A movement has begun in the wake of the Sony DRM Rootkit fiasco to
draw attention to some PC Copyprotection software that behaves in a
similar fashion, installing itself unannounced with your game and then
sitting on your system as a low level driver which interfaces directly
with your harddisks, DVD, and CD/CD-RW drives. The driver can
therefore conflict with current and future system drivers. The
Publishers of these games also do not support the Copy Protection, and
one would need to wait for the CopyProtection maker to fix an issue
with their drivers.
The Publisher and the copy protection maker acknowledges that problems
can be caused with their software because in their EULA they
specifically seek to absolve themselves of any responsibility for
issues caused with other software such as CD-Copying or DVD Authoring
software (Nero, Roxio,Alcohol 120 etc.) as well as state that the
software has been known to conflict with 'certain' DVD/CD drives.
While piracy is a problem, installing rootkits and system level
drivers is not the solution. For PC Games there are several other copy
protection methods out there which do not have the same problems as
StarForce. So why do Publishers use it? Because it does slow down the
copying of games and because it is cheap compared to the other types
of protection. So they do the math and think that the percentage of
actual users that would have problems that they would attribute to
their games is low, and the percentage of that number that would have
the inclination and the money to take them to court over it to be even
lower.
So the thinking is f*** the consumer,lets go make some money.
"Anti-copying malware installs itself with dozens of games
A group of gamers has started a site to spread a pledge to boycott
video-games that come with a dangerous anti-copying mechanism.
Starforce is an anti-copying program that some games covertly install
when you install the game. The software causes system instability and
crashes. The company that makes Starforce refuses to address the
damage their software causes; instead, they blame the people on whom
their malware has been forced: "According to our research those of
users [sic] that do run into compatibility problems are
beginner-level-hackers that try to go around our protection system."
The list of games infected with Starforce is long and depressing --
there are dozens of these. If you're a gamer, you owe it to yourself
to have a look and check to see if Starforce might have damaged your
PC. What's more, you should join the boycott of any game that comes
with this malicious software onboard.
For example, here's one of the common problems brought by
Starforce: under Windows XP, if packets are lost during the reading or
writing of a disk, XP interprets this as an error and steps the IDE
speed down. Eventually it will revert to 16bit compatibility mode
rendering a CD/DVD writer virtually unusable. In some circumstances
certain drives cannot cope with this mode and it results in physical
hardware failure (Most commonly in multiformat CD/DVD writer drives).
A sure sign of this step down occurring is that the burn speeds will
get slower and slower (no matter what speed you select to burn at).
Starforce, on a regular basis, triggers this silent step down. Until
it reaches the latter stages most people do not even realise it is
happening.
Moreover, the Starforce drivers, installed on your system, grant
ring 0 (system level) privileges to any code under the ring 3 (user
level) privileges. Thus, any virus or trojan can get OS privileges and
totally control your system. Since Windows 2000, the Windows line
security and stability got enhanced by separating those privileges,
but with the Starforce drivers, the old system holes and instabilities
are back and any program (or virus) can reach the core of your system
by using the Starforce drivers as a backdoor. "
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