*Article Removed , Use For Other Purposes?* How is piracy affecting you? Any ideas of stopping it from effecting you to harshly?
For the Movie, i am not seeing anything that could prevent people downloading from the internet, however, for the iphone (which is a phone), it will be as simple as : 1) Put an Hardware security chip that unscramble bit memory in realtime (and in Hawardware only) according to the UUID of each customer, that means, my code, once scrambled for my UUID by the appstore server, will never run in another iphone than mine because the code is always scrambled and just unscrambled while executing by the CPU. 2) Cancel the carrier service and the OS upgrade if the security chip is disabled (and make it clear to every customers). 3) wait a minute, we do not need (2) , if the chip is disabled, then code cannot run properly because it cannot be unscrambled....
That's pretty much where its heading, strong hardware encryption, user signed binaries and data (this prevents alot of things, like hacks due to code injection methods etc..). Not just for moibles devices but all computing devices. Bussines will demand it, to protect their intellectual properties, goverments will demand it to protect and control their intrests and users will demand it to protect their privacy and security. -ddn
Another issue is server costs, if your game has any kind of online high scores, multiplayer, chat/community, non-Apple downloadable content, etc. Pirates are using those services and increasing your monthly server bills. And paying nothing back. That's why I'm limiting any kind of online component to my first game(s), which is unfortunate.
Well, that depends...adding online high scores increased my server costs by $0.00. I'm paying the monthly hosting fee anyway, might as well use what I'm paying for. --Eric
It's actually really easy to tell if someone is playing a pirated copy. You just need to check if Info.plist has been tampered with. You can use that to filter pirates out of your online high scores, if you're concerned with server costs. We're tracking this for Harbor Master, and we know all the people who have pirated copies. It's about 25% of registered users right now. We're not doing anything about it yet because our servers are handling it fine, but if we start getting overloaded, we can block their submission server-side right away.
