandatory, so that users cannot override it. This feature would have the handy benefit of excluding alternative operating systems such as Linux and FreeBSD. This is according to Professor Ross Anderson of Cambridge University and other industry insiders. Also, it's not at all clear that it actually secures against viruses and other malware and appears to be solely designed to appease corporate self interests for unbreakable Digital Restrictions Management (DRM).

UEFI supercedes the 30 year old veteran BIOS found in most PCs today, which is very inefficient and slow for modern PCs, carrying a lot of old, legacy compatibility baggage that's just not needed in today's PC. UEFI, a key component of Windows 8, is designed to work on several CPU architectures, such as ARM and is streamlined and efficient. It also includes a much improved graphical interface that replaces the keyboard-driven menu system of the BIOS.

In early October, content technology major Adobe will release Flash Player 11, the next major release of the Adobe Flash client-end software. The new browser plugin promises a platform that allows 1,000 times faster 2D/3D rendering performance over Flash Player 10, using full hardware-acceleration. Right here we see Adobe waking up to the HTML5 threat. Angry Birds on Google Chrome, anyone? The next key area addressed by Flash Player 11, is full native 64-bit (x86-64) web-browser support. This move will potentially cause the long-overdue decline of 32-bit web-browsers on 64-bit operating systems, since you already have HTML5 and Java on 64-bit browsers.

Next up, Adobe will pack its AIR platform, a Flash-based application runtime environment that uses the "superior user-interface" plank. AIR 3, which accompanies Flash Player 11, will support native extensions, that gives AIR applications added functionality. These include hardware capabilities including access to device data, vibration control, magnetometers, light sensors, dual screens, near field communications (NFC) and more. You know what adobe is getting at, future portable devices that are extremely powerful and functional.

The "Scene", self-styled "Robin Hood" hackers of the computer world allegedly fighting for you and me, who first made the no-CD crack and then the cracked DRM, are starting to target the intrusive adverts that are now appearing in today's hottest game titles such as the latest Deus Ex:

Apple introduced iCloud, a breakthrough set of free new cloud services that work seamlessly with applications on your iPhone, iPad, iPod touch, Mac or PC to automatically and wirelessly store your content in iCloud and automatically and wirelessly push it to all your devices. When anything changes on one of your devices, all of your devices are wirelessly updated almost instantly.

"Today it is a real hassle and very frustrating to keep all your information and content up-to-date across all your devices," said Steve Jobs, Apple's CEO. "iCloud keeps your important information and content up to date across all your devices. All of this happens automatically and wirelessly, and because it's integrated into our apps you don't even need to think about it-it all just works."

Pioneer Japan rolled out the BDR-S06J internal Blu-ray disc writer drive. It is available in three bezel options: white (BDR-S06J-W), piano black (BDR-S06J-BK), and matte black (BDR-S06J-KR). The drive uses the standard SATA interface, and has a 4 MB buffer. It can burn Blu-ray discs at 12X, and has Blu-ray 3D support using PowerDVD. Along with this, it also supports AVCREC DRM (2D or 3D). Scheduled to arrive in November, the drive goes for ¥30,000 (or US $360).

Valve today announced a new set of advanced features delivered in Steamworks, a complete suite of publishing and development tools that are available free of charge to developers and publishers worldwide.
Headlining the new feature set is the Custom Executable Generation (CEG) technology that compliments the already existing anti-piracy solution offered in Steamworks. A customer friendly approach to anti-piracy, CEG makes unique copies of games for each user allowing them to access the application on multiple machines without install limits and without having to install root kits on their PC.

The new features also include support for in-game downloadable content (DLC) and matchmaking. The in-game DLC support allows developers to deliver new content as they choose (paid or free) from inside the game itself, allowing users to make immediate purchases and experience the new content in the same game session. The Steamworks matchmaking now includes the robust lobby system shipped and tested in Left 4 Dead.

Sony BMG has become the last of the 'big four' record labels to drop Digital Rights Management - on part of its music collection at least. Specific details have not yet been released, so this could potentially apply to all of the songs that Sony offers for download. Digital Rights Management is the technology that limits users to playing songs only on certain computers and devices, and has been the subject of fierce opposition over recent months. Warner, EMI and Universal have all made plans for DRM-free downloads, and Sony is set to launch its DRM-free downloads in the first quarter of this year.

EMI started the anti-DRM movement by being the first major record label to sell their music without DRMs. Fortunately, Universal Studios caught on quick, and now offers the majority of their library sans DRMs to select retailers. And thanks to a recent promotion of the Amazon DRM-free music selling service, and a new partnership of said music service with Pepsi, more record labels are planning to sell DRM-free music. Warner Music Group, who owns material from famous artists such as Black Sabbath, is planning to put their music on Amazon. Sony BMG is also planning to place their material on Amazon. The main reason behind this sudden adoption of DRM-free material is the recent success behind DRM-free music. A symbol of this success is Universal making 85% of their music available as an unprotected MP3 file. Universal is all but confirmed as staying in the DRM-free MP3 market, pending final results of the market trial due in mid-January.

In another move against pirates worldwide, Sony unveiled and attempted to adopt "BD+", a type of virtual-machine encryption that allows a Blu-ray disk to determine if the player is hacked. Unfortunately, the earliest adoptions of BD+ show abysmal results. Fantastic 4: Rise of the Silver Surfer and The Day After Tomorrow are the first two movies to feature BD+ encryption, and neither of them will play on Samsung's BDP-1200 and LG's BH100. While both companies promise to release firmware upgrades within the coming weeks, there is a bigger problem: disks with BD+ loaded on them take up to two minutes longer to load than their encryption-free brethren. And even when the disk does play, there's a good chance that it will either crash or stutter during playback.

We have been reading and listening to your frustrations over SecuROM, PC activation problems, and technical support issues since BioShock launched on Tuesday, and we've devised a plan to help.

Starting immediately, we will be upping the activation count to a 5 by 5 plan. We will be raising the maximum amount of computers a user can have BioShock installed on simultaneously from 2 to 5, and allowing a user to reinstall BioShock on each of those computers from 3 times to 5 times. Also, we have in the works a revoke tool which you will be able to run on your machine if you want to free up that key and move it to to another computer (this works very much like Steam or iTunes system). We are also working with SecuROM and 2K customer service, so that when you do need to call in support problems, you get answers to your questions faster, without much waiting or being bounced around. SecuROM has been given much more autonomy to help fix your problems quickly and effectively. I am personally sorry for anyone who got bounced around in the past couple days (I even think I contributed to this problem) and we're going to make sure that does not happen in the future. As for other technical issues, we are bringing on a team of tech support that will be on the 2K forums 24/7 to help people resolve their technical issues. Our QA guys are in the offices and on the forums, too, reproducing issues and looking for workarounds and compiling information that they can put towards making you a patch and updating the knowledge base.

Via an update of the Individualized Blackbox component (IBX), FairUse4WM can now remove DRM for Microsoft IBX versions 11.0.6000.6324 and earlier, on both XP and Vista.
This is another drawback for Microsoft since for the past year hackers have managed to defeat DRM in more than one occasion.
This release was first announced on Doom9 forums where a user nicknamed 'Divine Tao' managed to update FairUse4WM to support new keys (v1.3 Fix2). In any case so far 'Divine Tao' does not seem to be working with the same hacker(s) who broke the Windows Media DRM code a year ago, as the user says that he could not access the FairUse4WM source code.

Editors note: It is a federal crime to remove the copy protection from any song in the United States. If you are caught, you can be fined $25,000 and put in jail for 5 years. TechPowerUp! does not support piracy.

Now that Apple has finally led the way and launched its DRM-free downloads for EMI music, you could be forgiven for thinking music fans should be happy. Unfortunately, Apple has removed the protection only to give downloaders another surprise: the tracks still contain data about who bought them. Apple launched the DRM-free service two days ago, which allows iTunes users to download higher quality music without DRM-protection (the technology that prevents music from being played on certain devices in an attempt to combat file sharing) for a higher price of $1.29. However, even tracks without any DRM have the user's account information, including the buyer's email address, embedded into them. Apple hasn't given any comment yet, but music fans fear that Apple is not respecting their privacy and are worried it could be used to identify them if the songs end up on file sharing sites. Obviously this would be useful to prevent illegal sharing, but if the data could be easily spoofed then it may lead to people being wrongly accused of sharing music.

Popular online retailer Amazon has confirmed that it plans to launch a DRM-free music store, which should allow customers to chose from a wide variety of songs from numerous artists. Apple recently took a step forwards after a deal with EMI allowed it to sell unprotected music via its iTunes store, and Amazon today announced that it plans to offer "millions of soungs" from over 12,000 record labels, all DRM-free. Amazon will be the first major distributor to offer all downloads without any digital rights management, which should allow customers to transfer music between different devices much easier compared to downloads from competing firms - something which has often been criticised by music fans. Amazon has not revealed when this service will go live, nor is there any indication of which regions it will be available in and what prices will be like, but this should be a good move from the consumer's view provided songs aren't too expensive.

Online retailer Amazon.com could be about to launch a DRM free music store next month providing that it can reach an agreement with the music industry. According to The Times, Amazon has been approaching major music companies in the last fortnight with ambitions to provide unprotected music downloads in order to compete with Apple's iTunes store. Although Amazon has previously been unsuccessful in such requests for the last 18 months, Apple's recent deal with EMI to provide music without any digital rights management protection has reignited Amazon's hopes. EMI and the smaller independent labels are expected to be the first to allow Amazon to sell their music (if they are successful), whilst record labels such as Sony BMG, Universal and Warner generally seem reluctant to allow their music to be distributed online without DRM.

Digital Rights Management is famous for frustrating numerous people that chose to download music legally when it comes to sharing between devices, whilst the illegal file sharers sit there laughing at them. But now it seems one of the major record labels, EMI, could be listening to customers at last. Rumours are flying around the internet claiming that Steve Jobs' visit to London to speak with EMI could be to negotiate a deal that will see significant amounts of EMI's music catalogue being available to download on iTunes without anti-piracy software, something music fans have been begging for since the start of the legal music downloads. If this is true, then it might not take long for the other major record labels to respond with DRM-free music, a move which would make it much easier for music downloaders to play their music on different MP3 players. There will be a live audio webcast of the press conference at 1pm London time on EMI's website, which is when the deal is supposed to be announced.



Update: it's official, EMI has launched DRM-free downloads across its entire music catalogue (although iTunes will get it first) - read on for the press release.

People who want the right to rip their own DVD movies onto their computers have just won a major battle. The DVD Copy Control Association was trying to stop a California-based startup company from selling their only product, which ripped DVD's onto computers. When the DVD Copy Control Association brought this to court, the judge and jury took one look at the license and declared that not letting this company do their thing would violate the DVD Copy Control Association's own license. The judge says that "This (the license) is a product of a committee of lawyers". Basically, the license that tried to enforce copy-protection laws really just ended up shooting the copy-protectors in the foot (figuratively speaking, of course).

Anyone who's really been paying attention to the recent things coming through Windows Update knows that an update to the Windows Media Player 11 runtime recently has been released (say, wasn't patch Tuesday a few days ago?). Anyone who's been wondering what this update does need not look much further. There was apparently a problem with the way Windows Media Player "metered" the times a song bought over subscription services was put on a digital device. This led to all sorts of issues, such as entire music stores not working (it's not fun, trust me), and sometimes outright failures of Windows Media Player library to MP3 player transfers. You can read the full details from Microsoft as to how exactly they fixed this problem here. Or, you could just be glad that if you go through the trouble of paying for your music, you can rest assured you'll actually be allowed to listen to it.

The Inquirer noted that Slysoft promised it's customers that their software would be able to remove Blu-ray Digital Rights Management (DRM) software by the end of this quarter. It seems that the people at Slysoft have not only done this, but accomplished their goal an entire month ahead of schedule. AnyDVDHD version 6.1.3.0 adds more than just true Blu-ray support. It also promises to run on Windows Vista and XP x64 (along with all the other operating systems it supports). The free upgrade also removes region encoding. Now it seems that the only problem people will have with upgrading their PC's to support high-definition optical drives is affording the drive and Slysoft AnyDVD HD. You can get AnyDVD HD here, and if you already have it, you can patch yourself for Blu-ray support here.

Steve Jobs announced that he really wants to see DRM go away, much like the rest of the music industry. At the Digital Music Forum East conference, Steve Jobs was made to look like a bit of a hypocrite. While he may want DRM free music, every song (and possibly video) featured on iTunes comes with some form of DRM protection. They claimed that if Steve Jobs really wanted DRM-free music, he would have done away with the DRMs in iTunes as soon as he could. They also said that Apple's proprietary version of DRM is giving the rest of the music world a lot of pain. This falls back on the original music industry's agreement that they need to either do away with DRM's, or all use one version of it.