Slashdot Mirror
Controversial StarForce Copy Protection Creators Quizzed
Thanks to FiringSquad for its interview with the creators of the StarForce copy protection scheme for PC videogames. The author explains: "In recent months there's been an increasing awareness and alarm over StarForce copy protection. It's actually a driver that installs itself with the [Windows] games that come shipped with it, and originally it didn't uninstall when the game was uninstalled." StarForce's Abbie Sommer argues the advantages of "driver-level copy protection", explaining: "The drivers are what prevents the use of kernel debugger utilities such as SoftICE, Cool Debugger, Soft Snoop etc. Also the drivers prevent emulators from spoofing a drive, and thwart burning tools such as Alcohol 120%." The author concludes by injecting a little personal opinion into the mix, arguing: "PC games will never go away, but if the market keeps shrinking due to the increasing ease of piracy... then the number and quality of games will almost certainly decrease."
>"I wouldn't buy it anyway" - doesn't matter, fact is you didn't pay for it but benefited from the labor of the publisher and developer - that's theft.
so... linux is theft!?
>"Games are crap so often I don't want to get ripped off" - try reading reviews and playing demos. Besides, good luck getting a car dealership to refund you your money after you so much as signed the contract, never mind drove the car. Not all that many goods can be used and returned for your money back.
good luck getting a demo for many modern games. good luck getting a review that hasn't been bought, if not with money then "exclusive access" deals. in the UK at least, almost ALL non-perishable goods can be returned. exceptions are things like pierced earings due to hygiene. the rest comes under STATUTORY RIGHTS. a nice but unknown one is anything you buy on the internet can be returned within 30 days ("cooling off period") for ANY REASON WHATSOEVER.
(I'm not saying reasons for piracy are valid/invalid, just that the author is factually wrong)
note: most Doom 3 piracy was fans in non-US wanting ir right away instead of delayed release, just like all the films I've downloaded are ones I've seen in the cinema but the DVD isn't out yet.
They missed nothing.
Read the StarForce webpage. Their goal isn't to stop determined experts, since that's impossible to do when the code runs on the adversary's computer. Their goals are to stop "industrial software piracy" (read: businesses buying one CD for all the computers in the office) and "casual copying" (read: Joe Teenager giving a copy to his friend Fred Teenager).
If these people are thwarted then their mission is accomplished.
And for the lazy (or those behind an abusive proxy server):
http://www.balorn.net/
?
Yeah - I'll correct that.
Safedisk is a PAIN to implement.
It works by changing the geometry of the disc - the tracks are actally spread out more (it makes it look a bit like the gaps between songs on old vinyl disks)
Then it measures the TIME it takes the drive to seek across these areas compared to the time it takes to seek across normal areas.
Their driver is very flaky, due to the large numbers of strange drives it has to cope with. This in turn makes it very difficult to build a drive which co-operates with it reliably.
Most disks produced with safedisk are within the spec - the spec just says that the track density must lie within such and such limits (I'd have to look them up) - they are expected to vary due to quality of disk and so forth. They AREN'T expected to vary on a single disk (much) - but nothing says that they can't. So they are in the CD/DVD spec.
The audio protections usually used fall into two camps. The polite camp simply has an audio session and a data session, and relies upon windows preferring to show the user the data session. These are within the redbook spec, and easy to break.
The slightly dodgier protection issues the same track number to tracks in both sessions, and relies upon data drives mounting the last session first and audio drives mounting the first session first. This DOES break the redbook spec. Quite horribly.
A few minutes of googling yielded this:
http://boycottstarforce.org/games/
Has anyone found/compiled a list of games that use this copy protection so that we can vote with our wallets?
There's an entire website devoted to that now; It's here.
Here's one... Though I believe some of those have it only in certain versions, ie. EU or US version only. Also beware of the demos of those games, they install starforce too.
Thanks for the list. According to the interviewee, no StarForce games are cracked.
According to google, cracks appear to exist for:
Breed
Cycling Manager 3
Dead to Rights
Fire Department
Gangland
Korea Fogotten Conflict
Prince of Persia Sands of Time
Rally Championship Xtreme
Restaurant Empire
Runaway A Road Adventure
Soldiers Heroes of World War 2
Track Mania
XIII
X2 The Threat
Now, being that I don't want to get my system all infected with virus laden garbage, I'm not going to download any of the cracks I found. I wonder how many work? Perhaps none of them. Or perhaps they all do. In that case, We have a 58% success record. That's not worthy of saying your protection is crack proof, IMHO.
If you could be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you could be told what to say or think - BoC
Worth pointing out (Disclaimer: I work as a game programmer) that it is often PUBLISHERS who add this sort of shit once the game is finished and has left the developers' control.
Game dev and music blog
hope they get the Microsoft Hardware Lab to certify this thing or else Windows XP is going to bitch about this and it won't go smoothly
That's only if they go through the 'accepted' API for adding new hardware. Just adding it to the registry and then asking the user to reboot when the install finishes is enough to install it 'stealthily'.
Beware anything that asks for a reboot.
Persistent rumours in the copy protection industry tells that the technology used in StarForce3 is actually reverse engineered from CD-Cops http://www.linkdata.com/index.htm#cdcops, by StarForce's russian team.
This is supposed to be one of the reasons the pricing of the StarForce3 systems does not reflect the perceived development costs for the technology.
The PC game market is growing, not shrinking. Many companies are losing money, I don't doubt that and I don't question the rest of his assertions, but nevertheless, this doesn't change the fact that the PC market of legitimately purchased PC games is growing, not shrinking.
Perhaps you should try the the 'removal tool':
sfdrvrem.zip
http://www.boycottstarforce.org/
I think its also worth nothing that starforce drivers CAN mess up your system, and can only be safely removed with the starforce removal tool. (which they dont go out the way to advertise).
This program is, essentially, a virus. So why is it ok for corporations to spread virii that stop me legally using my own game, but crackers who create trojans and the like are hunted to the ends of the earth?
Copy/paste from www.theisonews.com
... Also kind of a cheap trick, it leaves me no doubt the creators themselves were/are hella good crackers.
.exe file - but that would take more work again.
Im by no means a l33t hax0r but I know my way around icing/dumping procedures and messed around with SF3 a bit.
First of all, whenever someone writes SF3 uses physical fingerprints, STOP READING - it DOES NOT, and yes a lot of wannabe experts will say that. If you wanna know how the SF3 discs are produced I can write another post here, but for now I'll tell you about the protection itself;
The Devil (=StarForce3) is INSANELY coded to avoid debugging, and by INSANELY I mean NOTHING COMES CLOSE : you can find over 200 RDTSCs on a SINGLE procedure. WTF is a RDTSC? Its an instruction to read the time stamp on the CPU, that is, they use it to MEASURE the amount of time some routine takes to complete: if you debug+trace the operations, stopping them before they are complete, the reply from the CPU will tell the app they are taking a long time to finish - and you get rebooted while the SF3 creators laugh at you.
The most low-level interrupts cant be traced as well since the SF3 driver replaces them with their own evil, custom, devilish, encrypted drivers - and thats where the problems for LEGIT buyers start, drivers messing around with system resources = always dangerous. Theres even a INT 2E routine used into SF3, thats an undocumented but widely known backdoor to run COMMAND.COM-based programs!!
What happens then is, one would actually need to recreate the drivers removing all those ( hundreds of ) evil anti-debugging checks - that would take a *LOT* of time/work already, considering the drivers are encrypted as and when executing - to ONLY THEN start working on breaking the games' protection itself. And for every new SF3 version/update/whatever ( = another game) , you would have to do everything again. Of course after ending up with a working crack, you can remove the "custom driver" thing and just emulate everything with an
Truth is, it becomes much more of a challenge than a way to play the game for free, since its much (much much) easier - even cheaper considering the hours a cracker would spend starforcing - to simply buy the damn original.
I can only see this affecting legitimate users... seeing as im anon cowarding this post ill just say it, i noticed at least 2 games on that list of starforce protected things, and i pirated both of 'em -downloaded, mounted, installed, cracked, played, didnt even know starforce existed and i still played it. way to go starforce, the pirates will find a way and you just piss off legitimate consumers.
on the other hand my copy of half life, half life 2, ut2004 and doom3 are all legal, because of online key checking
and i crack all my games, legitimate or not, because its just annoying looking for disks, frankly.
ALL COPY PROTECTION DOES IS INCONVENIENCE THE LEGITIMATE USER This is untrue. If you read this article by a developer for Spyro, Year of the dragon, their copy and crack protection schemes were able to prevent a crack from being released for over 2 months after the game came out. Such protection did not inconvinience legitimate users AT ALL. http://www.gamasutra.com/features/20011017/dodd_01 .htm
No it doesn't. If I buy a book/CD/DVD etc, from you, the copyright holder, I have the right to use it. I also have the right to sell or give it to someone else, transferring the "use" rights I had along with the physical media, without reference to you. I don't, in general, have the right to make copies of it and distribute them.
What do you mean "At some point"? I instantly look
for no cd cracks when I purchase a new pc game.
Rally Championship Xtreme no-cd crack works nice. and Breed demo does not install StarForce (at least their remove tool found nothing).
here is list with some games and protections used.
the only way to stop piracy is divine intervention from God... btw God has an easynews account
The best education consists in immunizing people against systematic attempts at education. - Paul Feyerabend
Quite a few in that list seem to be cracked by a "big name" group, which means, they're not virus ladden and probably do work.
I can personally attest that X2 crack works, StarForce is far from uncrackable. The sooner they realize there is no such thing as uncrackable the better, maybe they'd go back to simple copy protections and stop pestering paying customers.
Not true that requiring a reboot means the installer is doing something dodgy - at least, not true when you're upgrading already installed software.
Windows (EXPLORER.EXE) regularly holds application program files open for no reason at all (I suspect it's something to do with displaying icons), so a reboot is the only way to replace an out-of-date file.
FYI, this list is misleading. I believe they are refering only to Starforce 3 when they claim the games aren't cracked. Most of those games use an earlier version of Starforce which was not nearly as tough, or only the European version uses Starforce 3. I own Trackmania, which was cracked for version 1.0. However, the US release is 1.25 and it is yet to be cracked. It's extremely annoying because even with the CD, sometimes Starforce takes upwards of 5 minutes to validate the CD on startup. In addition, the article is correct that the cracks are much more involved. The Trackmania 1.0 crack included 100+ files that had to be replaced. What's the incentive for a cracker to crack subsequent versions when they're so involved. Personally, I think the copy protection has hurt the game's sales in the US.
Doom 3 wouldn't let me play until I had deleted CloneCD. There might be a setting I could've just turned off, but when I first got the game (the day it came out), it wasn't clear what it was. Not cool. I uninstalled anyhow (this isn't a huge loss, just a pain in the ass), but the whole thing left a bad taste in my mouth.
Most large cracking groups have FAR more respect for the end user than these companies do.
No "legit" pirate is going to risk damaging their reputation to stick some stupid trojan inside their rip of "The Sims..."
That's because the travel agent is a service provider and not a store. They don't sell me any items there; they simply agree to do something for me (namely, arrang the aeroplane seat and hotel room) in exchange for money. Software store, on the other hand, sells software on nice, shiny, oversized cardboard boxes (or nice, shiny, small and handy plastic DVD packages).
You mean an office of an insurance company ? Presumably I want to enter into a contract with them, in which I pay them money (usually in a monthly basis) and they pay me money in certain conditions (usually if something bad happens). Why you compare an office for signing contracts to a store that sells objects is beyond me.
I walked out with a mobile phone. It sits on my bookshelf currently. It's mine, all mine, to do with whatever I please.
Why ? What did you expect ?
As a side note, you shouldn't confuse the mobile phone that I bought from the mobile phone store with the contract I entered with a mobile phone service provider, which allows me to use the service providers network for a monthly fee. While I did sign the contract in the same place as I bought the phone (a matter of convenience), the two events are completely separate events.
No, I'm buying the box and everything it contains, including the physical media and whatever data it contains. Since I own said data, I don't need any license to use it in whatever way I please. The only limitation is that I can't distribute copies of it, since I'm not a copyright holder (but I can wallpaper the rooms of my own home with copies if I so wish - just as long as I don't give any away).
Do not confuse copyright with ownership; they are not the same thing. A writer might own the copyright to a book, but that doesn't change the fact that this particular copy is mine.
Now, there has been some typical lawyer tricks about needing a specific license to use computer programs since I'm making a temporary copy into the memory of the machine (which is absurd; if I read something, it gets copied to the back of my retinas and then to the back of my skull where the vision-related brain centers are, and presumably copied forward in some form to my thoughts, where it affacts my every action somewhat (meaning they contain some information about the book); so do I need a license to read a book ?), but, as I already said, the copyright law only forbids distribution of copies, not making of them. Furthermore, the Finnish law specifically grants me a permission to change the data I've purchased into whatever form is most convenient for me (in this case, from the packed installation files in the CD to the run-time data and code structure in the main memory).
Oh, you were talking about the US law ? Sucks to be American ;).
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
Are you sure about that with Call of Duty? I'm running it from an image of the original disc I made in Alcohol 120% (ie, a virtual drive). I've always run it like this.
CoD is supposed to using SafeDisc 3 for it's copy protection.
(I have Nero installed, as well).
My friend had the same sort of issue. We never actually figured out what he had installed that Doom3 was objecting to (he's got a lot of crap on his computer). The solution? No-cd crack from GameCopyWorld. Will *I* be buying Doom3 based on what I had to help him through? Hell no! Its a shame, because it looks like a good game too.
> A "trojan" is not called so because it purports to be something that it's not to gain entry, as the Trojan Horse did. There are inumerable viruses that pretend to be something else, they aren't trojans. A "trojan" is called so because of what it does once inside... it let's the attackers in. A "trojan" is a computer program that, once inside, allows access (almost always via the network) to intruders
Uh, for all I care that is called a trojan with a backdoor as payload. It is about the tactic, not about what the tactic is used for.
ANd rreally, there have been enough trojans out there that did nothing of the sort because they existed in times before most computers were connected to any kind of network. They were programs that posed as being a usefull program while in fact they were destructive. Those have always been called, and are still called trojans. There is no remote intruder involved or even possible there.
Wizardry 3 (Legacy of Llygamn or something) diskettes
were COPYA-able, but the copy wouldn't run because of
timing checks. The p-code called a native 6502 routine to
do the check and returned the status in location $00,
which was returned to the higher-level code. Zero meant
success. So by turning the LDA (location 0) opcode ($29)
into a LDA (literal 0) opcode ($A9), it's cracked. Thus the
crack instructions are: change track t, sector s, byte b,
bit 7 from a zero to a one, and you're done!
Can't recall t, s, and b offhand, though...
A "trojan" is not called so because it purports to be something that it's not to gain entry... A "trojan" is a computer program that, once inside, allows access (almost always via the network) to intruders.
Wrong.
A peice of software which claimed to be a solitare card game but in fact contained hidden code to cause a nuclear reactor to overload and explode would be a trojan. So yes, a trojan is exactly code with hidden functionality inside.
-
- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.