I don't, but feel free to point that post out.
Why must the thread be locked/deleted/have someone banned? Aside from a self-righteous troll every so often, it seems that the forum itself tends to take care of itself without their intervention.

Isn't all DRM malware?

It seems pretty obvious that there are only a few people who actually cared about the topic in question, the rest being trolls and those who read clickbait gaming media and believe every word without question.

But for the 2 or 3 others here, there has been an update from the developer...

The head of the company, Lefteris Kalamaras, made a post to the Flight Sim Lab forums, admitting again that the dodgy file was embedded in the installer. As in previous posts, he refers to the malware as “DRM” – digital rights management. He then goes into more depth about what they did and why.

“As soon as the user entered their customer information (order ID / serial number / email) it verified this against our server database. Genuine customers and any other legitimate serial numbers trigger a full proper installation and no tool was called / used to figure out any pirate info. The installer that temporarily extracted the tool would remove it as part of its normal cleanup operation upon proper installation completion.”

“…there were specific crackers who were successful in sidetracking our protection system by using offline serial number generators. We could not find how this would happen, but we happened upon a particular set of information (username / email / serial number) that would occur recurrently from specific IP addresses. We tried to add more tests in our subsequent installer releases, but the specific crackers were also upping their game in ensuring they sidetracked our installer. We even went so far as to figure out exactly who the cracker was (we have his name available upon request of any authorities), but unfortunately we could not be able to enter the registration-only web sites he was using to provide this information to other pirates.”

“We found through the IP addresses tracked that the particular cracker had used Chrome to contact our servers so we decided to capture his information directly – and ONLY his information (obviously, we understand now that people got very upset about this – we’re very sorry once again!) as we had a very good idea of what serial number the cracker used in his efforts.”

--------------

I really don't blame the guy that much. I'm sure it's their life's work. Pirates are freely distributing their ill-gotten gains for free and then hiding under VPNs and "privacy" while they take and distribute what is not theirs to take. Sorry. I guess disagreeing with piracy, means I will just continue to get downvoted by trolls, but I have honor unlike most of you.

You can cherry-pick their methods like unsecured http (of course GoG had unsecured pages for years - supposedly only the login tokens at risk). Or that they didn't use a bigger badder encryption method. But really, unless someone is already in the computer in question, or can somehow intercept the http traffic at the correct time, it's not like privacy was very at risk anyway. And it's just the information of pirates who took games for free, so I have little sympathy.

What I hope is that authorities actually arrest convict and imprision those that were identified as the crackers. Say 1,000 copies each at 99.99 owed to the developers, $100,000 sounds about right plus punitive damages.

This one ain't...


Steam DRM probably ain't too, but I'm not sure how invasive that is (considering that some games have still other, sometimes multiple DRM besides the Steam requirement leads me to believe its not that invasive).

Nasty shit like Starforce probably is; although I doubt any of them potentially reads out passwords like that flightsim DLC is described to be able to.

I was more generally speaking. Threads like this were people start to call each other names tend to spin out of control and if this goes to fast sometimes it's better to lock a thread. Some threads however also go back on track after a while so this should be the last step taken in my own opinion.

Good to hear that they posted an additional statement. Imo that is the first step in correcting possible misinformations the media might have posted.

I am wondering what this database wa about. Was it a database build from data legit customers which they provided freely by subitting this data by themselfes? If this would be the case I don't see any problem.

Meaning that after the installation the file is not even on the HDD at all which imo is different from the file that does not do anything but still remains on the HDD.

Well, I guess that's a little naive. Afaik crackers don't use real names - not even in their forums.

I am pretty sure most here are disagreeing with piracy - otherwise we would not buy here on GOG. What some people here did not find acceptable was the way the dev used to catch them.

While I do agree with the fact that piracy will lead to losses your math makes the same error as the movie industry makes. A pirated copy does NOT equal a sold copy. Some might but not every copy. Most people using pirated software would not buy them otherwise. I don't know (of course) how high the percentage here would be but it's not nearly 100% I am sure (gut feeling and experiences wit friends only of course). To make it clear: that does not mean at all that I think piracy is harmelss.

What makes you believe that the keylogger would know what information it should exclude if there happens to be more than one user's passwords stored on the suspected pirate's browser? (Not that being able to do that would absolve the developers from any legal ramifications no matter how justified they themselves feel about it...)

This is not about having sympathy for the pirates, the developers are likely breaking several laws, most of which have far more severe consequences to them than what the pirates would face if the so called evidence the developers are claiming to collect would even be accepted by the courts.

I'll just address this part, but I spoke of it above...
They have serial keys for their product. Any company who does that has a record of those keys. Presumably, all legitimate users would have order IDs and it appears e-mails associated with it.

This isn't too hard to understand. And I see the local GoG downrepping trolls are still at work. A bunch of morons who continue to downvote people for opinions they disagree with. What a bunch of losers!!!!!!!!!!v It makes all of you trolls! You are the people making GoG a horrible forum. Keep driving people away...

Like I said - nothing wrong if that in fact is the database they were talking about. Unfortunately the devs did not describe it in more detail though so that it will have to remain a guess.

This isn't the link I was thinking of but the lady I'm working for just got back from Home Depot and I have to stop wasting time.

Stopping piracy does not equate into regaining those lost sales.

I can sit here and give lots of studies but I really need to get going today so you get this one:

http://freakonomics.com/2012/01/12/how-much-do-music-and-movie-piracy-really-hurt-the-u-s-economy/

edit: Oh and just for reference, not sure where these pirated files are showing up but I don;t recall a single release group who relies on serial codes. All of them hack the files removing the need for the serial numbers in the first place.

Yup, people are definitely downvoting you because they don't agree with your opinion. They're not doing this because you're insulting them all the time...

ps. I know what I'm talkng about... I downvoted every post from you in this thread where you threw around your insults ;)

First off, courts don't see it that way. They see it as theft of property and assign fines as such.

As to crackers, you have that wrong, depending on the game they may have to send something back to the server. These dummy codes (often generated) are sent back in the background. In fact, a lot of GoG software does the same thing with generic serial numbers embedded for activation purposes.
And here you go continuing to insult me...you are no better jerk!!!! Quit trolling me!!!!! Quit harassing me. Go away troll!!!!! Piss off loser!!!! You aren't contributing to the discussion. You are actively harassing me... You are a total complete jerk. Go away!!!!
Here's the problem and it's the way almost every court works...

If I buy drugs from a dealer and he shorts me, I cannot sue them. If I go to court, the court will just dismiss the case because they will not let themselves be clogged up with cases involving criminals vs criminals. For someone to sue them, as it stands, that person would have to go to court, talk about illegally downloading that DLC from a pirate site to claim they got malware. Court throws it right out.

Frankly it seems more people are worried about this developer than they are worried about pirated software containing malware put there by pirates.

Furthermore, most laws have multiple facets. For example, murder means use of deadly force plus intent to use this deadly force. I'm sure most malware statues are similar conditions. One of which likely is gathering personal information for personal gain. In this case, that does not appear to be what the developer is doing. The case would fail on that clause alone.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WuDwUnhwPAk

again, (and notice there are no insults in this post, I am trying again to give some advice here) people are not down-voting your opinions, they are down-voting your behavior.

If you truly want to stop the downvoting there are two things you need to do:

1) Stop attacking people and calling them names. If you feel you have been attacked, the best course of action is to either ignore them completely, or try to deal with them seriously. If you ignore them, they will also disappear as there is no sanctification in being ignore - there is, however, in annoying you.

2) stop taking about rep. you have been here from many years now, and you must have noticed that the easiest way of getting down-repped is complaining about getting down-repped.

If you want to take anything our of this, then just behave like a well-balanced person and ignore those you think attack you and you will not be downrepped anymore. Just reply to those who you think are worth replying to.

(but I guess you will ignore this message of this post, and accuse me of attacking you again...)

Don't know if it's different in America but here in Germany -unbelievable but true- exactly this happened. The drug buyer wanted to file charges against the dealer. He was able to do so but they also filed charges against him.

(Of course it's only German but Google translate might help)
https://twitter.com/Polizei_Rostock/status/958259370550349825?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Ftwitter.com%2FPolizei_Rostock%2Fstatus%2F958259370550349825