CDV Officially Drops Starforce Copy Protection

simoniker writes "Publisher CDV has officially announced that it is dropping the controversial StarForce game copy protection scheme from its games, and is using the TAGES protection scheme instead, in what it calls 'response to consumer demand'. This follows Ubisoft's dropping of the scheme in April, as controversy continues about StarForce's allegedly negative effect on PCs. However, it's notable that the StarForce drivers have just passed Microsoft's 'Designed for Windows XP' certification programme, according to the company's official website."

Comments

TAGES

[Kadin2048]

I thought it was interesting that the one thing that the summary didn't link to was any information on the new scheme, TAGES.

A quick Google brought me to their site. It's mostly corporate PR-speak fluff, but there are some hints there:

Our main technical asset is our specific mastering process which builds up a programmable "secure area" on the disc. The secured area is used to protect useful application data sets or encryption keys. ... With TAGES(TM) there will never be a generic crack, and there will never be one-to-one copies. It is physically impossible. ... Nevertheless, we consider emulators to be a real threat and have all the necessary flexibility to be able to react immediately, with much more powerful solutions than blacklists - which are a very limited answer to emulation.

I don't buy the whole "physical impossibility" part. If you can read the data off of the disk with their special APIs and drivers, then those drivers can be reverse-engineered and someone else peel the data off and distribute a hacked version. The data is there, on the disk, they're just storing it in a way that the system can't normally access, without special code that they license out and allow software developers to integrate into their protected application. It's the same thing that game developers have done for years -- there were some old Apple II titles that did strange things with the floppy drive in order to pull off similar tricks.

*yawn* At any rate, just more security through obscurity. Not that I care, particularly, as I don't run Windows (or, for that matter, play games), but I find the whole area interesting enough to keep an eye on.