Ubisoft stealing from the (alleged) pirates. Haha!

I thought you should know.

There's a little irony when you read about how a big name computer game company takes code from an (alleged) hacker / pirate group and tries to pass it off for their own "patch."

(picture from www.arstechnica.com)

Shame on you Ubisoft.

The story goes like this: If you've played games on the PC, you'll be familiar with that annoying pop-up that tells you to insert your [original] CD-ROM into the drive to play. The reason companies make you go through this hassle is so they can verify that you indeed paid good money for their software.

Of course, the only people they are hassling are the people who've been faithfully paying for original copies as savvy pirates will easily download "cracks" (or replacement files) that allow them to circumvent this annoyance.

The crunch came when Ubisoft's put its game Rainbow Six Vegas 2 on sale through direct download and users who had downloaded and installed the game were told to "insert your CD", but handily had no CD in hand! For a quick fix, some Ubisoft employee posted up a "patch" which, when opened through a hex editor (screenshot above) was actually a copied "crack" from the group Reloaded.

The "patch" has since mysteriously disappeared from Ubisoft servers. Oh, the irony!