In case you didn't know cdfreaks.com homepage talks about Safe Disk 2.90...anybody care to comment on this:

SafeDisc 2.90 - Key features - release Feb 2003


New Degrading Signature - The new degrading signature has been designed to prevent Lite-On and Pioneer burners being able to make a working gold copy of a SafeDisc protected title. The new patterns also enhance protection against several other modern CD Writers. Lite-On has
achieved considerable sales success recently and this move decreases the chance of a "casual copy" being made with a users existing equipment.


Strengthened CD Signature patterns - The degrading signature patterns have been changed to stop copying programs such as Clone CD and Alcohol 120%.

ATIP spoofer detection - SafeDisc checks whether a CD-R drive has a gold CD in it and fails to run the application if this is the case. Several copying programs such as Clone CD and Alcohol run a program to fool the checks that SafeDisc does, we have countered these
programs.

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Guys what can I say? Just yesterday I was laughing at Macrovision. Now I'm wondering. Well good news is Feburary 19th I'll probably have a chance to beat this. I pre-ordered Splinter Cell (lives in USA) for PC. Most American Game Developers that know there game is gonna be popular put a CD protection on there game to try to stop piracy. Ubisoft made Splinter Cell and they have ownership of Redstorm gaming company. RedStorm put Safe Disk 2 on there three Ghost Recon games for PC. So most likely Safe Dis 2.90 for Splinter Cell if USA. This will be interesting. A degrading digital signature,new weak sectors. My best guess is Macrovision watches fourms like these to try to learn how we beat em. Then the they take apart CD burners to study how it works. I wouldn't be surprised if Macrovision has examined CD burning software code by code to see how it works to find loop holes and flaws in it. I also wouldn't be surprised Macrovision had a team that knows nothing about there new securities but tries to beat there securities like we try to beat it. HEY FutureProof I bet Lite-On will make a new burner to beat this all in the future and Elyborate Bytes will have a new CLONE CD to beat this all sometime in the future. We can still help are teammates though by understand how 2.90 works. What about this isn't all true at all there is no 2.90 and we continue to win; boy I would love to see that. Well guys just be prepared for anything and I expect Splinter Cell (USA) version for PC to might be a challenge


Alcohol detection - The Alcohol burning and virtual drive programs have been added to our detection routines along with other popular hacker tools.


New version of Security Libraries - New techniques to stop a game being "lifted" out of memory and then subsequently produce a "cracked" version with SafeDisc removed. Please Note the best protection is afforded by creating protected functions using the SafeDisc API.

Even if they disassembled burners, they could not find out what they exactly do. I didn't disassemble anything either to find the weak sectors that are more "effective" than current ones, and it is not necessary. Working out the theoretical part suffices.

If they found a way to reliably create weak sectors, made of irregular patterns, then it will take us not more than a finite amount of time to scan for them...and amplify if necessary. If they are continuing to work with regular ones => even better for us

IMHO, they have played enough with weak sectors, and have left us enough time to study them, and to react on them.

I read it and I want to know how they can get away with not allowing a CD protected with it to work when the user has Alcohol 120% or Clone CD loaded onto their computer? MS got into trouble with this when one version of their Internet Explorer came out and disabled Netscape. Unless I'm reading that article wrong, but I wasn't the only one to pickup on that.

Second, don't we, as purchasers of licenses for software, have rights to make unlimited backups for our own personal use? I am not saying to make copies for friends or to make copies to loan out to friends, I am talking strictly of making copies for, say, day to day use, as in a game, and another copy for a portable device that we can use the software in when we are away from home, such as using another copy of the game in a laptop while on vacation or on a work assignment away from home.

I am strictly looking at this as an enduser since I am not knowledgeable to program copying software and therefore cannot speak to the technical side of the issue, here.

No! You are allowed to, but you do not have the right to (meaning, you may do it if you achieve this goal, but if not => your bad luck...)

BTW, a german saying: nothing is eaten as hot as it is cooked...

no dude, you can only make one personal back up copy of software on cd.

I agree with you totally, MS got in the shit why dont these companies. who the hell do they think they are telling us what we can and cant use on our "personal" computers. If we buy their software, they should be happy that we bought it and not trying to tell us that if we want to use it we cant use someone else's program. If it were written on the box that you bought it in I WOULDN'T BUY IT even though i know i can copy it

so does all this mean an end to backing up our software? At least till someone updates their burning software. Will there be such a thing as a 3 sheep burner? I am sure there is someone out there with an old scsi plextor that is going to be giving sd2.9 a crack at it.
I hope these companies have a policy that if you buy a game and it gets scratched enought that you can't use it anymore that if you return it, they will give you a new copy.

LOL
Depending on which weak sectors they are going to use, there are 2 possibilities:
(a) no burner can make a perfect copy (=> without AWS)
(b) Toshiba burners can.

The idea that an Plextor should do it is...funny...

I *think* that a Yamaha F1 could do a running copy with AWS. But lets wait till the protection is really released!

Just thought I would throw that in there, remembering that there was a scramble for the scsi plextors when a new version of SD was introduced a while back and they were good to back them up.

its actually written in the eula