With all the negativity piled on Ubisoft over its latest DRM scheme, which requires a constant Internet connection to play its PC games, it’s no surprise that hackers took the challenge and won. I’m not going to link to the crack itself, because we’re not that kind of site, but you can check out the ReadMe file for Assassin’s Creed II from SkidRow, the hacker group that put this together. From the text (typos and all):

Thank you Ubisoft, this was quiete a challenge for us, but nothing stops the leading force from doing what we do. Next time focus on the game and not on the DRM. It was probably horrible for all legit users. We just make their lifes easier.

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The Entertainment Consumers Association bills itself as an advocacy group for gamers, so in light of Ubisoft’s new anti-piracy scheme that requires a constant Internet connection to play its PC games, I was curious whether the ECA was going to bat against the publisher. Beau Hunter, the ECA’s digital rights consultant, answered my questions by e-mail. You can read the whole thing if you like, but here’s what I took away from Hunter’s responses.

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If you’re planning to pick up Command on Conquer 4: Tiberian Twilight, released yesterday for the PC, keep in mind that the game, published by Electronic Arts, has the same constant Internet connection requirement as Ubisoft’s headline-making DRM. This was first reported in July 2009, but given the outrage over Ubisoft’s adoption of similar anti-piracy methods for Assassin’s Creed 2, Settlers 7 and other games going forward, a public service announcement seems prudent.

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It seems fitting to post this piracy flowchart (via PixelatedGeek), in light of Ubisoft’s latest attempt to crack down on illegal downloads of its PC games. To recap, Assassin’s Creed 2 and Settlers VII will be Ubisoft’s first crack at a new kind of DRM, requiring constant online authentication in order to play, even for single-player games. If you’re playing Assassin’s Creed 2 and your Internet connection drops for any reason, you get booted out of the game and all progress since the last save point is lost. Settlers VII lets you pick up where you left off, but it won’t let you play without an Internet connection.

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It’s no shock that if you modify your Xbox 360 console for any purpose, Microsoft reserves the right to ban you from Xbox Live, but one report suggests that Microsoft has kicked 600,000 people so far, mostly for playing pirated games. Now, the source of this number is sketchy at best. Some reports on this story are sourcing the BBC, which attributes the 600,000 figure to “online reports.” The original story actually comes from a cosplay blog, Pinoy Cosplay, whose information comes from “a friend who works for a call center that handles an Xbox 360 account.” The source’s figures are for the U.S. and Canada alone, and the source says Microsoft is pushing to ban 1 million consoles from Xbox Live by year-end (why a customer service call center would have this information is beyond me).

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A video showing Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2′s opening scene has been leaked online, and continues to be available despite Activision’s efforts to take it down. If you’re deathly afraid of spoilers, don’t click the link above, navigate to the video that says “modern warfare 2 leaked gameplay w/ sound” and click play. Otherwise, we’re sorry to have spilled the beans on civilians getting shot, but Activision apparently plans to spoil the surprise anyway by warning players of the scene’s graphic nature and allowing them to skip it. The publisher told VG247 that the scenes are meant to convey the ruthlessness of a rogue Russian villain, but that the skip prompt can’t be disabled. At last, a video game that has the purity of your thoughts in mind. [via GameDat and VG247]

Sometimes, when the arm of the law isn’t long enough to catch software pirates, the arm of the programmer works just fine. So it goes with Batman: Arkham Asylum, which contains an intentional bug that punishes people who illegally download the PC version of the game. A commenter on the Eidos forums, Cheshirec_the_cat, learned the hard way when he or she asked how to effectively use Batman’s glider, which kept malfunctioning. The response from forum administrator Keir: “The problem you have encountered is a hook in the copy protection, to catch out people who try and download cracked versions of the game for free,” Keir wrote. “It’s not a bug in the game’s code, it’s a bug in your moral code.” Ouch. [Afterdawn via Joystiq]