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157 Comments
- gorkish, on 10/12/2007, -8/+105Starforce serves human meat product in their corporate cafeteria. It's mainly ground up babies, I hear.
- uptown, on 10/12/2007, -0/+74Here's the actual list:
http://www.glop.org/starforce/list.php - xraycat, on 10/12/2007, -13/+64It's true.
In Russia the software pirates you... - ahhell, on 10/12/2007, -1/+48That is just going to backfire and force even more people to pirate software. I still don't get how these companies can get away with this *****.
- DisposableRob, on 10/12/2007, -2/+47This reminds me of the Master Control Program from Tron. Started out as a chess program and turned into the world dominating MCP.
- modian, on 10/12/2007, -2/+39END OF LINE.
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -4/+40Needless to say, Starforce's lawyers must have already threatened r-force with a lawsuit. They're always quick to respond to facts that damage their scam operation.
- rideagain, on 10/12/2007, -5/+35Now may be an appropriate time to remind ourselves that there is a list of starforce games online, so we can avoid them.
http://www.glop.org/starforce/ - EricAnderton, on 10/12/2007, -4/+33A worm with ring0 access? That's especially nasty.
Has anyone else coined the term "Ringworm" for this kind of virus/trojan yet? - gorkish, on 10/12/2007, -3/+30Yes they did do this. On their forums someone was suggesting that one reason GalCivII was selling so is that it was not copy protected whereupon a Starforce representative proceeded to link to a website distributing a .torrent of the game. Immediately after making the offending post, said Starforce employee proceeded to become intimate with his beloved pet goat, Trixie, to whom he is legally married.
- cr3ative, on 10/12/2007, -3/+30Hiya, Mr. Starforce Owner.
:) - DIGGBLOWS, on 10/12/2007, -4/+25Maybe he does maybe he doesnt BUT everything he has said in the past about SF has been confirmed by what most people would call experts, I have every confidence that he is correct about this too, he is VERY qualified in the computing world and has probably about the same amount of experiance as anyone else out there.
Starforce on the other hand have lied and lied and lied about what their products do, and at every turn they have been proven to be liars.
Who do YOU honestly believe? - inactive, on 10/12/2007, -1/+19starforce = _THE_ *MOST* ***** up copy protection on the planet. it actually ***** up legit buyer's pcs.
r-force = seems to be a website ;) - acceptab1euname, on 10/12/2007, -1/+19yeah, alright dude. why don't you go back to the starforce forums where you can lock threads, fling insults, and pretend like you actually matter. StarForce is going to go under eventually, and I'll be laughing when they do. That's what you get for ***** on your users.
- MugatuOT, on 10/12/2007, -2/+17Well I tried to uninstall it last night (after their removal tool didn't work) and while trying to clean out my registry my computer did a reboot - just like the last digg article said it would. Needless to say I'm not a StarForce fan either and I don't put much faith into these verifications by independent sources.
- ThePikey, on 10/12/2007, -1/+16They put it in Garfield?!? Those bastards!
- BloodyPath, on 10/12/2007, -1/+16It seems like an inherant part of DRM schemes to be overreaching. When starforce hit, up until the new daemon tools release came out, it was a royal pain in the ass to get around. They fairly well succeeded in keeping games like Splinter Cell 3 from being massively pirated because, while anyone could grab the torrent, only the geeks would actually start disabling cables to play it.
So it was golden, or at least golden enough, and all the crap like the "fly yourself to moscow and prove it can destroy a hard drive" scam wasn't enough to drive it out of use. Legitimate users were having problems, but that was mostly considered p2p propoganda. But, just like the rootkit story, it seems like every time you turn around there's another load of crap coming out of Starforce or it's developers..
It took a hell of a lot for the rootkit to be addressed by Sony.. What's going to be the breaking point for Ubisoft to pay attention? - cr3ative, on 10/12/2007, -1/+14I was waiting to hear LOL from Starforce's representative there. He couldn't even be bothered to spell-check!
- Skywise, on 10/12/2007, -1/+13I'm ready to believe him, but I'd like to see some hard data. Maybe even a simple program one can run to determine what PCs have been "infected".
- DIGGBLOWS, on 10/12/2007, -9/+21From the wiki entry you posted.
"A worm, however, can spread itself to other computers without needing to be transferred as part of a host."
Please read your own links before spouting rubbish please. - DIGGBLOWS, on 10/12/2007, -4/+15What he found was that because other computers on his network were setup to have full read/write access, starforce has had no "walls" stopping itself move to another machine, whats incredible is that the machines in question were NOT PC's yet somehow SF managed to bruteforce its way onto the systems, this has VERY serious implications on security, in theory a firewall wont pick up what starforce is doing because it operates at low level and can bypass whatever it wants.
- DIGGBLOWS, on 10/12/2007, -6/+17Oddly R-force will more than likely be doing the legal action as far as I can see, the finder of this new info is the same person who has revealed all the other things recently which have been backed up by magazines and other reputable sources, he posted the information on their forum and they moved it to a read only area where he could not reply or edit his posts, tried to ridcule it the best they could with their awful English and when asked to remove it they flat denied and delete all posts about it. the funny thing is the holder of the copyright for his post isnt SF but 13th hour so ONCE AGAIN SF are breaking copyright laws.
- Twinsonia, on 10/12/2007, -0/+10When I installed Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory, my mouse cursor would constantly go static and become non-responsive. It wasn't until I completely reformatted my drive that the problem stopped. Not even removing StarForce from device manager and registry fixed the problem.
And that is why I will never again purchase a StarForce game. - cogen, on 10/12/2007, -0/+10This is the kind of information that needs to get out, similar to the blow-up over Sony's copy protection.
I honestly didn't think the Sony news would make waves when it broke, but there was a wonderfully large backlash against it. Proof that, despite the supposed ignorance of the average use, people still do *not* like their machines doing things without their permission; especially when it comes from a source generally regarded as legitimate. - deBeuk, on 10/12/2007, -0/+10"This means Starforce has FULL access to the internet as it is a ring0 driver, so it could potentially be sending information back to their servers and wont show up on firewalls."
This illustrates why it's actually really dumb to (only) run a firewall on your workstation. Use a dedicated box for that if you really care about security. - kRYPT, on 10/12/2007, -1/+10If you RTFA, you'd find it spreads over the network because it's buggy. The author does not believe this behavior was intentional, and he makes this clear in his posts.
When your primary drive is SCSI/SATA, it gets confused as to which drive it should install itself on (the driver is some kind of an IDE emulator), so if you have any network drives mounted read/write (which many of us do), it will attempt to install itself on what it believes to be your primary hard drive, but which is really a network share. - yoblin, on 10/12/2007, -4/+12I agree that this deserves some more information, seems it's getting a little overblown.
However, if it does ACTIVELY block a reinstall, then that's a serious thing... - Saintlink, on 10/12/2007, -0/+8DRM will never work without screwing the consumer. Even if you buy legit games you should boycott products with such DRM as Starforce....
...and write Ubisoft an email! - ronintetsuro, on 10/12/2007, -2/+9Jesus. I've had a lot of those games installed. Hell, TrackMasters Nations is installed right now... Silent Scope was on my laptop, and plenty fun... jesus.
Reformats all around I guess. - CoolWind, on 10/12/2007, -0/+7"This Starforce driver runs regardless of whether the game runs; keeping an eye out for any suspicious activity such as attempting to copy a protected disc. If something suspicious is detected, it forces the PC to make an immediate reboot, regardless of any other applications running and whether or not the user has any unsaved work.
To make matters worse, this copy protection interferes with DPM readings from software that is designed to allow the playback of copied game discs, which means that any game backups that rely on this Data Protection Manager will no longer play with the Starforce protection driver in place. Finally, as the Starforce protection has been found to interfere with certain device drivers, some drivers will run in legacy PIO mode instead of DMA, which not only slows down the PC by hogging CPU resources, but also slows down the data transfer to the affected hardware. " - from http://www.cdfreaks.com/news/13212 - DoubtfulSalmon, on 10/12/2007, -5/+12Yeah, 13thHouR comes across as a right twit in his first 'warning' post, and just keeps digging himself into a deeper hole of non-credibility with each subsequent post: "OK, I warned you, I told you there'd be repercussions. I warned you and you ignored my warning, so now.... I'm gonna.... warn you again. Kthxs".
And WTF is an "AdDip.Prof.Con.Phys"... I'm thinking that's an Associate Diploma - the guy went to University for six months, and he puts it on his title! That will get his opponents quaking^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hlaughing in their boots! If you google for "AdDip.Prof.Con.Phys", the ONLY place google finds it is in posts from this kid. In some of those posts he's William Taggart the second, and in other posts, he's William Taggart the third. The kid is making this lot up as he goes along! - Nowheredan, on 10/12/2007, -9/+16This is getting kind of silly. I'm no fan of StarForce, but I'll believe this when it's verified by other independant sources and no sooner.
- cogen, on 10/12/2007, -1/+8There are some links further up about the "anti star force" movement. Not that they're exactly a disinterested party, but it's someplace to go.
Star Force, simply stated, is copy protection software that some feel is over-zealous. From what I've heard, I tend to agree. - JeffH, on 10/12/2007, -1/+8Almost all the games that use StarForce suck anyways. Looks like the smart developers who make good games don't hinder thier games with viruses like StarForce.
- clevershark, on 10/12/2007, -0/+7Codemasters has forever lost my business because they use that Starforce ***** (in CMR 2005, TOCA, etc.). I've already written to them to inform them of this. It's a shame because they have some really good titles out. My email probably won't do anything, but they won't see another bloody cent from me. I think of Codemasters in the same way one thinks of a wild hooker -- sure you get a good time, but you walk away infected.
- baojiacai, on 10/12/2007, -0/+7Starforce is in the King Kong game as well. I was unable to play DVD’s after I installed I game. PowerDVD would hang and the system would eventually reboot. The game sucked so I returned it. Starforce also causes my optical drives to spin at full speed all the time. This puts way more wear on drives than normal use.
- venom8599, on 10/12/2007, -0/+7In Russia, jokes regurgitate you.
- DIGGBLOWS, on 10/12/2007, -1/+7it installs without the users knowledge, runs at a higher level than you or your os (opening up potential backdoors) and has been proven to damage optical drives, theres LOADS more reasons why you probably should avoid it at least till the bugs are fixed.
- ronintetsuro, on 10/12/2007, -1/+7I think a lot of us who hate reformatting for *any* reason would like a utility like that.
- danmanx, on 10/12/2007, -0/+6KILL STARFORCE NOW.
- fgsfds, on 10/12/2007, -0/+6"While I am no fan of starforce (and will boycott any game using it), I'm a bit inclined to believe starforce this time.
1. Install starforce in the boot sector.. What exactly will this accomplish? Will it have some embeded filesystem drivers, so on boot it can detect if you have ntfs or fat32, and magically reinstall any dll's that have been tampered with? Will it try to create some kind of TSR which will be destroyed as soon as the windows kernel loads? I don't get it."
It's a Ring-0 driver. Specifically, it's an *IDE* driver. That means that it makes itself load first, and then it loads the rest of the system. Saying it's in the boot sector is redundant; Of *course* it's in the boot sector, because it needs to take the place of the drivers it replaced. IDE drivers are required for Windows to access IDE devices (ie: Hard drives), and so they must be loaded before anything else so that the system knows *how* to load anything else.
"2. Starforce copying itself to random network drives.. Explain to me how you'll register your dll with the system by just dropping your dll's in any network share you find."
It doesn't, but 13thhour never said it was registering itself anyway. Read it as it's written, not as you want it to be written. - h0dg3s, on 10/12/2007, -2/+8Yeah, I looked down their list and didn't see any I games I would spend my time playing.
- apoc06, on 10/12/2007, -0/+6honestly, im glad that sony came to its senses and dropped that crap, but starforce is being quite unapologetic...
i dont understand why people are taking up for this kind of potential behavior from a company. why continue to buy games that support companies that choose to do business with them? i say boycott them til someone learns to respect their customers - snapcase, on 10/12/2007, -0/+6These dumbasses will end up out of business eventually. Either through boycotts or through legal action, it will happen.
- ronintetsuro, on 10/12/2007, -5/+11Soylent Green? Those bastards!
- dclowd9901, on 10/12/2007, -2/+8It almost writes itself, doesn't it?
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -1/+7It's moments like these where we mostly agree who the enemy is in the tech world that makes me smile.
I can't wait for this company to crash and burn. - venom8599, on 10/12/2007, -2/+8@DIGGBLOWS
h0dg3s would be correct. It's acting like a virus, not a worm, assuming that none of the Starforce code gets executed by the remote computer. It merely tries to store files there, as it cannot tell the difference between local and network drives. If, on the other hand, it was actively spreading files via the network in such a fashion that it installed itself on the remote computer in such a way that it could be executed, then it would be acting like a worm.
And calling him a Starforce employee is absurd. He was correcting your spelling and grammar. That's pretty much proof right there that he isn't. - Silentshadow900, on 10/12/2007, -2/+7the guys at starforce are *****, it appears. Who would have guessed?
- MikeSavior, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5This is a little different than just a bug..
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