Boycott Starforce

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dipdude

Forerunner
What is Starforce?
Starforce is a software copy protection tool installed by PC game publishers, which is designed to prevent the casual copying of retail CDROM applications. It installs as a hidden device driver, without the end-user's knowledge or consent.

Why are we boycotting it?
Starforce has received criticism for installing its own device driver onto computers. The Starforce drivers are often linked to system instability and computer crashes. If these problems occur, the end-user would be unware as to the cause of the problem, and would be helpless to solve the problem.

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.

Update:
It has been reported by many users that the slowdown caused by StarForce on some recent multiformat DVD writers can cause irreversible hardware failures on those drives (they aren't recognized anymore), as they aren't supposed to write at slow speeds.

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.

For the complete article, forum, removal tools etc goto : Boycott Starforce
 
Most Ubi games have and will use StarForce so, if you wanna play games like Splinter Cell, PoP and Brothers in Arms then you'll have to infect your pc with it. Removal tool didn't do it form me I can still see the registry entries and a few dlls :@
Damn Ubi, damn StarForce, BOYCOTT!
 
What ubisoft and other companies who use starforce don't understand is the fact that they are punishing legit buyers with such antics. Result: More pissed off buyers and more harm than what organised piracy would cause.
 
Actually if you stick to legit, SF3 poses little to no problems.
Smalltime developers like Simbin wouldn't survive long enough to release 3 ultra-high quality titles (as they did) if not for SF.

Main thing that pisses off people is the inability to remove it entirely, not the idea that it causes problems (which it doesn't, not anymore with v3).
And it's not spyware, many people including the guy who discovered the Sony root-kit issue confirmed that.
The Russian developer is offering a free trip to Russia plus a $1000 reward to anyone who can reproduce a SF issue that they can't fix.

It's just a pain in the ass to run pirated copies, so it's only doing what it was meant to do a little too well. Although 90% of SF protected games can be run already albeit with a lot of headache.

imo SF is a 1000 times less problematic than Steam.
 
a free trip to Russia
Click to expand...

Yeah, so that they can bump you off. The law and order situation there is as bad as Bihar, if not worse. Do you know that someone once threated Hans Reiser (the creator of ReiserFS) that he would have a 100 Russian scientists swear in Russian court that they made the filesystem and he (Reiser) had nothing to do with it?

In anycase, all this starforce type crap will be impossible in Vista, as they have changed the Windows architecture (in fact, even XP x64 will not allow it) to prevent a lot of that privilege escalation bull****
 
Starforce is a peice of shit.I could crack it without breaking a sweat without any programmes like Starforce nightmare or Star****.
 
KingKrool said:
In anycase, all this starforce type crap will be impossible in Vista, as they have changed the Windows architecture (in fact, even XP x64 will not allow it) to prevent a lot of that privilege escalation bull****
Click to expand...

Right ! Sf doesnt work at all under winxp x64 but then the games refuse to work as well.
 
Exactly. The games don't run on x64 thanks to starforce.

Well then, when vista is released, MS is sure as hell going to push it (unlike x64 which was just screwed by its creator). Do you think the game publishers will stick with starforce at the expense of not running on Vista? No way. Starforce will have to come up with some new ways of aggravating us.
 
Yeah. Good thing is only Ubisoft (among the biggies) and some smaller russian and European publishers are using it aggressively to protect their IP. I was planning to get SC:CT and GRAW of which i dropped the plans of getting SC CT since it is sf'ed. i'll wait and watch if graw has sf. Imho if devs want to so aggressively protect their IP or are hell bent on doing so they can keep it, i don't want it. Plus they are only screwing the PC users, the ps2 and xbox versions of SC:CT din't have starforce and was easily broken day one.
 
This just came in

StarForce threatens to sue for criticizing its products

A company that was criticized on Boing Boing has threatened to sue me, and claims to have sworn out a complaint against me with the FBI.

Yesterday, I posted about StarForce, a harmful technology used by game companies to restrict their customers' freedom. StarForce attempts to stop game customers from copying their property, but it has the side-effects of destabilizing and crashing the computers on which it is installed.

From: "Dennis Zhidkov" <denis.zhidkov@star-force.com>

Date: January 31, 2006 9:55:40 AM BST

To: "doctorow@craphound.com" <doctorow@craphound.com>

Subject: StarForce Response to Cory Doctorow

StarForce Inc. response to Mr. Cory Doctorow

Dear Sir, calling StarForce "Anti-copying malware" is a good enough cause to press charges and that is what our corporate lawyer is busy doing right now. I urge you to remove your post from http://www.boingboing.net/2006/01/30/anticopying_malware_.html because it is full of insults, lies, false accusations and rumors. Your article violates approximately 11 international laws. Our USlawyer will contact you shortly. I have also contacted the FBI , because what you are doing is harassment.

Sincerely,

Dennis Zhidkov

PR-manager

StarForce Inc.

www.star-force.com
Click to expand...

Read the whole thing here
 
This guy reminds me of J.T.Starforce craps up PCs,and one can't deny that.How could he press charges on someone for telling the truth?
 
The dogs are barking but the caravan keeps going.

There have been a lot of rumors in the Internet concerning DVD/CD writers’ malfunction after installation and star-up of StarForce protected applications. Some have even mentioned that should such “malfunctioning” drive be placed in any other PC without StarForce protection installed it will fail to work as well.

Others came up with the idea that the StarForce drivers installed on your system, could grant any virus or trojan total control of the OS.

In the past year our staff and many of our clients tried restlessly to reproduce the matter based on these rumors. We had serious reasons to believe that such problems were pure fiction. Using our hardware collection we assembled systems alike, but such problems never took place.

Just to make sure, StarForce decided to have a worldwide contest among users of StarForce protected applications. We had an open invitation to visit our office in order to display the issue and receive $10.000 US in case the person would have proven the problem to exist. January 31st was the last day to apply for the contest which lasted for almost two months. The contest page was visited 48.000 times but we received 0 applications. No one showed up.

Therefore, we now have proof that such issues with StarForce protected applications are pure fiction and all of these rumors are false and probably initiated by frustrated pirates.

We are open to constructive cooperation and we do our best to work with any challanges that really exist, but just as well we are going to stand up for our rights using every legal opportunity.

We certainly are not going to silence the voices of all the biased people on the internet, but we hope that a little bit of common sense goes a long way. Don’t believe rumors. Believe the facts.

If you do run into a problem – always at your service support@star-force.com

StarForce Technologies.

___________________________

Anti-Starforce :

Now these are replies countering the claim made by starforce :

StarForce invited anyone tn to show up at their office and present in person the security issues that have been reported. If you could do so, then you'd be awarded $10,000. Where is there office? MOSCOW!!! They surely did not expect anybody to show up. Now they're declaring victory over allegations presented on this and other sites..

Who are they trying to kid,

1. Its nigh on impossible to create such a hardware failure on demand. (If it wasn't then they would have never have been able to issue such a challenge as the actual physical failure would have been so numerous that nobody could have ignored it).

2. The (Code 41) error still occurs.

3. The DMA step down still occurs.

4. It is still grants Ring 0 access to Ring 3 level programs.

5. SF clashes with SCSI and SATA systems and makes the games unplayable

Now I wonder why they excluded issues 2, 3, 4 ,5 from their challenge ;)

We at NGH issued a counter challenge against Starforce Technologies, to come to our head quarters in England and prove that the issues we where raising where not factual.

We even offered to publish the findings on NGH and around the net should they be successful, given that we are one of the main players in the Boycott Starforce campaign, you would have thought they would have jumped at the chance.

Did they?

Well actually they refuse to even acknowledge that we even exist, although we are the ones that have been clearing up the problems in the wake of their so called protection software.

We posted the DMA fix, the Code 41 fix (Which SF did not know how to cure) and explained the other issues where in some rare circumstances hardware failure does occur.

With my many years experience as a Prototype/Test Engineer, I am fully aware of just how difficult such hardware failures would be to replicate as there are too many variables involved. It would take several hundred drives from a single manufacturer to even think about replicating it.
 
With the ease that pc games get pirated, something like starforce was long expected.
I for one never had any problems with it apart from difficulties in bypassing it (pretty much the reason it's there :p).

Yes it will blacklist all scsi drives real or virtual, but they actually expect to make money with their games. And 95% of the real scenario usage of said virtual drives is for running illegit images.
Playing devil's advocate here but as Mr. Bauer would say - the ends justify the means.
 
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