After it is cracked, it may take only another revision to put the hackers at bay for another 9 months or so, but 9 months or so is all it needs to protect the product for. Prior to StarForce, all the other copy protections were a total joke and hacked days after release.Ĭompanies only need to protect their game for the first few critical months before the game hits the bargain bin. I’m sure they will eventually prevail, but even when they do, I think this has proven that the technology is viable and worthwhile. Even though a relatively easy hack is to just disconnect your IDE drive and then mount an image of the game as usual, the hackers don’t consider that a “win” over StarForce. The hacker community is just pissed that it’s working so well. But I don’t think anyone has proven that it is destructive in any way. It is very invasive – it installs a driver which directly connects to the drive, not using any other Windows drivers.

After all, it’s been “proven” that the software is fine. I wonder if that’s the defense Ubisoft will use in court. Of course, at the end of that month and a half, when no one had shown up to take the “challenge,” the company announced that it was proof their software was fine. And, of course, you only had a month and a half to show up at their office. If you failed, the company would publicly shame you on their website.

In order to win the contest, you had to bring a PC (must still be under warranty) to their Moscow headquarters at your own expense - then install their software on their premises, and then prove that your CD/DVD drive no longer worked (only one of the various complaints some have had). Remember, Starforce is also the same company that launched a silly publicity stunt contest to “prove” its software didn’t do any damage. Remember Starforce? The somewhat insecure makers of video game copy protection, who are often criticized for problems brought about by their copy protection system? It appears that someone finally got fed up enough with them to sue… However, they’re not suing Starforce (based in Russia), but video game maker Ubisoft for using Starforce’s copy protection, which they claim opens up huge security holes on computers without warning and without an easy way to remove the software. Fri, Mar 31st 2006 03:49pm - Mike Masnick

Starforce driver windows 7