Maybe in some ideal, utopian world that doesn’t obey the normal laws of society and human nature that might be possible, but this is 2010 and the days of staying completely under the radar are long gone.

One only has to look around the most prominent half dozen torrent invite communities. There is always someone spilling the beans on even the most supposedly low-profile of locations – often with the full knowledge of the ‘secret’ site’s staff. The facts of life on the web are simple – if you’re on there, have a URL and you invite people to your torrent site, word spreads as easily as the files being shared on it. Hollywood and IFPI can’t stop that free flow of information – and neither can site owners.

Although there are plenty of smaller communities with a few hundred members, a large proportion of the more visible private sites – despite what some of their users may think – could not survive without a level of publicity since members are kicked out all the time. These sites, one way or another, nurture their image and desirability using things such as the apparent exclusivity of their community, the size and quality of their swarms (which by necessity require a decent number of contributors) and their efficiency at getting the best material first.

In recent times, the ability to get the latest releases first after they have pre’d (been released onto the net) has become one of the major bragging rights site staff and members use to demonstrate that their community is ‘better’ than that of their competitors.

So, in common with members of the Warez Scene who also have their own races to see who can be numero uno, many torrent sites are involved in competition too. Their rivalry is tested in something called a TRACE (Torrent Race). Thanks to a website that has been running for a few months now, the results of these races can be discovered without using IRC channels, making them even more public than they used to be.

When one first visits pre.corrupt-net.org and enters a title into the search box, it functions as any other preDB (Pre-Database) might, displaying a list of releases and a time and date of when they first hit the Internet. Since the movie ‘Inception’ topped this week’s Top 10 Most Pirated Movies chart, we’ll use that as an example below.

With the release format (DVDR/XVID) on the left, the penultimate far right column reveals the time when the release first hit the Internet. However, by clicking the green ‘TRACE’ buttons next to them, the list of which private torrent sites got them first can be viewed.

Using Inception.NTSC.MULTi.DVDR-THENiGHTMARE as an example, we get the following results:

What we can see here is that a site with the acronym of TL offered this particular release 6 minutes and 57 seconds after it first appeared on the Internet and was quickly followed by sites AL, HS, TBy, IPT and TB.

Many staff and members use acronyms when referring to their sites (ahem) in public, often for speed but also so that outsiders don’t know what they are talking about. But as a security measure it’s absolutely hopeless since anyone Googling ‘tracker acronyms’ can easily find out the full name and URL of the site in question.

When site admins give highly public interviews, as was the case with the owner of ‘TL’, the whole thing is made even easier. Many private sites say they want obscurity and many of their members believe that, but obscure sites don’t have tens of thousands of members and they certainly don’t race.

Rewind back more than a decade and a half ago and finding the latest warez releases on the Internet was a fairly difficult task to say the least, and if you had a reliable and safe source you were not only lucky but in the minority. Back then even the notion of a private tracker where one could sign up (let’s admit it, fairly easily) and get almost anything would be almost unthinkable.

These days everything is mainstream and as much as even the most 1337 inhabitants of private trackers would like to have people believe, nothing is off limits to someone determined to get in since everyone knows these sites exist. Of course, that’s by design, because if people don’t know they exist there would be no way to replenish their userbases.

And what’s one of the best ways to attract quality users to boost those constantly diminishing userbases other than relying on existing users to invite them? By having the top releases, first – and proving it with consistent TRACE results.

Source: Which Torrent Sites Get Releases The Fastest (and why it’s not a secret)

The situation revolves around that oddest of characters, Direct2Drive (D2D) – an online games store, owned by IGN, selling games over the Internet as protected downloads. Game code is modified to prevent the standard retail DRM from inhibiting game play (as there is no actual disc to check for) with Trymedia activation utilized instead. More importantly, since the code around the DRM has been modified and changed to a different system, regular patches from the game developers can’t be used. Instead, patches must be reworked by D2D to accommodate these changes. These changes are not always quick, a point D2D does try and defuse in its FAQ.

Thus we come to Rainbow Six: Vegas2 (R6V2) which, since its release in March, has had three patches released for it. The third, 1.03 provides a lot of changes, including new play modes, so legitimate purchasers of the game were eager to try it. The problem is, those that bought it via D2D can’t use it. This is the problem inherent in DRM. Those that buy the product are the ones affected, not those the DRM is designed to defeat.

After lots of complaining and attempts to fix things themselves, one Ubisoft employee found a solution. A zip file was uploaded to the help/support site, named “R6Vegas2_fix.zip”.

If D2D users patched to 1.02, then replaced the EXE with this one, they could then update to the new patch. However, someone ran a hex edit and it appears the fix was not Ubisoft code but actually a ‘no-cd’ crack released by the Scene group RELOADED, as shown here.

Since then, the zip file containing the fix has been pulled from the Ubisoft support site, so we’re unable to verify. The game’s community is as baffled by this as everyone else. Since the claimed origin of the fix, 10 days ago, there has been no word on it officially from Ubisoft, beyond a ‘Community Manager’ who states

We’re looking into this further as this was not the UK Support team that posted this, however if it is an executable that does not need the disc I doubt it has come from an external source. There’d be very little point doing so when we already own the original unprotected executable.

As soon as we find out more about this we’ll let you know.
_________________
Ubi.Vigil
Community Manager
Ubisoft UK

Although it is not unknown for a Scene release to be used to ‘fix’ a retail product, it’s certainly rare to have that fact promoted. That the ‘no-cd’ patch works, might have some relation to how brutal the Scene is when it comes to the quality of their work, especially in games. Whilst this is a validation that the Scene isn’t as bad as the lobby groups would have you believe (they fixed the game, and did it for free) you can bet that Ubisoft won’t be smiling at E3, and that they, and Direct2Drive, will continue to use DRM to annoy and inconvenience paying customers.

Source: Ubisoft Steals ‘No-CD Crack’ to Fix Rainbox 6: Vegas 2