Just to make things clear with this whole starforce vs. the people case. I shall write from a balanced viewpoint and try to explain matters to the best of my abilities with the current data. I shall begin by explaining what starforce actually is, what it does and how I think it goes about achieving this, I shall also comment on what it doesn’t do, and why. If you read this please comment on the version in my blog and if you have any suggested alterations they will be happily received.

Starforce, the copy protection software is basically a device controller (driver) that is stealthily installed into your operating systems core when a starforce protected game disk is first read. It is the fact that the drivers install themselves with no warning in this manor that causes alarm in the educated computer communities, starforce incorrectly stereotypes these intellectuals and groups them with the criminal world by grouping all educated computer users (the majority of whom are legitimate software users with no history of hacking) as ?hackers?. This is quite clearly prejudice on Starforce?s part and it causes the less computer savvy users to think that anyone complaining about starforce are simply hackers, when a large majority are simply educated computer users who can understand that what the starforce copy protection software is doing sounds fishy ? to summarise: no copy protection software should need to install anything on a customers computer that interferes with the inner workings of any of the components. Reasons for which I shall detail later in this article.

As I said above, the educated computer users are alarmed by what the starforce copy protection software is doing, quite simply because of how it works. Starforce (the copy protection program) installs four hidden drivers onto a customer?s computer. These drivers actively interfere with how your operating system talks with its hardware components ? this is very dangerous territory indeed, because most drivers that are designed to do this are designed to work with specific deceives, thus you get such things as graphics drivers and raid drivers. Starforce drivers are not hardware specific and so have the ability cause your hardware to work outside its safety margins which can then lead to irreparable damage being done to the device. For example: starforce interferes with how your operating system talks to your cdrom drive, causing the operating system to see device errors when none are occurring, in response to this windows steps down the device speed eventually it steps down to 16Bit mode. Most modern cd drives are not designed for this mode and so crash, which can in the best case cause a failed cd burn and in the worst case destroy the drive.

As of writing this I have only heard of the starforce drivers damaging cd/DVD reader/writers and hard drives. Gunark has one of his SATA hard drives destroyed by the drivers after attempting to use the official starforce remove tool, and he isn?t alone prepaq has had issued where the starforce drivers have stopped his DVD drive from working and analogue had a scsi drive destroyed. I myself have had issues with my DVD burner not functioning as it should since installing a starforce protected game.

Due to the nature of starforce copy protection many educated computer users are worried about how this will affect their computer. I must say that although I have had it adversely affect my computer I am part of the minority of people who have had problems. This could simply be because out of the vast number of computer users in the world, only the minority know the ins and outs of their computer, and its that minority who are noticing the problems and speaking up about them. It is the nature of the copy protection software and how it works that is alarming. When you install a program you expect that all it installs is what you want it to install, the game or the program files needed for the application to function, and only the files that are need. You don?t expect foreign drivers to be installed into the root of your operating system from where they pose a potent security risk by creating a nice little back door for any malicious program or code to abuse.

What the starforce drivers seem to actually do is provide a barrier between your operating system and its hardware devices. In short I see it as a hardware driver, controller driver. It is designed to stop you from copying a game by controlling how your cd burner works, it would appear that it works actively while a game is running and contrary to what Starforce say many user reports would lead to proof of it actually running passively on your computer interfering with your system regardless of what?s running ? only one other type of program I can think of does this and that is a virus.

Unfortunately starforce is categorising all computer users into one category and that is ?potential hacker?. I find this insulting as many others should; as I have no intention of ever hacking, I buy all of the games I play and take pride in my small collection mainly because I see cd and box art as a form of art and like to show my collection off. Because of Starforce?s unfair stereotyping of every computer user as ?potential hacker? is given them the ability to call anyone who complains a ?hacker?. This is wrong, if I complain I want to be a ?concerned customer? not a ?whiney little hacker?. Because I am a concerned customer, I do not wish to have software installed on my computer against my knowledge, especially software that messes with my hardware controllers to the extent of potentially damaging my expensive components; and you know what the sad fact is? Starforce copy protection does literally nothing to prevent piracy of the games that it ?protects?. All the pirates need to do is rip out the copy protection and re-publish. So what does the copy protection achieve? Nothing much, just a week at most delay on cracked software being published and a lot of problems on user?s computers.

To summarise, from a computer experts point of view: it is extremely worrying the way that starforce attempt to provide copy protection, these drivers pose a security risk and apparently a very real risk to system hardware. I would recommend against using the remove tool they supply and if you can reinstall windows to provide a fresh starforce free copy otherwise if reinstalling windows is for some reason implausible use the remove tool at your own risk. If you must buy starforce protected games, buy them for a consol or not at all in the case of the latter write a formal letter to the publishers to explain why and maybe something will be done.

Copy protection is all well and good, but should not be exercised at the risk of the end users computer, data and privacy.

Lastly as a footnote, doesn’t this all remind you of the Sony root kit ordeal?

This article is not finished, I have tried to write from a unbiased view even though I am firmly against the methods that starforce use to secure games. If you have read this article please leave a comment on my blog to let me know
Useful links: Boycott Starforce Homepage | The Boycott Forums | GameSpot Forum Post | Starforce Game List

Hard disk photo by Roberto F.

I am also very tight on security on my computer, I have a quarantine machine that I test most software on before running it on my computer because my computer is very, very important to me and I don’t want the extra problem of having to reinstall windows every so often because of extra crap that programs install on my computer without my consent. I thought I was safe, I only have the following installed:

• photoshop (uni work and hobby)
• word & excel 2003 (I don’t need the others i don’t use them)
• Visual C++ (I like to port old BASIC games to C++ so they will run on a x64 platform)
• Firefox (I dont like IE’s lack of support and security plus pngs look like shit in ie)
• winrar (my choice of unzipping app)
• winamp (i may be uninstalling this soon )
• intervideo windvd 7 (general dvd playing and because videolan isn’t as feature packed)
• videolan (for playing all those codexes that nothing else will for free)
• dameon tools (i like to copy my game disks to hdd and mount them makes for faster load times in my opinion, also usefull for checking linux boot disk iso’s)
• mirc (I dont really use this anymore, did once upon a time when i was heavily saturated in deviantart, but #alt.uk became crap so I left)
• macromedia dreamweaver (I have one of the free versions macromedia gave out on magazine, although its being uninstalled because I don’t really use it. I’m an old school coder and like to use notepad :p)
• Cinema 4D (I like to play around with 3D modeling and this appears to be the best way to do so, if you want to get into 3D stuff I recommend you buy a copy of cinema 4D and get started, its pretty easy to use)
• NVidia Mixer Application (it works in x64 which is good and controls the soundcard better than windows does so that is why i keep this necessary piece of extra baggage)
• Avast! AtiVirus (I run their free home edition of their anti virus application, it acts as a live firewall blocking malicious requests and such like as well as live anti virus scanning new files and programs as I open them, I should really shut down its email scanner because I don’t use any email software on my computer)
• Skype & MSN Messenger 7 (Got to keep in touch)
• Finally Interactual (it came with intervideo windvd, I installed it at my request, although I havent any use for it so I guess I shall uninstall it pretty soon)

So as you can see, unlike many computers mine is pretty clean with only 15 applications that I have installed (the rest being bundled with xp) and some of those are being uninstalled soon.

My problem is that Starforce copy protection has been installed on my computer against my will, and is actively fucking with my cd rom, thus the following drive errors that have been stopping my cd burns (a guy has to backup his photos and stuff) costing me money with broken disks, and because I’m on a 64bit OS its messing with the 32Bit emulator build into windows64 called syswow64 due to windows not liking what it is doing.
Starforce copy protection is seen my myself and many many others as malware (a lot like the sony rootkit). It is a piece of unnecessary crap that should never be installed on mine or anyone else’s computer. It poses a problem on two main levels:

• under Windows XP, if packets are lost during the reading or writing of a disk, XP interprets this as an error and steps the IDE speed down. Eventually it will revert to 16bit compatibility mode rendering a CD/DVD writer virtually unusable. In some circumstances certain drives cannot cope with this mode and it results in physical hardware failure (Most commonly in multi format CD/DVD writer drives). A sure sign of this step down occurring is that the burn speeds will get slower and slower (no matter what speed you select to burn at). Starforce, on a regular basis, triggers this silent step down. Until it reaches the latter stages most people do not even realise it is happening.
• The Starforce drivers, installed on your system, grant ring 0 (system level) privileges to any code under the ring 3 (user level) privileges. Thus, any virus or trojan can get OS privileges and totally control your system. Since Windows 2000, the Windows line security and stability got enhanced by separating those privileges, but with the Starforce drivers, the old system holes and instabilities are back and any program (or virus) can reach the core of your system by using the Starforce drivers as a backdoor.
  

I have noticed both things happening (see image above) these errors began to pop up around the time (checked my logs) that I installed the game X2 which stealthily installs the Starforce “malware”. I have also noticed more cd’s as coasters while before installing the game I had 0 bad burns, or burns that just stopped for no reason. I have also noticed (and this is a nice feature of XP64) that security errors have been showing up relating to a 32Bit processor stating bad driver or incompatibility issues, I have traced this to these starforce drivers (which took a while because I had to learn how).

So before today I was sure my computer has safe and secure with everything running as best as I could get it to, and then I find out about this, now I want to get rid of it, because it is “damaging” my computer and costing me money with respect to toasted cds. Below you can see the processes in windows device manager, however normally they are hidden. To show them you have to open device manager go to the view drop down and select show hidden devices. If the malware has been installed you should see the following:

Not one but four starforce devices! They are un-needed junk, that is basically slowing down your computers cdrom drive amongst other things, they need to be removed! They should never have been installed in the first place, and thats what bugs me the most is that I wasn’t warned – and also they are incompatible with my system which is causing ever more problems than they do under a 32bit OS.

Well ok, before I attempt to brute force remove them, I have researched a lot into the matter, I quote slashdot “some users report difficulty in keeping their systems stable due to conflicts, and think they’ve tracked it down to the StarForce protection.” and Broadbandreports “Users report that the software gobbles up computing cycles, slows CD drive read-times, creates CD-R read errors even after removal, and is responsible for a number of device conflicts – particularly with external USB drives. Users who have tried to remove the product manually have often damaged their systems to the point of needing a fresh OS install.“

So its not just me who is finding problems traced back to this malware, reading those I can also ditto the usb driver issue, I plugged a friends pen drive into my computer windows installed the drivers automatically and then just rebooted, upon start up I got the error report, windows had a system critical error due to device drivers, and it wasn’t the pen drive, it was these bloody Starforce protection thing, just back then I didn’t know about them, but looking back on error logs and id codes I can trace the problem to starforce. I have run windows 32Bit solidly for days on end really hammering it and have only ever had to reboot once because of memory leaks, my x64 version of windows xp has never in the 5 months I’ve been running it ever crashed, explorer has had to reboot a few times but never resulting in data loss (explorer rebooting meaning that explorer.exe crashes, windows closes explorer and then starts it again all other apps running remain running with no problem so i usually browse the net while waiting for the startbar to come back).

Ok, so I have checked the stories, found out the problem of many errors shown on my computer, traced error reports and finally found out why thanks to boycott starforce as well as how to remove. So I shall now go about the process and shall report back asap.

Edit: Well that was quick, I just downloaded the Starforce Cleaner Utility from online security and it took less than a second before asking me to reboot :/ And guess what, yup it did jack shit. Bugger all, fucking nothing! So yes, after all of this the remove tool doesn’t work, the only thing I can think of doing now is reinstalling windows. Thankyou a lot starforce, now I have to spend hours backing up my files just to fix a problem YOU CREATED!

Disclaimer: All the games I own have been bought, fortunately the only games I play now are UT2k3, Sim City and Guildwars. All software is either from magazines or bought. I am not endorsing piracy simply standing up for my right to protect my investments.

:info: I wrote a follow up which can be seen here.