Ironworks Gaming Forum - Starforce gets another kick in the crotch

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- - Starforce gets another kick in the crotch (http://www.ironworksforum.com/forum/showthread.php?t=66989)

[URL=http://www.bluesnews.com/cgi-bin/board.pl?action=viewthread&threadid=65392]lol
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Quote:

Aspyr Media is responsible for publishing the North American release of Spellforce 2. We wanted everyone to know that Starforce will *not* be included in the retail release of this game. Starforce is being used in the demo in cooperation with the European publishers of the title, JoWood Productions. This is to help prevent reverse engineering that could lead to our product being put up on illegal software networks. We apologize for any inconveniences Starforce may have caused and would again like to reassure everyone that we have chosen alternative copy protection software for our final release product. Thank you for your interest in Spellforce 2!

Hehe, I loved:

Quote:

We apologize for any inconveniences Starforce may have caused

I accompanied a friend to the local game shop the other day. He was buying Battle For Middle Earth 2. The poor guy was jumping up and down, bouncing around the store while paying the bill. We went off for a coffee before splitting ways. While we were sipping the coffee, all he could do was gaze at the magnificence of the box. A few hours later, I recieve the following message on my cell phone, translated and censored for your viewing pleasure: "Those mo********ing sons of *****es, **** every last one of them, and their ****ing sh**** copyright protection from the **** ****ing Starforce ****!!!"
Reason this happened is that we thought "Hey, it's EA, they use SafeDisc." Well, it seems EA doesn't use SD any more...

not sure i get your story here

Azrael,
Starforce is a new copywrite proctection software that a few companies are using. The problem is it actually installs a full set of drivers that actually conflict with a good 33% of your standard Windows drivers. In fact I found that the drivers it installed actually are corrupting my sound drivers so that they start pumping out nothing but static.

So far little is known about Starforce other then it installs drivers that are actually quite a pain to get rid of since they do not appear as a program and are not removed when you uninstall the game that used it.

Battle for Middle Earth 2 is one that a lot of people are having problems with. Everything from the game ending a battle after 3 mins, causing Blue Screens of Death, to making it impossiable to play anything not Starfroce enabled.

It is by far the worst copy protection ever and if I knew BFME2 had it I wouldn't have gotten it. It's actually become common due to alll these issues for companies to actually tell customers new games will not have this protection. Go to the Oblivion Forums and you'll see the rejoicing being done by gamers for Bethesda Soft for deciding not to use it.

The biggest gripe with Starforce right now is that it destroys any security set-up you may have on your computer. Every single command ring 3 or lower becomes ring 0, which has absolute read/write access. You browsing the net right now, that's within the rings 0-3. Someone sending you a trojan in an email? That's there too. See what happens?
Secondly, it is known to cause hardware failures, especially in the following: external drives, SCSI drives, Plextor writers, firewire and USB HDDs, sound cards(not embedded). It has specific read-down instructions which will in time kill your optical drive. It doesn't go away. Several people reported Starforce transmitting information through the internet every time you execute a protected piece of software, and it does so unhampered by firewalls since it is in ring 0, and makes the firewall allow it. Basically, it's a nuke.