STARRR FOOORRRRCE! *breathe*

Heh, I've been getting strange errors from my laptop when returning from Standby. Something like "tried to act on impersonated thread but thread was not impersonated" or some crap like that

Anyway, the error is from my SMART Monitor application. Never understood it.

Give you three, no, ONE guess whats done it....

Thing is, it was fine until the other day. i uninstalled the starforce drivers again yesterday and now the monitor app wont even start up!

In fact, I uninstalled them before but they didnt *really* remove themselves and remained in the dev manager.

Why is this even LEGAL?

Heheh, It's Microsoft raping your ass :)

You're not using XP are you?

LAME thread! Get a life both of you...

It's got nothing to do with Microsoft enay... It's got everything to do with craptastic starforce copy protection. It's just shy of a freakin virus.

0 Eyed Jack, I just removed your lastremaining eyeball.

Tell me, How is being ass-raped by StarForce and yelling about it because i'm peed off, make me Lame?



Precisely! If a small-time company had come up with StarForce then it *would* have been classed as a virus.

What is this StarFarce thing? How does it crap-up your system? I don't know coz I never play PC games. :)

Big10p: It's a CD 'protection' program, that works by hooking itself into your IDE driver system, to all IDE addressing calls are made through it, and it can block the ones it doesn't like.
Side effect is that it may break some CD/DVD burner functionality or interfere with other programs than the ones it is supposed to be protecting as well, locking you out of legitimate uses of your own hardware & software.

Well, that's simply outrageous! :/

It's malware. And you are 100% correct.


The thing is, it may overwrite previous functionality also, so that an uninstall of Starforce MAY leave you with a working system, a partially working system, or a system that doesn't even recognise your CD/DVD drive.

Boycott Starforce
Make a stand in your own little way.

The ironic side effect is that these draconian protection schemes can do more harm then good:
- People may pass on buying a title they want, because they don't want to risk blowing up their computer
- People may pass on buying other titles from the same manufacturer as well, especially after experiencing problems before
- Starforce isn't 100% compatible with all drives either, so some legitimate purchases won't even work on the buyers computer
- People who pirate a copy have a *better* user experience than legitimate buyers, which can convince people who are on the edge anyway to pick the pirated copy

And the best part is that since there are multiple similar-but-incompatible anti-copy implementations from other vendors that won't work together, so if you happen to buy a certain product from another vender all of a sudden all your starforce 'protected' discs may stop working too.

Maybe it's just me, but I can't help thinking that some of these DRM 'protection' schemes have an awful lot in common with 'protection' offered by the maffia...
Nice computer you have there. Shame if anything should happen to it.

I'm pretty sure it's the other way around - the other protection systems don't overwrite normal IDE operations - it's Starforce that screws up the other copy protection systems.

OH MY LORD - I did NOT know this:

You know, that's the third time you've used a serious crippling injury as a means to insult people. Paralysis is a serious issue, and I don't think its appropriate for you to be using it in the fashion you are.

I can certainly vouche for that. The Starforce protection that was appearently installed with the DEMO version of LEGO Starwars (and not subsequently removed when the demo was uninstalled), caused Civilization IV to think I was using a pirate copy. I even returned it because I thought it was defective. They sent it back ofcourse because it wasn't - which I found out when I tried playing it on the laptop.

So it's a rootkit? Well that worked so well for Sony. Is this well documented?

I don't know if it also cloaks its files from the operating system based on their filename, which is one of the major points Sony got in trouble over...

But yeah, even if it's not a true rootkit, it comes dangerously close to one.

First I've read of it... but the average or even experienced gamer wouldn't know something like that. This comes off -the- official boycott Starforce site and I doubt they need to make stuff like this up =]

WOW. thats a long list of games that use it. I thought there were about a dozen, but there are loads. Over 100 in fact!!!

WEll they do have an agenda. :o> ANyway, if they're making this claim, certainly they have some sort of proff of concept for this attack? If not, I find it a bit hard to believe.

Now don't get me wrong - I hate Starforce as much as the next guy. But I think there are enough legit reasons to hate it, without having to make @#!* up.

The really disturbing bit is how it's used on really appalling games that no right thinking individual would want to own, much less copy. What exactly are they trying to protect? Isn't that like having a high tech security and anti-theft system installed in your Ford Pinto?

That was exactly what I meant to say... sure they have an agenda... but the reasons against Starforce are numerous enough without rootkitting around =] So it -must- be true! <grin>