Nokia pledges to aggressively pursue N-Gage crack creators

src="http://www.cdfreaks.com/contentimages/newsimages/1138832072" align=right vspace=5
border=0>A Nokia spokesman told The Register the company had already begun
working with ISPs and law enforcement agencies to track down the
perpetrators.

He also said the company would attempt to shut down
web sites posting the crack software – a move reminiscent of the movie
industry’s pursuit a few years back of anyone hosting the DeCSS DVD
cracking code.

“We are treating this very seriously,” he said. “As
soon as we saw these claims posted on the Internet, we started to
investigate.”

How the copy protection mechanism was cracked isn’t
known. The Nokia spokesman said the company’s system was proprietary, but
presumably documentation and tools exist to allow game developers to
create the encrypted content files they will transfer to game cards.


The spokesman denied that the development of the crack might be an
‘inside job’, either within a game developer or even Nokia itself,
suggesting instead that the work had been done by an individual “with
enough time, skill and intent” to break through the copy protection by
brute force.

Skill is one thing, but as far as time goes, it has
taken only a month from the console’s release to the public for the code
to be cracked. The Nokia spokesman admitted that the company had “expected
this to happen” – which begs the question why, like the DVD Content
Scrambling System, the copy protection developers didn’t come up with
something stronger in the first place.

Nokia is committed to strengthening its copy
protection system going forward, the spokesman said. He also noted that
future N-Gage releases are more likely to take advantage of
platform-specific features that will make cracked games either impossible
to play on other Series 60 devices, or at least play with a very poor user
experience.