Source
Idiots.
Companies that take an iron fist approach to fighting software piracy are generally best served by not lifting a pirate group's code themselves to fix their own product.
Ubisoft, the French video game developer and publisher, was recently caught with its pants down, releasing a pirated hack as an official fix.
Ubisoft sells the PC version of its game Rainbow Six: Vegas 2 (RSV2) in a boxed copy format and through the online store, Direct2Drive.
When the publisher released a new patch for the RSV2 this month which added play modes and other goodies, customers were eager to update. Unfortunately the patch also added a check to confirm that a CD was in the PC before the game could play. This was obviously a problem for customers who downloaded the game through Direct2Drive and lacked physical media to validate.
Naturally, this theft prevention tool was meanwhile no problem for software pirates. A hacked executable removing the CD-check was soon readily available — although Ubisoft understandably forbade and punished discussion of the crack on its website forums when Direct2Drive customers came for help and advice.
Complaints about the physical media snafu kept coming, so a zip file was eventually uploaded by an Ubisoft employee to the help/support site, named "R6Vegas2_fix.zip."
But then Fileforums.com user Twingo discovered Ubisoft's little secret. The fix was, in fact, a cracked version of the .exe file modified by the pirate group 'Reloaded.'
Users on Ubisoft's official forums have provided proof, the "official" fix was Reloaded's crack by running the executable through a hex editor.
Idiots.
