When game developer UBISoft first announced their new Digital Rights Management (DRM) system for future PC titles, it triggered the start of many debates (Is it right to ask gamers to be online even when playing single player portion of a game?) .Despite heavy criticism, UBI went on and implemented the new DRM on two of their titles; Silent Hunter 5 and Assassin's Creed 2. Much to the dismay of pirates, both these titles remain uncracked to date (that’s not counting the partially working cracks which have bugs). While pirates look desperately for a scene group to break this protection, a group calling themselves ‘IPAKI ASIAN Division’ claims to have already done so. What’s really interesting about this group is that they’ve been updating the public on their progress via microblogging service Twitter.
Since the 28th of March, Twitter account http://twitter.com/IPAKIGroup has been Tweeting messages about AC2 cracking progress. The first Tweet is directed at UBISoft itself, which claims that IPAKIGroup has broken the DRM and will be publishing a crack sin a few days. Full list of Tweets is quoted below:
@UBISOFT We have cracked Assassin's creed II successfully , We are releasing it to public after 3 days because we are sill testing it .
We are debugging assassin's creed II please wait , still many problems we face to get it 100% finished . Viva TokYO !
Missions fixed with our new crack ~ but game is stuck at 13 FPS ~ we are still fixing it
~~Settlers 7 ~~ crack will be available to public after 5 days .
~SH5 ~ too many bugs , has not been fixed yet .
~ACII~ crack will be published after 24 hours , Tokyo's time . everything is fixed and game works fine now .
~Settlers 7 ~ crack delayed , we are facing lots of bugs . We apologize for that .
~ACII~ crack will be published at 7 a.m Tokyo's time . we are putting our final touches on it , keep tuned
If what they say is true, we should see an AC 2 crack out in several hours. However, one should keep in mind that this could very well be a deliberate hoax (and it most likely is). Fake cracks and scams have always been a great way of malware distribution and this could be another such attempt, only more organized.
EDIT: Definitely looks like BS:
Oh my god dammit ! we are very sorry and that was one of our members after he had a fight with us .. we will give you the valid crack today.
Assassin's creed II crack isn't published by us yet . we apologize for that . wait some hours remaining . about 3 hours ago via web
Again we are very sorry for what had happened . we will publish it today , don't be pissed off . about 3 hours ago via web
Regardless of the fact that their DRM gets cracked or not, UBISoft has already won the battle when it comes to Assassin’s Creed 2. The new DRM (despite heavy criticism), has held pirates at bay ever since the game’s release. In a world where every game usually gets cracked before release, this is a huge achievement. However that’s not to say this DRM is unbreakable. Starforce remained uncracked for 422 days until RELOADED publicly released a set of reverse engineering tools that ripped the protection apart. No matter how advanced the protection is, someone, somewhere always finds a way.
