Destroy your PC and receive $1000 from StarForce

[nst6563]

would it really be so hard to write your own program to monitor for a starforce process and if detected, erase the eeprom on the DVD drive and deleting itself thus rendering the drive useless on ANY machine???

just a thought...the program wouldn't be hard to code (as long as you know the routines to write to the eeprom of the drive), and could be disquised as a system process.

but still...lame excuse for a PR stunt.

 

[rcf1987]

Oh god...Good going getting the [H] into your ill-thought out email.....

I was thinking about that after I sent it I hope I didn't screw myself. Oh well

 

[M1dknight]

I was just reading up on this after seeing this post and can't see why more fuss has never been made over this stupid program, just a quick check of their website shows that the older version of the drivers (does not say which) introduced a security flaw in windows.

Starforce page

Why do companies do this? It makes people more likely to pirate stuff if anything just to avoid their stupid copy protection methods.

 

[EricDawg]

Russian-Americans are odd folks. They act like American wannabees. Everything done over the top. Gets old.

 

[EinsteiN]

would it really be so hard to write your own program to monitor for a starforce process and if detected, erase the eeprom on the DVD drive and deleting itself thus rendering the drive useless on ANY machine???

just a thought...the program wouldn't be hard to code (as long as you know the routines to write to the eeprom of the drive), and could be disquised as a system process.

but still...lame excuse for a PR stunt.

MS Windows has a built in ability to have a "Filter Driver" installed for a optical drive so a process can monitor (and possible control) IO for the drive.
It's used by some CopyControl systems, more specific the ones who can be disabled by disabling autorun. MS Windows IFS Kit

A file system filter driver is an optional driver that adds value to or modifies the behavior of another driver, specifically, a file system. It is a kernel-mode component that runs as part of the NTexecutive. A file system filter driver can filter I/O operations for one or more file systems or file system volumes. Depending on the nature of the driver, filter can mean log, observe, modify, or even prevent. Typical applications for file system filter drivers include antivirus, encryption, replication, and hierarchical storage management products.

I for one don't appriciate the often clumsy efforts to stop casual copying of media. Since they don't know how their product will behave when combined with other rootkits/DRM/malware/etc. All they do is introduce another new possible point of system failure/compromise without the customers consent.

I've also had my runin with the starforce protection, and it reinstalls it self with every start of a protected game and are _very_ picky regarding the optical drives it'll work with.

</rant>

-E