The Fall jams your gun on jailbroken iOS devices | Hacker News Reader

The Fall jams your gun on jailbroken iOS devices

joystiq.com

60 pointscobrausn60 comments

So if someone buys the app legitimately from the App Store with a jailbroken phone, they'll still get this popup? That's pretty ridiculous. This isn't about stopping piracy or shaming pirates, it's a blanket accusation that all iPhone owners who jailbreak their phones are thieves.

true, however i am sure a large percentage of jailbreak users are indeed doing it for pirating. Probably not you and me, but its a huge thing in certain regions and age groups, sadly. For example ive seen articles on game sale stats stating piracy rates of >90% for china for example.

http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/WeiCiaoJheng/20130124/185392/...

This is kind of like saying desktop programs should refuse to work properly if BitTorrent is installed.

A high number of pirates may use BitTorrent to pirate software, but that doesn't mean your program was pirated using BitTorrent.

If there are better methods of copy protection, you should use those.

If I remember correctly, it used to be common for disc-based PC games to refuse to run if they detected certain software often used for piracy, like optical drive emulation software.

This of course leads to the user throwing the disc away and pirating the game he legally bought. I'm not much of a gamer myself, but I also heard stories about people buying games on Steam only finding out that there is some terrible cloud service (like uPlay) that they need to register to, before they can play the game, and this is advertised nowhere.

I think making people pirate your product so they can enjoy it, even if they bought it just means they will pirate it in the first place next time.

That's precisely what I did with Bioshock. I bought it for PC the day it came out, installed it but never got around to playing it, then a year or so later I found the discs and tried to reinstall and it wouldn't work (I can't remember if the issue was an online registration check or an optical drive DRM support issue). So I pirated it and it worked like a charm.

All it takes is doing this on one person's legitimately bought copy to open yourself to a nasty lawsuit.

A lawsuit over the rational approach of contacting Apple for a refund?

Not only that but Apple will probably also have a list ofpeople asking for refunds after that was probably saved on their game center accomplishments wink wink.

This is as dumb as blocking users on windows that know the administrator password.

On the up side, jailbeakers will take that as a challenge, so i expect community mods for this game in two weeks tops.

Jailbreakers didn't have to wait for a mod to fix this; there's an existing free tool that bypasses common types of jailbreak checks (xCon), and it worked for this.

Yeah, that's terrible. I'm all for anti-piracy measures that mess with the app when it's pirated, but to assume that "jailbroken" means "pirated" is dumb. I've jailbroken several iOS devices and never pirated any iOS software. You can pirate iOS software without jailbreaking.

This is the problem with "detecting" piracy - it is super-easy to get it wrong and start punishing legit customers. Any developer who makes the decision to punish pirates risks losing paying customers. How many lost paying customers is it worth it to punish people who have never and very likely will never give you a dollar?

I love the approach that showed up recently where the developer uploads their own torrent to pirate sites. The torrent has the game, but it's a slightly-modified "pirate version" rather than the regular version. You can beat any pirate group's release time, and if the modifications are subtle, people won't notice until the torrent is already entrenched. This has pretty much zero risk of punishing legit customers unless you cock up your build process and accidentally ship the "pirate version" to them somehow.

Stuff that tries to detect piracy by looking at its runtime environment or whatever is bound to go wrong, of course.

How? Wouldn't that require an Apple developer account?

Yes, but each account can put apps on a hundred devices. You can buy signing keys for a single iOS device for a few bucks from shady people with developer accounts who are selling their device slots off one by one.

And even worse is when these pirates get their hands on enterprise certificates - where they are not limited to 100 devices…

http://thenextweb.com/apple/2013/01/01/low-down-dirty-iphone...

Counter argument: You can't legitimately buy from the App Store with a jailbroken phone. Either you or the developer is violating the agreement you have with Apple and in fact if you are in any way touching copyrighted code then you can be charged with a crime. Fun times.

Wrong. People who have a jailbroken phone CAN use the app store. Also, jailbreaking (phones currently) is a DMCA exception.

Wrong. Jailbreaking phones may be a DMCA exception but if you copy any memory of any sort then it becomes copyright infringement offences. See WOW Botnet case.

I don't know what you're talking about.

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/10/jailbreaking-now-...

> Counter argument: You can't legitimately buy from the App Store with a jailbroken phone

Citation? I just skimmed the iOS agreement and couldn't see any clauses that would imply that, but maybe I missed something or missed a separate App Store agreement somewhere.

Whether you're in breach of contract with Apple has no relation to whether you're pirating some third party's iPhone app.

Are you doing a hypothetical or just assumed wrongly that you can't legitimately buy from the app store?

Legally purchase a $7 app and get screwed by the DRM.

Pirate a $7 app and subvert the DRM using a Jailbreak tweak like xCon.

It seems that this only hurts the legitimate users, as others will still be able to pirate the app.

Just to clarify what xCon does: it's intended for use with legally-purchased App Store apps that refuse to work correctly on jailbroken devices - xCon tricks those apps into thinking that they're running on non-jailbroken devices.

So yes, the gun-jamming hurts legitimate users, but those legitimate users can use xCon to work around it.

Here's some more documentation: http://theiphonewiki.com/wiki/XCon

Why would I want to support a developer that treats me as a criminal off the bat? I might as well be a criminal and just pirate it at that point... Self fulfilling prophecies at work.

It looks like they decided to patch this 'feature' out of the game.

http://kotaku.com/patch-will-give-jailbroken-deus-ex-players...

"We're sorta sorry we got caught."

"but we're not sorry that we did it."

But their error message starts with "We are sorry"!

More anti-consumer crap from SquareEnix. It's really a shame they are hellbent on running their fantastic franchises into the ground.

Because there is someone of the big publisher that is consumer friendly?

Only indies seem to treat their customers with respect. That is why I buy all bundles for at least a buck even if I have the games already.

How do you detect a jailbroken device from software? Presumably someone could just patch that, but maybe that's a bit beyond what most people want to do.

The software simply attempts to read the device's root folder. Success == Jailbroken.

Piracy detection involves checking the app executable's compile time, permissions and similar.

The methods change from time to time, but that is basically the gist.

There are quite a few different ways a Jailbroken device can be detected.

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/413242/how-do-i-detect-th...

In fact, it can be an arms race at times. People can use insanely clever ways to detect if the runtime is being modified, and then others can come up with an equally clever solution to subvert this check.

Such as xcon.

Given what one can do when trusting a walled garden, and can't without, is there some reasonable concern critics overlook?

Say, apps having access to other apps' data could unfairly modify cached user data, frustrating legitimate multiplayer gameplay? i.e.: write an app which auto-maximizes all player capability stats?

To wit: cheats may become easy to perpetrate and hard to block when full sandbox access is not prevented.

You can access app data with a USB cable and the right PC software. Cheating is already rampant in many games and it doesn't require jailbreaking.

There's a lot of outrage about this -- a lot of frustrated consumers.

I think its naive to assume that Square-Enix didn't have data that said "Money lost to pirates > Money to be gained from legitimate purchasers on jailbroken devices."

That being said, pirates always seem to win the DRM-escalation arms race -- and the PR blowback from this will probably outweigh the extra purchases they snag.

The reason why pirates seem to always win, is that it is highly asymmetric. To do this correctly takes more patience and sneakiness than 90% of executives have in the technology context. Not everyone can be Irwin Rommel or Laurence of Arabia.

They will be releasing an update to remove this: http://www.joystiq.com/2013/07/12/deus-ex-the-fall-update-wi...

Their wording bugs me, as they show no remorse except that they did not make this particular restriction known to people before they bought the game.

Essentially they're saying it would have been okay if they'd told everyone up front, even though it's still tantamount to calling all those who jailbreak their phones a thieving pirate.

I thought it was quite good, comparing tho most company statements I see. They even used the word apologize. Most companies do not use such wording as it might imply admission of guilt. That's why you see regret instead of apologize in a lot of company issued statements...

My guess is an idiot product manager conflated "jailbroken" with "stole the app" and thought the feature would be a good one.

Product managers don't implement features. Someone coded and tested this too, and somehow the communication process didn't get far enough to stop it. That's more than one dumb middle manager.

What is with the prevalence of always mentioning "jailbreaking will void your warranty" completely out of the blue? It's not clear that it's actually true, and being constantly repeated everywhere only works to make it true. The manufacturer sold me a computer - installing software on it is the expected use. We wouldn't say a laptop was out of warranty because someone nuked Windows and put Linux on it.

Still, it's wise to jailbreak any device as soon as you get it. This way you can be sure of having a jailbreak method, it's still in the return period, and you won't end up becoming reliant on a locked down device and worried about changing it.

Jailbreaking carries some risks to the user and this article is an example how no one really understands these risks fully. Nevertheless, jailbreaking is quite popular and it's something that ordinary iPhone users do. It's not just hackers who have some idea what they're getting into. So it's worth reminding readers that jailbreaking may bring your phone real economic consequenses.

Also, this is an article about how a bit of 3rd party software behaves on jailbroken devices. It seems entirely relevant to discuss how Apple itself views the practice.

The latest stat I've seen is that only 4% of iOS devices are jailbrokem.

This seems like a really good way to invite a lot of 1-star reviews from angry players with jailbroken phones...

A ridiculous attempt to prevent piracy? Jailbroken != pirated.

If they hadn't fixed this with a patch, I could see a class action lawsuit on the horizon for fraud. You can't sell something as working when it is not.

It is included in the description.

Please be aware, the Deus Ex: The Fall play experience is currently restricted on jail broken devices. Do not purchase if you have voided your warranty and have Jail broken your device.

I'm not sure whether that's exactly fraudulent (equivalent for people not reading what devices an app supports and purchasing it)

On the other hand, the developers built the game with the assumption that you'd be playing on the basis of a standard set of software. If you change that software, the assumption is broken.

I wonder if the TOS says anything about agreeing to not play on jail-broken devices...

What I'd like to see is their analytics showing how many unique users are playing the game compared with sales numbers from the App Store, to get the actual percentage of piracy that's occurring.

Bonus points would be to show how many jailbroken users have purchased vs how many have pirated. Not sure how'd you detect this without IAP and receipt validation, though, given that that's the point of piracy...

The title of this submission should start with "Deus Ex:" since the game's name is "Deus Ex: The Fall".

Does anyone know if this is a shooting optional stealth game? In other words, essentially still playable with this restriction?

This is doing it wrong. You must bias to false negatives. You must make the initial impression and experience sacrosanct. You must avoid penalizing your paying customers.

It's stupid to do this so obviously, so quickly, and for it to be triggered by jail breaking. Jailbreak != piracy!

Can you issue a chargeback if the publisher does not provide you with working software?

If you're buying from the App Store, this is probably a terrible idea. Other software distributors (like Steam, for example) have been known to disable people's accounts when they do a chargeback.

Chargebacks aren't just "I want my money back". They're meant to fight against fraud, and there's an implicit indication that you won't be doing business with that vendor any more because of this.

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