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StarForce Copy Protection Causing User Ire
Ant writes "According to a thread on the Rage3D boards, and another on The Adventure Company's site, the copy protection system StarForce, as used in PC videogames including Toca Race Driver 2, Traitor's Gate 2 and Broken Sword 3, is installed on a user's PC without proper explanation, and doesn't get removed on many uninstalls - some users report difficulty in keeping their systems stable due to conflicts, and think they've tracked it down to the StarForce protection."
The pirates will always crack it. They only wind up hurting paying end users. It seems nowadays the more you pay for a game the more worthless it is, due to the increased amounts of so called copy protection, which actually does little at all to halt piracy. CD's get scratched. Their attitude is "if it gets scratched beyond repair, that's just one more reason to buy a new game to take it's place" and preventing piracy is just the excuse. I've never pirated a game in my life. I know a couple people who have, but copy protection never stopped them.
I read through much of the threads on the forums mentioned in the abstract, and what is terrible about this thing is that even after installing the game, the "driver" remains. Remove it manually and it returns later like spyware! And what is most disturbing is that one user received an uninstaller after he complained to the company--only the uninstaller didn't uninstall the thing either!
"The television is the retina of the mind's eye" - Videodrome
1) Don't buy the game. Pirate it once a warez group comes up with a cracked copy with all the annoying copy protection removed.
2) Send a personal check to the development company for what the game would have cost you. In some cases, dev houses have copy protection forced on them by the developer. Most dev houses will have contact information listed on their website. Include, with your check, a letter saying that you are sending them this check because you are unwilling to buy the game with copy protection included. This is very important, to ensure that they get the message -- this is an unhappy customer who is honest enough to pay for their game -- the copy protection not only was unnecessary for you, but made you unhappy.
You shouldn't have any ethical problems, as you're paying the developers for their time and effort. As for legality -- technically, what you're doing is illegal, but prosecutions for pirating software for personal use are nonexistent, and the possiblity of such lawsuits is openly ignored en masse.
May we never see th
I noticed they claim to have a "firm shield" against debuggers and the like. Yea right. I assume we all know that any binary can be debugged, right? fscking idiots. someone wana bury the company in nuclear waste?
but I'll say it again.
Agressive copy protection is often more a hinderance to legitimate users than it is to pirates.
Copy protection (especially for games it seems) stops only most amature pirates, and I'd venture to guess they would still be thwarted by the simplest measures. Certainly they should be as confused by cd checks for bad bits, as they are by hidden drivers and the like.
Burning pirated games is not the thing to do nowadays. Pirates instead download a CD image and mount it. With Linux it's no problem, and for Windows you can use something like Daemon Tools.
TMPGEnc 3.0 XPress by Pegasys needs the usual reg key, but the product page on their site also states:
LICENSE VALIDATION is required for TMPGEnc Plug-in AC-3 and TMPGEnc 3.0 XPress. Therefore an Internet connection will be needed to validate your license from time to time.
To be able to use the Software, the license validation procedure have to be executed via Internet. The purpose of the license validation is to verify that you actually own the license. The information you have input the first time, will be sent to the license validation server, and you will be able then to use the Software.
This is a new annoying form of copy protection. For some reason, 'guilty until proven innocent' comes to mind.
I almost purchased the software for our department's video needs, for manipulating safety and training videos, but our corporate firewalls and proxy prevent it from hitting the internet. No cha-ching, this is a lost sale. Ironically it's inexpensive software. Like $60 US.
I don't like any software that needs to 'phone home', since you'll never be told what's being phoned. Real Networks RealannoyingPlayer comes to mind with the user-tracking feature that got their butts in hot water. TiVo monitors your watching habits. Windows XP phones back to the mothership on occasion.
We've gone over this countless times. You are 100% correct, pirates will pirate, regardless of protection. I remember my pirated copy of 3DStudio MAX, which was cracked despite requiring a bunch of serials and an actual hardware dongle.
The end 'legitimate' user will always pay the price of hacked-up protection schemes. I still install my warezed copy of starcraft instead of the copy I bought. Searching for the CD for a game that completely installs on my drive is just annoying.
Companies don't understand this, and for some reason it seems they never will. Or perhaps they just don't care. Either way, we should just let the subject die, or come up with a better way for users to benefit from protection.
-- I have fans? Wow.
Copy protection might prevent "casual" copying between the computer illeterate and that's the intent. But when it screws up your computer (by introducing instability), affects game play (I've heard of schemes that check mid-game causing major lag points for online players), or even makes it impossible for you to play the game you just bought (many of these schemes don't actually work with all disc drives), then it's just a load of crap.
That "protection makes it impossible to start the game" thing is a real killer for some people with crappy drives because you can't take software back most places. There should be a big WARNING: Disc is copy protected! sticker on the front of the box to warn people.
I was using cracks on some of my games because:
The problem with using a no-CD crack is that you're suddenly locked out of future patches unless you backed up the original executable/DLLs. That's a pain in the butt.
Using DaemonTools to mount CD images and BlindWrite5 to make images, even of "protected" CDs has been awesome. No worries about patching, or damaging the original CDs, and the copy protection checks happen fast because you don't have to wait for the CD drive to detect a disc, spin up, etc.
- chrish
Back in the days when games booted directly, my friends and I had a joke - "Psygnosis - Latin for Won't Boot"
Psygnosis copyprotected their games with every trick in the book, to prevent the game from loading if it was pirated.
It worked.
It also prevented the games from booting if they WEREN'T pirated, but your drive was a little off. Or you had an accelerator card. Or it was a day with a vowel in it. Or if there were baryons in your computer.
Simple solution - don't buy copy protected software. Don't copy it. Don't use it. If you buy it and find it is copy protected, take it back, say it won't work, and demand your money back.
www.eFax.com are spammers
Does anyone else find it funny that the Starforce home page features a picture (top right) of a dude at a keyboard throwing up his hands (blurred) in apparent disgust while the two "overlords" standing behind him are laughing and smiling?
"Lawyers are for sucks."
- Doug McKenzie
My friend purchased Painkiller immediately after it was released. He liked the demo so much, why not? Well, there were some issues with Safedisc. Certain CD and DVD prevented the game from running. AAnother one of our friends also ran into the same problem -- it wasn't an isolated case. After several weeks of him trying to get it to work with official patches I finally suggested he try a no-cd crack. Guess what, it worked. Personally, I think the game industry is in serious trouble when warez groups have better releases the the game developers themselves.
Of course, to be fair for the developers of Painkiller, as it was a Safedisc problem it is Macrovision's fault. Developers really need to be aware of this stuff. I won't even get into the pain in the ass of constantly swapping CDs just to play a different game. Maybe they just need to remember that the people paying for the games are thier customers -- not their enemies. Of course, that wouldn't make Macrovision very much money. What really has me worried is the new download-only systems like Steam. There is going to be a day when Steam is dead. How will I play those games then? (Yes, I enjoy old games)
As far as I know, everyone who's ever been to a LAN party has probably pirated Half-Life, along with a few dozen mods. But that won't work outside the LAN party. I also know that, with the advent of Steam, everyone who wants to play any kind of online game at all has to have a CD key. It only costs about $10 to get one anyway, so most people just deal with it.
It's even more centrallized with an MMO game.
The best copy protection is: Make online games so you can make it reasonably difficult to pirate the game -- but make the CD key and online identity the only copy protection. Make good games so everyone wants it, and make them cheap enough so that everyone can buy them.
In fact, make it so that when I look at a game, it actually costs me less money to buy the game than time to crack the copy protection.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Oh, it could work, you just dont understand the mechanism..
The BINARY can be decoded directly, or a deadlist can be compiled..
My guess is they have lots of no-start loops that throw debuggers off or other common tricks.
Now the problem I see is they could provide a runtime de-cypher (with the decrypting stub program) decryptiong the contents of the exe.. Even worse yet is if they decrypt it to CPU cache (A murder to debug) and do their operations in that. I could allocate 2K in cpu cache and use a nasty (and proven) 1k block cypher.
This is all beaten by an ICE, but who can afford one of thse for a home..
Starforce does have a very clever way of preventing debugger to work.
...) and load the exe in it. It then check which dll is required by the exe and load them as well. Each dll as a usually small function that is called by the OS when the dll has been loaded, before the exe is even started, for initialisation purpose.
To explain it requires some little background about how an OS like Windows handle the initialisation of a process that uses dynamic libraries.
Basically, Windows will create a process environment (virtual memory,
Windows debuggers usually use the same method for loading the process, they let Windows do everything that has been described above and only debug the executable itself, after each dll has initialized.
Starforce protected games come in the form of (at least) one exe and one dll. The exe is dependant on the dll. The big trick is that the function that initialize the dll contains the first part of the protection schemes. It probably check wether the process is being debugged there.
Debugging such a software require to rewrite the whole process initialization procedure which is something not very easy to do, and I as already said, not done by most debuggers. A kernel debugger is probably even required because Starforce use drivers, which is the main issue people in the mentionned forums have problem with.
BTW, What I find annoying about Starforce drivers is that they are loaded everytime the computer is running, It would make much more sense to only start the driver when a copy-protected game is launched and stopped when the game is stopped. Maybe this require administrative privilege and that's why they did not do it this way.
Ever heard of key generators? The idea of a cd key is nice, but if tools exists to generate them, want's th point in using them. Just look at the quake 3 misery where a lot of buyers could not play online. Evertime they tried it, they got a 'cd key already in use' message. Very annoying if you buy a game and cannot play it. That should never happen if the keysystem is implemented correctly, that is, the number of potential keys should be up there in the trillions. Also, limiting how fast somebody can try to contact the key server should lock down any attempt at brute force searching. But this doesn't address what I think is the real cause of those people getting "key in use on their new games" - that is, people going around in stores, ripping packages open and typing down the often quite visible key.
To get around online cd key checking, pirates have been launching cracked servers where the keys don't get checked. Browse on Battlefield 1942 servers and you'll find a bunch with cracked in the title.
> users report difficulty in keeping their systems
> stable due to conflicts, and think they've tracked
> it down to the StarForce protection.
If I was licensed at bar, I'd start working on a
class-action suit.
-I like my women like I like my tea: green-
See here.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
...Why did the bloody idiots added this horrible, intrusive "Protection" to the bloody *DEMO* of TOCA 2?
;-))
Isn't a demo freely availale and it's distribution activley promoted by the publisher??
I got this SF.virus from trying out TOCA 2 (the demo), I was about to buy (once I dig up my wheel), but now I won't get near any CodeMasters game.
Why put such files in the demo? do they gain anything from distributing (read: infecting) people's PCs - people who have yet to buy the game? Why did the drivers stay after I uninstalled the game? Why oh why, where they there in the first place? a demo isn't protected! it is meant to be distibuted!
Have anyone checked if these drivers transmit any information to SF servers? if so than it's officially a bloody Trojan.
PS
I will be waiting for the first title in the new mass-market gaming franchise: "Rip it out!" a modern day FPS where players fly around thier system fighting evil "copy protection" viruses, all while juggling several torrents of new "releases".
It is rumored the title will use the SOURCE (beta) engine
"667 - Neighbour of the beast"
You won't get that crap if you just play Tux Racer!
Phillip
The irony is, starforce is one of the most annoying copy protection schemes out there right now, but can actually be defeated without cracks. physically disconnect your cd/dvd drives, mount your disc image across the network, and voila! bye-bye starforce...
A friend of mine had a similar problem with Diablo II, except that the problem was the game was working, but when a new patch fixed some game bugs, the updated copy protection that came with it made it incompatible with his cd-rom drive. He had to play with a no-cd patch for a few more versions until Blizzard finally fixed it again. This wasn't a case of "buy the game, find out it's incompatible with your computer, get a refund." This was "buy the game, play it for awhile, then it becomes incompatible!" So you say, he could have just kept playing on the old version? Yeah well, forget playing online with friends then. The no-cd crack, as much as game companies hate them, was the only way he could play.
This is getting ridiculous. I myself have encountered problems with EA's use of (whats it, SafeDisc? I forget the name). After a patch on a game, the copy protection started harping as if I were using a hacked or pirated copy of the game, but I wasn't. EA tech support was completely clueless. I ended up finding and fixing the problem myself (the protection's DLL file had been switched to READ-ONLY somehow).
Point is, the average user is too dumb to self-diagnose stuff like this and EA was zero help.
How should I practice my favourite sport if games are not copy protected anymore. That is just wrong.
It can be done always. Only your speed is what counts.