BItTorren Download

[steuben]

encrypting it and releasing the enycrpted file is a good way to build up the hype before the actual release. kind of like what valve is doing with steam and hafe-life 2.

with a lead time of about week, the encrytion doesn\'t need to be very strong, just reasonably obscure, and custom built. when the time comes for cb to finally go live, you just post the decryption program on the website.

[Seytra]

Originally posted by Levski
I hope it won\'t be the only way to download CB since I do not use such programs...

Bah, P2P and filesharing has been given a bad name for copyright violations, but there are other uses for it which, in fact, have been the real reasons it has been created, just like the internet itself (free sharing of information, unencumbered by physical locations or political disagreements and such).
The fact that it\'s being abused by many ppl. doesn\'t make the concept unethical or lessen it\'s ability to be used for what it was intended for.
I\'ll be happy to P2P PS if the protocol ensures that I\'ll be getting the \"real thing\", which AFAICS BitTorrent does (and MD5 helps with other P2P solutions).

[Androgos]

Haha! That would be really fun

\"CB is released, but you can\'t play it\"
Some fans might even create a new SETI@home or CRACKCB@home or something

[theRealGorbulas]

I doubt that a 300MB RAR file would be hard for someone who knows what they are doing to crack if they have 1GB of RAM or more. You don\'t need to open the whole archive to see if you have the password right.

[Xordan]

Originally posted by theRealGorbulas
I doubt that a 300MB RAR file would be hard for someone who knows what they are doing to crack if they have 1GB of RAM or more. You don\'t need to open the whole archive to see if you have the password right.

Bruteforcing takes ages, unless you have some supercomputer. I doubt that anyone here has a supercomputer.

[theRealGorbulas]

Even if it is cracked, you need a server before you can play.

[Seytra]

Originally posted by Xordan
Bruteforcing takes ages, unless you have some supercomputer. I doubt that anyone here has a supercomputer.

Does rar have decent encryption? And still, if a password is used, bruteforcing isn\'t that hard. If you use some 4096 bit PGP-like key for it, that\'s another matter...

Originally posted by theRealGorbulas
Even if it is cracked, you need a server before you can play.

Doesn\'t matter, one could use the CVS server and it would suffice for doing some screenies and familiarising with the GUI and char creation options.

[theRealGorbulas]

Actualy, does RAR have WinZip like encryption where you can see a list of the files that are in the archive? There could be a clever trick involving CVS...
I still don\'t understand why you would release it early and not let people use it.

[Seytra]

Originally posted by theRealGorbulas
Actualy, does RAR have WinZip like encryption where you can see a list of the files that are in the archive? There could be a clever trick involving CVS...

That\'d only work if the CVS did contain the actual art, which it will not until the official release date is there, AFAIK.

Originally posted by theRealGorbulas
I still don\'t understand why you would release it early and not let people use it.

Because if it weren\'t this way, millions (OK, hundreds ) of ppl. would be wanting to d/l it, but once they have downloaded it, they\'d quit The BT client so that they can have full resources for playing. Therefore there\'d be 23 seeders (the devs) but hundreds of leechers, which would mean that the rate of d/l is looooow.
By making the encrypted version available prior to the official release, the file could happily spread to the whole audience, and there\'d be plenty of seeders (since there\'s nothing else to do, and it creates interest), so that only a tiny fraction would be left leeching at the release date, which can be easily acommodated by the existing servers (SF, fragnetics).

[theRealGorbulas]

Originally posted by Seytra
That\'d only work if the CVS did contain the actual art, which it will not until the official release date is there, AFAIK.

But the CVS contains many files that will be in the official release.

[Seytra]

Indeed it does contain the full CB release even now, so you could indeed run a CB server and client already. However, this will not help, since the art and rulebases are not in the CVS yet, making the whole gaming experience rather boring.

[theRealGorbulas]

You missed the point. If the file in the RAR archive can be extracted, but still encrypted, you could compare them with the known contents of some files to try to extract a key.

[Seytra]

Indeed I did.
Anyway, that would indeed help. However, if the encryption is strong, it might still take more than the time till the official release (the proposed week might be short enough), but I don\'t know for sure.

[Cha0s]

I\'ve programmed Java encryption on numerous occasions (in fact I made have a program that might be useful for this kind of thing, though I plan to sell that...) and I can tell you that even 64 bit encryption is hard to crack all by itself (I\'ve looked at encrypted text... it\'s gibberish, not even any understandable letters). You\'d need some serious computer power to crack it, and once you get into 128 and 256 bit... it\'s ridiculous. Unless you\'re talking about owning your own super computer, you\'d be in for a long wait. The password on the other hand, is a different story. Then again, it\'d still take a while, especially if some sort of required delay were programmed in.

[theRealGorbulas]

Then again, it\'d still take a while, especially if some sort of required delay were programmed in.

It\'s open source.