Epic Explains Gears of War PC Shutdown Snafu

Why the fuck even bother with DRM that can be circumvented by such elaborate hacking feats like changing the system time?

Epic retardedness.

Seriously, who lumbers a game with shot DRM, then doesn't bother their asses to check the expiry dates on the digital signatures?

It should have been set to 01/01/2099 or something similar.

Idiots. And they still haven't fixed a simple problem like this yet?

Surely the real issue here is how they get the update out there?

Updates cant happen without GFWL checking for them. GFWL doesn't even run until the game that supports it does. It's a chicken and egg kerfuffle here.

The only way I can see for them to fix this assuming this is the issue, is for them to issue a GFWL patch that cause GFWL to start in some capacity on start up of Windows. This would require the user having a second game that uses GFWL, but not many people have them. Dawn of War 2 beta costs nothing of course and has GFWL, people can use that to update, restart, GFWL patches Gears of War making it work again, then in 12 months remove the need for GFWL to start up with Windows at all and go back to as it was.

The big point here is that now everyone has another GFWL product on their systems, Dawn of War 2, pushing the whole GFWL on to more unwilling systems. Conspiracy theories!

So how about the UT3 demo, which is just as unplayable without turning the clock back? Are they going to fix that too? Are they going to expire it in favor of a post-monster-patch demo?

For anyone worried that code signing is a DRM time bomb and their games will all stop working one day, don't panic.

This problem only occurred because someone fucked up and didn't timestamp the certificate. Timestamped certificates never expire.

More detail here, inc. a link to an explanation on one of the certificate authority's sites:
http://www.shacknews.com/laryn.x?id=19093791#itemanchor_19093791

Since this has to go through the GFW approval process and they just axed most of those people in the approval testing (or so i've read) this might be awhile. :\

Another feather in the illustrious cap of DRM.

EPIC failure.

Pants-on-head retarded.