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Ubisoft's DRM Failure

[Mar 08, 2010, 11:12 am ET] - Share - Viewing Comments

The Ubisoft Forums have posts from customers who were unable to play games protected by Ubisoft's online DRM yesterday because the DRM servers were offline. Needless to say most of the posts express severe unhappiness at being unable to play and express anger over a DRM scheme that locks paying customers out of their own game. This Ubisoft tweet explains: "Apologies to anyone who couldn’t play ACII or SH5 yesterday. Servers were attacked which limited service from 2:30pm to 9pm Paris time," and this one follows up: "95% of players were not affected, but a small group of players attempting to open a game session did receive denial of service errors."

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69.

Re: Ubisoft's DRM Failure

Mar 8, 2010, 15:54

kanniballl

Wow, who saw that coming?

/sarcasm

I still don't get how they estimate 95% not affected if the DRM servers were offline.

My theories

1 - Only *some* DRM servers in a cluster were down, and load-balancing estimates that 5% of requests were dropped/denied. IE, 1 server out of 20 went down.

2 - All of the DRM servers were down, but they could still somehow count the number of distinct request IPs to the server. Divide number of IPs by number of sales and you have 5%; meaning only 5% of users tried accessing the DRM servers during the outtage.
That seems like a lot of work to do just to say "see, only 5% couldn't..."

3 - It had nothing to do with DRM servers being down, but something flakey that prevented people from connecting. Perhaps a setting, bad piece of hardware, etc. Most likely POOR SUPPORT/ADMINISTRATION

4- DDoS. Yes, it's possible some angry coders decided to seek revenge on Ubi for such an annoying piece of DRM.

This comment was edited on Mar 8, 2010, 15:59.




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Subject

Comment [quote="kanniballl"Mar 8, 2010, 15:54]Wow, who saw that coming? /sarcasm I still don't get how they estimate 95% not affected if the DRM servers were offline. My theories 1 - Only *some* DRM servers in a cluster were down, and load-balancing estimates that 5% of requests were dropped/denied. IE, 1 server out of 20 went down. 2 - All of the DRM servers were down, but they could still somehow count the number of distinct request IPs to the server. Divide number of IPs by number of sales and you have 5%; meaning only 5% of users tried accessing the DRM servers during the outtage. That seems like a lot of work to do just to say "see, only 5% couldn't..." 3 - It had nothing to do with DRM servers being down, but something flakey that prevented people from connecting. Perhaps a setting, bad piece of hardware, etc. Most likely POOR SUPPORT/ADMINISTRATION 4- DDoS. Yes, it's possible some angry coders decided to seek revenge on Ubi for such an annoying piece of DRM. [/quote]

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