Weekly News Roundup (June 11, 2017)
Welcome to another WNR. Gonna have to keep this one nice and short again, one because I’ve run out of time, and two, because there’s not much news anyway.
Denuvo is just not getting a break at the moment. If it’s wasn’t the record time it’s getting cracked, or the allegations of being a resource hog from last week, now, there are claims that the company has been using unlicensed software as part of its protection system.
According to a developer at VMProtect Software, Denuvo approached the company a few years ago to enquire about using the VMProtect software to prevent reverse engineering and cracking. VMProtect made it clear that as Denuvo is a commercial outfit, they could not use the software’s standard $500 license, and instead, would have to negotiate with VMProtect for a commercial license.
But it appears that Denuvo ignored VMProtect’s advice and proceeded to purchase the cheapest license possible to use. This was later discovered by VMProtect, and they promptly cancelled the license and demanded compensation from Denuvo. After Denuvo ignored their requests, VMProtect has since reached out to anti-virus company Sophos to mark Denuvo as malware, and has even contacted Steam’s Valve to get them to de-list any games that uses the protection. Court action may follow.
So basically, anti-piracy firm Denuvo has itself been accused of piracy. Oh the irony. Keep you eye on this space for more on this developing story.
Not sure if this next story also falls into the irony category, but imagine going to the trouble of stealing unreleased episodes of a new TV show, demand a ransom, fail to get the ransom and then putting the episodes online, only to find that nobody downloads the damn thing. The Netflix hacker TheDarkOverlord may have found some “success” with the unreleased episodes of Netflix’s ‘Orange is the New Black’ (success as in people actually bothered to download it, as opposed to the hackers getting paid), but it appears ABC’s new Steve Harvey TV show ‘FUNDERDOME’ isn’t getting a lot of attention.
At the time of writing, there were only 5 leechers connecting to 15 seeders on The Pirate Bay. That’s just a little bit more popular than the download for “CBT Nuggets – CompTIA Network+ N10-005 Video Training”, a training video about configuring basic networking.
If anything, this whole thing probably helped ABC to promote their new show, which otherwise would have gotten practically no press coverage.
TheDarkOverlord has promised more leaks, and this time it might be a Hollywood film. With our luck, it will probably be ‘Saw 8’ and it will reach a maximum of 25 leechers instead of just 5.
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So, that’s it. Told you it was nice a short. See you next week!