Ubisoft DRM authentification server is down, Assassin's Creed 2 unplayable

Earlier today, our tips inbox and the official Assassin's Creed 2 forum were set ablaze by incensed owners of the PC version of the aforementioned Italian revenge epic. According to numerous reports from prospective players of the game, Ubisoft's DRM authentification servers have crashed, forcing some players to suffer lengthy login periods when booting up Assassin's Creed 2, and locking some folks out of the game entirely.

A Ubisoft representative responded to a particularly rage-filled forum thread, stating "clearly the extended downtime and lengthy login issues are unacceptable, particularly as I've been told these servers are constantly monitored." The representative added "I'll do what I can to get more information on what the issue is here first thing tomorrow and push for a resolution and assurance this won't happen in the future." We've got a really great suggestion for how to make such an assurance: Find a less abominable DRM policy.

Ubisoft’s New DRM Cracked in Under 24-Hours


Ubisoft made serious waves when they announced a new DRM policy for all new PC titles, beginning with Silent Hunter 5 and Assassin’s Creed 2. The new scheme UbiSoft hoped would thwart piracy requires all legitimate users to have a permanent Internet connection that continuously authenticates a copy of the game. Additionally, save game files are now stored on UbiSoft servers. This new system has angered long-time fans who are rightfully pissed off that this new procedure will undermine the integrity of their game, i.e., lose Internet connection and you can’t play the game, or Ubisoft servers take a hike and you’re left holding your pocky.

Well, Ubisoft’s master plan has collapsed in under 24-hours, as infamous cracker group Skid-Row has tackled the new DRM and rendered it useless, meaning the only people now suffering with this ridiculous DRM are legitimate owners.

Here is PRXdecrypter 2.4 - a minor update, with all the keys up to 6.20 courtesy of bbtgp, who spent many hours reversing to get them, whereas I just spent 10 minutes updating my source code.

It's been 4 years since I first entered the PSP scene, and those 4 years were a privilege to be part of. A lot has changed since the days of kxploit. We've had a lot of fun battling Sony back and forth with their constant diversion and obfuscation tactics, watched a lot of drama unfold over some quite petty incidents, and seen some real triumphs of talent and ability from great minds such as Dark_AleX, but the past few months have seen a steady and obvious decline in the number of people following the scene and the number of developers still active. With this in mind, I thought it'd be worth letting those of you who are still around that I have sold my last remaining PSP, my silver first gen PSP 2000 - it served me well.

I am still interested in the scene and will continue to update PRXdecrypter and PSPident as long as there is still a demand for them (please reply to this thread if you still want to see these apps updated). However, if/when the time comes where they require a major rewrite, which would obviously be impossible for me to do without a PSP, I will clean up and release the source code.

For anyone wondering why I did this: partly because I don't see an imminent recovery in the PSP scene soon, partly because the hardware is outdated (and has been for a while), partly because it has been sitting in my drawer for months doing nothing, and a tiny bit because I wanted to free up some cash to buy a Nexus One (a quite amazing phone, if anyone is looking at buying one).

In what’s been called an “incorrect inventory” by a popular online technology retailer, Newegg has shipped out a series of Intel Core i7 Processors that turned out to be nothing more than bogus. A total of nine customers thus far have been affected, receiving nothing more than a clay heatsink with a sticker of a fan on it, labels with spelling errors and grammatical mistakes (also a manual with blank pages), and a piece of scrap metal as the processor. It sounds completely ridiculous, but it’s absolutely true.

Newegg is currently aware of the situation, and made the following statement:

“Newegg is aware of a shipping error that occurred with certain recent orders of the Intel Core i7-920 CPU. After investigating the issue internally it appears one of our long term partners mistakenly shipped a small number of demo boxes instead of functional units. Our customer service team has already begun proactively reaching out to the affected customers. In line with our commitment to ensure total customer satisfaction, we are doing everything in our power to resolve the issue as soon as possible and with the least amount of inconvenience to our customers.”

Putting things off -- we've all been guilty of it. "I'll do it later". You don't like doing the job at hand, the task seems too OVERWHELMING, you're a perfectionist, you don't know where to begin, you are afraid of failing -- there are lots of reasons for PROCRASTINATING. But overcoming procrastination is less about developing will-power, and more about creating an environment that is conducive to completing the task at hand. You can't make yourself do something you hate -- but you can make yourself hate it a little bit less. So let's take a moment this month to look at some ways you can curb your TENDENCY to procrastinate.

SONY is always whining about piracy and how evil pirates are. But are they better themselves? Not really!

While I browsed the web lately, I read a bit about Bryan S. Blank, the Director of Information Security at SONY Online Entertainment.

Getting a bit more interested I found his private homepage (asdfg.org).

By random searching for interesting links I explored the directory "/uploads/" which contains a lot of illegal hosted, copyrighted music.

So, who are the pirates? We are? You are? Funny to see that SONY's bosses are only normal humans with a bit of normal piracy thoughts as well.

The condom, called the Hotshot, was produced after family planning groups and the Swiss AIDS Federation campaigned to have the condoms made following several studies that showed adolescent boys were not using proper protection when engaging in intercourse.

"The result that shocked us concerned young boys who display apparently risky behavior,” Nancy Bodmer, who headed the research, told the newspaper. “They have more of a tendency not to protect themselves. They do not have a very developed sexual knowledge. They do not understand the consequences of what they are doing and leave the young girls to take care of the consequences.”

Bodmer said the results of the study suggest that early prevention makes sense.

A spokeswoman for the company, Lamprecht AG, said the United Kingdom would be a “top priority” if they expanded abroad, especially since the U.K. has one of the highest rates of teen pregnancy in Europe.

A standard condom has a diameter of 2 inches; the Hotshot's is 1.7 inches.

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- Reintroduced the sound
- Other general improvements