This time it was Razor 1911 who removed the Ubisoft DRM from the game. As you probably noticed Skidrow has successfully cracked Assassins Creed 2 last week. Hopefully this sends a message to Ubisoft and other publishers that their DRM is only good for one thing: Annoying the shit out of paying customers. Here is an excerpt from Razors nfo:

As far as previous ‘cracks’ of Ubisoft’s new DRM system are concerned:

Both of Skidr0w’s releases show us they haven’t had a look (probably even didn’t find) the actual protection code and everything hints on em using parts of publicly collected ‘challenge/response’ pairs. Luckily Assassin’s Creed II is probably the only target ever where this approach of ‘emulating’ the server by a static lookup will yield any measurable success (due to a basic design flaw in an otherwise pretty neat idea of software protection). In fact, we considered this approach as generally too unreliable and ‘unworthy’ of a scene crack, so we didn’t care about doing it. Instead we opted for going for the arguably most challenging implementation of Ubisoft’s new DRM first (emulating actual server-side game code). So here it is: The first Ubisoft DRM crack!
@RELOADED:
Congrats on your recent advances in automating your Solidshield VM cracks. We actually respect that. However, we wonder why you didn’t go all the way and recompiled the fixed decompiler output to optimized native x86 code as we did as early as with Perry Rhodan (followed by Anno 1404).
Although we think there’s not much merit to discussing technical details in .nfos (mostly because it’s impossible for anyone lacking the skills and sources to fact-check these statements) we feel the need to preempt all that made-up “they-ripped-it-from-some-unprotected-tuvaluan-multi12-binary” bullshit that’s sure to follow:
We invite anyone who is able to and interested enough in this to check the history of scene-released Solidshield VM cracks taking into account things like availability of possible alternate sources for the protected code fragments at the time of release, similarity to compiled code (i.e. ‘copy & paste cracks’ from differently protected or unprotected binaries), the rebuilt code’s resemblence of the original VM instructions regarding sequence of mnemonics etc.pp. We’re pretty confident (read ‘100% certain’) you’ll come to the conclusion that we were first with respect to rebuilding actual Solidshield VM code.
Nvm, ‘mild respect’!

P.S.
Finally, there’s a chance of the good ol’ times coming back (when protections had to be dealt with on a per title basis by skilled individuals) and an opportunity of telling the sharpies from the fakers again. Thanks Ubi! (Yup, we’re actually serious about this)

Please feel free to ignore the nerdy dickishness that is inherent in those Scene talks. It is a large family and at the end of the day they all love each other again. The important point is, that from now on the race is on between the various release groups and my guess is that future titles with the Ubisoft DRM will be cracked much faster by the Scene.

Related posts:

1. Ubisoft DRM cracked by
   scene release group Skrid Row