Break it Down Blog

Previously we’ve written about the new DRM that Ubisoft has developed in-house that requires a 24/7, uninterrupted internet connection (not even for a modem reboot or lost sync) to the master Ubisoft DRM servers.
At the time there was a lot of speculation about “What if your modem reboots?” or “What if Ubisoft’s DRM server goes [...]

Above is a mockup of the Ubisoft Cloud Copy Protection prompt integrated into Assassin’s Creed 2 that pops up the instant your network connection to the Ubisoft master server goes down from within the game.
… let that sink in for just a minute…
You thought BSOD’s were frustrating, you thought games locking up on you was [...]

If you purchased BioShock 2 via Steam and preloaded it last night or early this morning and are trying to play it and are instead seeing this SecuROM DRM serial-number activation screen:

and thinking “hu? What serial number?!” then I’m here to help. Go back to your “My Games” screen in Steam, right-click on BioShock 2 [...]

Preston Lee has released a Serial-to-PID Calculator utility for Kindle users. Using this utility allows you to discover your PID so you can share your DRM’ed Amazon .azw files with other kindle users securely — this utility does not remove the DRM from the .azw files:
If you wish to DRM-protect your own personal content for [...]

Looks like some buzz going around the net that the DRM used on Chronicles of Riddick: Assault on Dark Athena for the PC (by Atari) is hard-locked to 3 install counts and then the game will not install again. (Thread 1, Thread 2)
Early indications suggest that there isn’t even an support number to call to [...]

ZDNet’s Robin Harris takes a look at why Blu-ray is dead-on-arrival. Robin’s analysis, while starting with an inflammatory title, makes a lot of sense.
Robing starts off by citing the first few key elements that killed the format:

2-year battle with HD-DVD took the steam out of HD Disks in general, making consumers a bit hesitant about [...]

Slashdot reports that the BD+ copy protection scheme used in Blu-ray media has officially been cracked by the Doom9 community. Slysoft had previously cracked the BD+ copy protection scheme and ship functionality in their existing product line supporting Blu-ray disk operations (copy, burn, etc.)
Turns out one of the developers from the Slysoft group provided a [...]

Marlin Developer Community claims to have ready the first Open Source DRM solution that is ready for rollout.
The co-chairman of the Marlin Developer Community claims the open-source system is far less oppressive than those from rivals such as Apple and Microsoft, allowing users to share content between any Marlin-enabled device in the home rather than [...]

After growing increasingly unimpressed with the Apple iTunes/iPod “lock-in” model I started hunting around for alternative low-cost music services online. Fortunately one of the first and favorite services I ran into is the relatively new Amazon MP3 Downloads service.
Some of the big highlights of the Amazon MP3 service for me were:

Non-DRM’ed music
Low-cost music (about $0.99 [...]

How cool is this, the European publisher CD Projekt (guys behind The Witcher) has approached the owners of some of the best classic PC titles of the past and bought the rights to them in order to port them completely to Windows XP/Vista platform (even re-doing the installers) and then turn around and sell them [...]

In an effort to make sure that consumers don’t enjoy their content too much, the MPAA is trying to push the adoption of Selectable Output Control (SOC), which would allow the MPAA to remotely decide when a movie could or couldn’t be recorded by our DVR. The point of contention came when the FCC stepped [...]

Atari’s Nolan Bushnell give’s a blurb:
Speaking at yesterday’s Wedbush Morgan Securities annual Management Access Conference, the Atari founder suggested that game piracy will soon be a thing of the past thanks to a new chip.
“There is a stealth encryption chip called a TPM that is going on the motherboards of most of the computers that [...]