By now, you've probably heard of Ubisoft's terrible digital rights management software. Unless you've been living under a rock, or just don't do PC gaming. So here's a recap:

Ubisoft added new DRM to their new PC games starting early this year. You have to have an Internet connection in order to play your game. Even if it's a single-player game. Your game has to be talking with Ubisoft's servers constantly. If you somehow lose your connection, it used to be that you were booted out of your game entirely without saving. Now (in Assassin's Creed 2, at least), it saves before booting you.

That being said, it seems Ubisoft's servers have had severe downtime, meaning the people with legal copies of their games can't actually play them. The games have been cracked in some way shape or form since the day they've come out, so the DRM is quite worthless. This has often been accomplished by emulating the DRM servers on a user's PC, artificially feeding the DRM beast. While this worked for a lot of people, the emulator wouldn't work with some localized versions.

Now it seems the DRM has finally been completely circumvented. Released by a group named Skid Row (stylized as SKIDROW at times), this cracked version of Assassin's Creed II completely strips out the DRM from the game. In addition, the group claims their cracked files have been protected from reverse engineering in order to keep other release groups from passing off Skid Row's work as their own and to keep Ubisoft from examining their work.

In the .nfo file for the cracked release, Skid Row tells Ubisoft, "Next time, focus on the game and not on the DRM. It was probably horrible for al legit users. We just make their lifes easier."

I'm still amazed PC games are still being crippled to death with these archaic schemes to punish the people that honestly buy the products. I guess in more than a decade, it still hasn't gotten through to the companies' heads that no matter how good, how full-proof your DRM engineering is, there are better engineers disabling the DRM and fixing your mistakes.

It's things like Ubisoft's always-on DRM that make me not want to buy PC games anymore.