That's even the saddest thing behind it. Everywhere are boards,blogs and pages who warn users of the DRM yet people still buy it being unaware.
It will be worse with the new Prince of Persia game (TFS). Why? Because of the upcomming Disney movie which is the reason this piece of junk was even made.
It will attract alot more customers, probably around 12 and less, casual gamers who hype for the move and then will buy it on retail stores and you'll probably guess what will happen next.

Maybe, but then again that's what how I understood AC2's DRM was working, but maybe I am wrong...

As far as I know that is correct, but what this person is talking about sounds more like parts of the game would be actually running on Ubisoft's servers. Sort of like OnLive, but maybe using parts of the game that wouldn't be affected by the lag.

Nah all thats sent is a short preset code at certain points it's more a confirmation that your online and talking to the server than "here have the targets data" hence why they could just copy the responses to the sent code and stick them in the server emulator.

Wow. We are now freaking out over anonymous postings that are probably trolls :p
Is this true? Maybe, maybe not. Only time will tell.
Reasons for: It would be a lot harder to crack, and Skidrow just got to the point where they can reliably crack these as 0-Days
Reasons against: A lot more bandwidth will be used. If the gameplay itself requires the constant connection, that is going to need a more meaningful connection. Rather than just sending the equivalent of a nohup every so often (and then periodically downloading a new level), this would need to regularly send data to get responses back as to how things should occur. I would like to think Ubi are going to hold off on that for a while, if only because people still remember the overloaded servers.

Stop seeing the Ubilauncher as a copy protection. It is naive to belive that all those software pirates will start to buy 2 or 3 games, 3 or 4 albums and 1 movie a month if they just bring up a protection that works for a month or less until it is cracked... Ubisoft may be a lot, but they are not naive. They throw around with millions of dollars. There is no room for being naive ;)
If it was for copy protection, the Ubilauncher would hardly refinance itself. There is no chance that those few pirates who really are willing to buy a game, will cover the costs for running those servers over years. Particularly with regard to all those customers (missing dollars, pounds, euros, bottlecaps...) that stopped buying Ubisoft titles because of this overdone DRM.
The Ubilauncher simply is a RESALE protection. The games are associated to your account and you are not alowed to disassociate them or to sell your account. They are not attacking pirates, they are attacking resaling customers. And if they keep this going for a while and some other publishers try similar systems (blizz with battle.net, ea with the system that's built in c&c), customers will get used to it, like to SecuRom or CD-Keys. I bet the next generation of consoles will allow a similar system to associate a game to a publisher account. Sony and Microsoft won't refuse because they will see the chance to get some more money as well as the publishers.
Who are those software pirates? ebay, amazon and garage sales are the evils to defeat -.-
edit: sorry for my english xP

No, AC2 works by having the server send game data that is not included on the disc. The entire code for the game is on the disc, but not all of the data. Thus, in order to crack the game successfully, the cracker "only" needs to intercept the data sent by the server, and integrate it locally into the game.
The new system mentioned takes it a step further. Here, certain parts of the game code itself only exists and runs on the server. This means that you can't simply save the data sent by the server, you have to reverse engineer code that you don't even have a compiled version of. Essentially, you have to code the missing parts of the game engine yourself, with no certain way of knowing whether the functionality you have implemented is actually the same as the original. Such a system would not be impossible to crack, but it would be much more difficult to do than with the current one. Such a system would also be much more vulnerable than the current one. It would require much better and more advanced infrastructure, something Ubisoft hasn't exactly demonstrated lately that they can handle successfully.

How do you know that? :(
I was looking forward to playing AC2 and Splinter Cell: Conviction but I have my principles and I'm going to stick with them 'till the end. So, no buy from me as long as they drop their turds on us customers (I can't think of anything else to call that, sorry).
The saddest thing about it is that a lot of people will accept all the crap that's shoved into them by Ubi, just to be cool and own the latest games.
My advice is if you're going to boycott Ubi's DRM, then do it right because words alone are meaningless! Pirating the crap out of it is doing it WRONG by the way.
Ouuhh... glad I got that out of my system. :|

Thanks for consoling me... still Chaos Theory was riddled with the Starforce disease but was totally awesome (original aswell!)
Ubi needs its higher-ups purged... or at least brainwashed.

Yeah, I hope Chaos Theory gets over here a GOG clean and DRM free. June seems to be the next Ubisoft month here, huh?

Sadly enough this is true.
While there might be a gain in thwarting piracy, at least temporarily, there is an even greater gain in killing the second-hand market.
When it comes to keeping vital game code server-side I believe that would be a ... touchy legal area to say the least. As I recall there are commerce laws in place that are meant to hinder just that sort of thing, as it essentially means you do not get the full product at the full price you're paying for it. Even if you put that aside, it's a very clear underhanded tactic by Ubisoft which has to rattle some chains somewhere.
Or rather, would have rattled some chains if it were any other medium than video games. Because it's video games, nobody gives a fuck about the consumer. Were it movies, music, or fucking oranges they'd never get away with it, at least not in the EU and Scandinavia.

I have to wonder if this is really the case. Despite all the noise some companies have made about game resales, just how big is the second-hand market for PC games? I'm well aware that there's a fairly large second-hand market for console games (which companies like Gamestop are really capitalizing on), but I haven't really noticed the second-hand PC games market being particularly large (although maybe I just haven't been looking in the right places, in which case someone please correct me). Thus I can't really see an attack on second-hand sales being a rational reason for some of the PC DRM schemes being used.

Yeah I saw videos of gameplay too. That is how I know their latest games suck, youtube. Chaos Theory was best game for SC, I still play Spy vs Mercs sometimes and love it.

I also don't see this. I never buy a used PC game. Never. The reason is CD keys and online play. I think this is another false reason DRM is being shoved onto us, it's like the companies counting each pirated copy a lost sale or even 2 lost sales at times. It doesn't make sense, they just want to lock the games down.