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Controversial StarForce Copy Protection Creators Quizzed
Posted by
simoniker
on Thu Aug 19, 2004 03:28 AM
from the force-not-with-you? dept.
from the force-not-with-you? dept.
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."
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Copy Protection Firms Encourage Piracy? 90 comments
Ars Technica has a reflection on the revelation that StarForce had linked to pirated versions of Galactic Civilizations II. From the piece: "It's not hard to see why the publishers use the stuff; after all, no one wants to spend a couple of years on a project only to see their efforts rewarded by flat sales and a robust pirate market. Still, in the quest for better protection, these copy protection schemes have grown in both sophistication and invasiveness. Some schemes now install their own hidden device drivers that monitor your computer's optical drive access, trying to prevent copying and other unapproved uses. (If this sounds familiar, it should. Game copy protection, after all, is just another form of DRM.)"
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And punish legitimate users? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:And punish legitimate users? (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:And punish legitimate users? (Score:5, Informative)
sfdrvrem.zip [star-force.com]
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Re:And punish legitimate users? (Score:5, Insightful)
Me too. Load times are much faster and there's no worrying about scratching your original CDs. Just copy them to the hard drive when you buy the game and put the original CDs back in the box. This article is written by some major shills for the game industry... Check out this quote:
Now copy protection is disabling games if you have utilities that simply might help pirate a game - like Alcohol 120%, Nero or CloneCD... Of course, if we honestly ask ourselves how many purely legitimate users of those utilities there are, odds are probably that deep down inside we have to admit "not many".
Wha????? Not many legitimate users of Nero? Nero is one of the best CD/DVD burning software out there. This article is clearly written by a BSA shill. Not every utility that can copy a CD is used for infringing purposes. In fact, most of us use these utilities for non-infringing fair-use purposes like backing up the games we purchased.
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Re:And punish legitimate users? (Score:5, Insightful)
Seriously, in the not-too-distant future, I imagine the first thing I do after I buy a new game is to go download the pirated version.
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Re:And punish legitimate users? (Score:5, Insightful)
This is a complete load of bull. Here is my story:
I have a "server" case with a LOCKED DOOR in front of the drive bays. I have two toddlers running around the house, so I HAVE to have my computer locked down from little hands. So it is a PAIN to swap discs. So I use Alcohol 120%. This also allows me to keep all discs locked away in the garage so that I do not have to have a stack of discs (or a disc case) sitting on my desk. It helps keep the clutter down.
I also have my old computer set aside for running educational games. So, I use Alcohol 120% on that one so that my three-year-old son does not have to come to mommy asking to change a disc or (even worse) try to change the disc himself.
Anot note that I am NOT into warez at all. If I want a game, I buy it. I still have not even played all of the games that came bundled with my sound and video cards (quite a lot of games, too).
I would also like to throw out one more secnario: A traveler who wants to play games on the go. First, carrying discs means more weight, and second, spinning up a disc uses more battery power than reading an ISO off of a hard drive.
I have absolutely NO problems with copy protection which checks the disc upon install, but why does it have to check EVERY TIME the game loads. As a legitimate user, I find it annoying that these companies are almost begging me to go to warez sites so that I can play the game that I PAID FOR the way that I want to.
As for me, I will NEVER buy a StarForce game. Yup, that's right. I hope that the game producers are reading this. I am a professional engineer -- the type of guy with enough money to buy the games that tickle my fancy -- and I am incredibly honest. And in your quest to stop the people who probably would not buy your games in the first place, you are driving legitimate customers away. Smart business plan.
Note that it is one thing to design a game that will not work with Alcohol. I can accept that. But to have your game cripple Alcohol even when your game is not even running is unacceptable. Have fun in the wellfare lines, boys...
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Re:And punish legitimate users? (Score:5, Informative)
There's an entire website devoted to that now; It's here [boycottstarforce.org].
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Re:And punish legitimate users? (Score:5, Insightful)
Remember, real pirates will be able to pirate/distribute the game. Your casual user won't.
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Re:And punish legitimate users? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:And punish legitimate users? (Score:5, Insightful)
Strictly spoken you are right, its a trojan, not a virus. It poses to be a game, in fact it is a program that limits what you can use your computer for.
> You bought it. What you charge people for is irrelevant. You bought a game. If you don't like it, don't play it. No-one's going to pay you anything.
How you obtained it is completely irrelevant for it being a virus or a trojan or whatnot. That depends entirely on the purpose and functions of the program.
When such a game installs this driver onto a machine without very clear and explicit warning about this effect of the copy protection, that game should be considered a trojan, nothign more and nothign less.
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Re:And punish legitimate users? (Score:5, Insightful)
I look after my disks so I don't need to make backups of them. Some of the people complaining about how this software disables their burning applications and such, should probably read the end of the article where it states that those types of applications are only disabled when the game is being played [firingsquad.com].
Personally I buy all my games, whether I have the ability to copy them or not, because I want to reward those publishes that make good games. The reason because "we" the consumers are being treated as criminals, is because some of the "we" are acting like criminals, so the fact that I have to put up with these ridiculous methods is because of those that are pirating this software. As ineffective as it is, I cant find fault with PC games publishers wanting to do something to protect their investments.
However publishers and consumers alike should both get off of their soap boxes and do something constructive about the problem instead of both sides making ridiculous arguments and counterclaims.
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Re:And punish legitimate users? (Score:5, Insightful)
But no, they would rather try and force you to buy another copy
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Re:And punish legitimate users? (Score:5, Interesting)
How many times have you actually tried to get a replacement CD from a distributor?
--
0x00
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Re:And punish legitimate users? (Score:5, Funny)
Mr. Babbages Line Printing and Mimographic Aperatus for the Laying Out and Production of Tabular Information and Mathmatical Tables
A Driver for use with Mr. Babbages Differential Engine No. #1
Driver verion 1.253 Patch Level 2
Warning! Women should not attempt the installation or operation of this device driver!
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Re:And punish legitimate users? (Score:5, Insightful)
Indeed. I hate this, and not even out of privacy/control grounds. The main problems are simple practicality.
Such schemes means you can throw away your games when you move to a new (Major) windows version, are far more likely to cause problems in Windows etc etc.
Forget about running your legitimately bought games running on an emulator in 10 years.
It is the same problem I have with DRM and mangled CDs. The copyright enforcing stuff limits the time that it can be used (because of equipment being only in vogue for a few years) and practical use too much.
Tying in media with the OS is a no-no.
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Re:And punish legitimate users? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:And punish legitimate users? (Score:5, Insightful)
And then watch the game publishers claim their sales go down due to piracy, bringing about even more safeguards and laws to prevent it. If this rat race keeps up, pretty soon the costs for producing music, movies and games will be a tax that everyone has to pay because everyone has to keep consuming new stuff to make the system work...
The "voting with your wallet" method is being circumvented by lobbying.
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Re:And punish legitimate users? (Score:5, Insightful)
To use an analogy: Sure food producers are allowed to poison their food, as long as they put a big warning label "poisonous" on the packaging.
After all, we got coffee cups that say "Warning! Hot!", why shouldn't we have software boxes that say "Warning! Contains copy-protection driver, may cause system malfunction!"?
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Re:And punish legitimate users? (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:And punish legitimate users? (Score:5, Insightful)
>don't own the games you buy. You own a license
>to use those games. Big difference.
Lets see, I enter a store, pick up some product or merchendice, pay for it and leave the shop. Do I own what I just bought? Yup! Typically regulated through sale or consumer sale laws in most countries. Why you would think sale laws doesn't apply to computer games is beyoned me.
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Keep treating me like a criminal .. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Keep treating me like a criminal .. (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:Keep treating me like a criminal .. (Score:5, Insightful)
Indeed, if it's so easy to become a criminal there must be something very wrong with the law.
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missed something (Score:5, Insightful)
http://hte.sf.net would work just peachy.
Re:missed something (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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Right. (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah, I've been hearing that since my Amiga gaming days, back when I had to travel to the capital city just to find a place that sold legitimate game copies, back when piracy was as just a blank floppy away. Look how much the number and quality has shrunk in the gaming market since then...
Re:Right. (Score:5, Insightful)
I've been hearing it since my ZX Spectrum days, so that means ooohhhh twenty-four years?
I wonder whether they pass this on in a gilt envelope marked with 'the piracy excuse'.
One thing that I have noticed is that the PC Games Market is shrinking with relation to the console market. Do you think anyone's realised that you have a finite number of games that can be sold, and people rarely buy for more then one platform?
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Re:Right. (Score:5, Insightful)
Look how much the number and quality has shrunk in the gaming market since then...
Well actually, the quality at least probably has shrunk since those days. I really do think it's more than just nostalgia that makes so many people prefer old games to the lastest cookie-cutter FPS/RTS/racing sim. I know this is going to make me sound old, but so many of those old games had an element of utter originality that is totally absent from the current crop of games.
It's not piracy-induced poverty that has stifled originality of games, however; rather the opposite. As the maket has grown and game studio budgets have grown commensurately, the opportunity to take risks has been shrinking. Studios simply can't afford to release a total flop anymore. Thus, gaming has followed the track of Hollywood. Sequels sequels sequels.
A lot of the problem is also brought on by consumer expectations and the distribution format. People pay a lot of money for games, and thus they want 20-50 hours of non-repetitive gameplay and the latest super-whizz-bang graphics or they complain. How can you fit a game like Tetris into a market like that? Better just make it another FPS...
People can struggle with the copy-protection on their copy of Doom 14... or they can play Frozen-Bubble and Micro Machines 2 (my current favourites). Gaming companies better face up to the stiff competition they face from their own past and start treating consumers with some respect.
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Is this possible? WHQL certified? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Is this possible? WHQL certified? (Score:5, Interesting)
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Brad Wardell's thoughts (Score:5, Interesting)
google groups link here [google.com]
Re:Brad Wardell's thoughts (Score:5, Informative)
And for the lazy (or those behind an abusive proxy server):
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The age-old rule (Score:5, Insightful)
Well here's another opinion... (Score:5, Interesting)
Gee, do you think this attitude might force a lot of people to conclude that PC games are such a pain they might as well buy a console and play there?
Such things should be banned (Score:5, Insightful)
In my opinion, such things should be categorized as malware, and should only be allowed if adequate warning is given to the user before installation.
Anyway, even when installed as a driver, it can't be fully crack-proof --- the driver can be removed, and the game code can be changed to skip the accesses to the driver. If the game is popular enough, a crack will soon be produced (probably unusable for Internet games though), and even legit users may use them so that they can get rid of the driver that is possibly destabilizing the system.
Somehow it's not quite piracy.. (Score:5, Insightful)
For gamers with CD-ROMs that are incompatible with SecuROM (and other copy protection measures), it is currently more convenient to download and crack pirated versions, than to buy a legitimate copy.
This is a dangerous discrepancy, and is running the game industry into the ground.
Terrible piece... (Score:5, Interesting)
This is such an apologist piece. From author's viewpoint, this is a done deal, copy protection is a necessity, and he doesn't address the issue of fair use at all. When I buy my videogames, I rarely install them, instead preferring to find a cracked version first, so I don't have to deal with all of the crap, like unwanted driver installations, that I don't know if I'm getting. The guys at Penny Arcade [penny-arcade.com] have said the same as well.
I don't play games without purchasing them (though I did as a student, because I was poor then. If I hadn't then, I probably wouldn't have the gaming drive now that causes me to purchase all of the games I do.), and I'm starting to buy less and less PC games because of the crap I have to deal with. Do you hear that, developers? That is the sound of lost sales.
I bought XIII, which had some protection that caused the graphics and performance to slowly degrade if the CD is not in the drive. Normally, I would have kept that game to play again in the future, but instead I found someone who was looking to buy it, and gave it to them instead. One more lost sale.
Could you imagine if a PS2 game you bought installed updated CD/DVD drivers on the memory card, and it caused problems with reading other discs? How about if you couldn't play games on your PS2 just becaused you owned an Action Replay disc? They can be used to play copied games too, you know. This sort of crap is unacceptable, and developers who realize that are in a unique position to capture extra market share. Sure, writing a crappy game won't get you sales, but with two equally good games, there are definitely people who will choose the one that doesn't treat them like a criminal if they know there is a difference.
Yay, let's piss off consumers for no purpose. (Score:5, Interesting)
I seem to recall some software a few years back which came with a dongle, I also seem to recall that someone managed to fake that dongle so you can pirate the software anyway. Take a lesson here people, if you can't stop piracy with hardware you sure as hell can't do it will software, in all reality Paladium(assuming it ever shows up) probably won't stop piracy. This is for a simple reason, for every guy out there trying to come up with ways to prevent piracy there are at least 100 attempting to circumvent it, and these guys are really really good. There's a lesson here, a lesson we should all have learned a long, long, long time ago, because it's been true since the first copy protection ever implemented. ALL COPY PROTECTION DOES IS INCONVENIENCE THE LEGITIMATE USER. Sorry to have shouted that, but I wouldn't want someone to miss that one. No method of copy protection every created has stopped people from pirating software and the only way I can see that changing any time in the forseeable future.
What? (Score:5, Insightful)
And this brings up a point about copy protection. It really only fucks with the people who actually buy the CD. I bought The Sims after, admittedly, not paying for it for a while. But I did go out and buy it after about a month, and lo and behold my CD Key was already registered. Ah well, an email took care of that. But, next I buy Neverwinter Nights. Damn CD Protection goes so far as to not work in my DVD drive. This happens with a TON of protected games. Flight Simulator 2002 would continuously corrupt on install, SimCity 4, Baldurs Gates both 1 AND 2... Correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm pretty sure the SecuROM/SafeDisc methods do *not* produce valid Redbook CDROM standard CD's. Doesn't happen on non-secured discs like Streets and Trips, Windows XP, etc... Either way, I paid for these games and they don't work. Yet I can steal them and they work, no hassle. Hmm, not too hard of a debate. I actually sometimes will buy the game then download the crack because I'm tired of dealing with shitty copy protection.
Safedisk (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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malware or essential tools (Score:5, Insightful)
No software company wants to invest 30 million into a (small?) project where sales are predicted by a declining history and diminishing market, or perhaps could disappear given the alarming ability to download gigs of data in a day.
In a perfect world, they would produce X, you want X, you buy X.
In a semi-perfect world. People Copy X, like it, Buy X
In todays world, a bit more perfect: People who copy and don't buy X, wouldn't have bought it anyway. (so does this mean copying impacts software?)
What does happen. People want games, if copying didnt exist, they would buy them, prices would drop. However, peope who say they wouldn't have bought the game anyway, shouldn't have needed to copy it.
OK, that bit over: If you purchase games, do you put up with measures that, in the end, are there for your benefit, as a games consumer (i.e., if they did stop copying)
Perhaps the issue is not so clear cut as music (which has always been way overpriced and overcontrolled)
Computer games used to be 1.99 casettes, 4.99 etc... not they are 49.99 at tops. Considering lower costs of marketting, vast market size, limitless and cheap distribution (electronically) and cheaper CD/DVD case distribution, the companies hsould be able to create games which sell for less, and meets a price that brings more consumers.
Sometimes it is easier to copy a game than physically walk out and buy it. This is the mentality they are dealing with.
At the end of the day - don't steal from people, no matter how rich they are.
and now, for some infamous quotes (Score:5, Insightful)
Yah, and remember the dark ages, when only the church could copy? Well if corporations get their way, it'll be dark again soon. Thanks Abbie!
"We have to live with it, and I don't think it is going away."
No Abbie, I don't have to live with it because I never buy copy protected software. Period. Sorry, but it's a religious thing with me.
"but let's face it, publishers aren't stupid"
Yes, yes they are, and evil and greedy too. First off, they corrupt copyright so that it no longer does what the founding fathers intended. Then they use it to abuse the market in order to force consumers to pay excessive prices for poor quality games.
In my humble opinion, piracy is a direct and inevitable outcome strictly due to the lack of fairness in the intellectual property issue.
Corporations have perverted the process and most people are simply taking the most economical route to get what they want
From where I sit, all of this is because companies will not produce products as inexpensively as possible. Indeed, these companies would earn more if they simply lowered the price to a point were far more people could easily afford to buy their products. As it is, most software is simply not affordable unless you are fairly affluent. So yes, they, the software publishers, are stupid, and what's worse, they're incompetent and abusive.
WTF? (Score:5, Funny)
Dork Behind Him: What is the matter with you?
Chick: Looks like he ran afoul of Star Force's copyright protection!
Dork: Ha ha!
Chick: *snicker*
Man: Shut the hell up you two!
Dork: OMG YOUR MEGAHURTZ HAS BEEN STOL3D!!
Chick: All your CD-ROM belong to Star Force.
some GOOD ways to prevent piracy (Score:5, Interesting)
2.stop charging a fortune, the cheaper they are the more likely someone will buy them
3.include better stuff in the box (e.g. a printed manual, mabie a poster of the main character or something)
4.use CD keys for online access to play multiplayer games
5.make valid CD keys a requirement to access extra stuff (like how you need a vaid CD key to get onto the official Neverwinter Nights forums or how you need a valid CD key to install patches for some versions of Borland Delphi)
6.make it easier to get replacement disks if yours are damaged/scratched/unreadable (i.e. send us the broken disks and some small amount to cover postage and we will send you a new copy of the game). Obviously it wouldnt apply for older stuff that they dont have anymore...
7.in addition to a paper manual, how about a PDF manual straight on the CD so that when the paper manual goes missing, you have a replacement.
Drivers run at Ring 0 (Score:5, Interesting)
StarForce stole technology? (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Starforce == no purchase (Score:5, Insightful)
Seriously, almost every game I own I've ended up downloading a CD crack for because either it's far too much of a pain to have to find a particular CD just to play a game that's already on my hard drive, or their appallingly bad 'copy protection' crap doesn't work with my SCSI DVD drive. These people are fscking over their customers who actually pay for the games, and wondering why we stop buying them.
No game should ever, ever, ever install a driver on a PC without asking and without making clear on the box that they will be doing so. Some of us use our PCs for real work as well as games, and the last thing I want is some stupid 'copy protection' driver screwing up my system.
More info on Starforce protection (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Actually ... (Score:5, Interesting)
... this is a pretty interesting point. Cedega (formerly WineX) does not have support for most of the new copy protection mechanisms around, and mentions as much in their documentation [transgaming.com]. This means that you can install and run pirated games in Linux that you wouldn't be able to in Windows.
I mention this not to promote piracy, but because it raises an interesting legal point - Transgaming are technically selling a product that allows you to circumvent copy protection - granted, in a very broad sense. But I wonder how long they'll be allowed to proceed before getting smacked down under the new US laws designed to prevent this sort of thing.
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Re:Games List ? (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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