As some of you know I've been raving about Galactic Civilizations 2 lately because it's an awesome game but Stardock, an indie developer. Anyway they decided to provide the game with no copy protection (that's how awesome they are) and a Star Force employee posted links to torrents of the game on their own forums. How ****ed up is that?



Read more about it here.

That's pretty ****ed up. Not to mention insanely ironic.

Heh... like it would matter if it DID have copy protection...

I hate Star Force almost as much as *bad metaphor here*

The metaphor you are searching for is "a bad rectal infection."

The interesting part is trying to figure out whether starforce is in fact responsible for flooding the internet with pirated versions of games that don't use their technology. Bastards.

Honestly I did not have a beef with Star Force until now. It never screwed up anything on my computer.e

I've had major issues with StarForce with certain games, namely X3, I'm trying to avoid it where possible but thats becoming increasingly difficult.

Don't know much about it but Star Force is one of the dumbest names I've ever heard.

aww, they took the link down.

I mean. Good.

:shifteyes:

i never had any major problems with starforce... other than the headache of having to reboot 4 times for one game to stop telling me i needed to reboot and just run

but now... *loads rifle and heads to the starforce offices*

Someone should find some Star Force boards and volunteer to fill in the gap of pirated games they offer, and link to Star Force protected and cracked games. That would be mildly funny.

[Edit: Oh, and someone needs to let JM know that most major games have their copy protection broken within 24 hours (is this right, I'm not positive). In the end, all the protection ends up doing is restricting legitimate users.]

That is a believable fact, but I don't know if it is 100% true.

I think it is, though.

[QUOTE=The Mega-ZZTer]Someone should find some Star Force boards and volunteer to fill in the gap of pirated games they offer, and link to Star Force protected and cracked games. That would be mildly funny.

[Edit: Oh, and someone needs to let JM know that most major games have their copy protection broken within 24 hours (is this right, I'm not positive). In the end, all the protection ends up doing is restricting legitimate users.][/QUOTE]

some even have their protection cracked a week before release however starforce uip until fairly recently was considered uncrackable (there was a work around that involved things like disabling your CD/DVD drives)

Starforce encrypts the game's executables and libraries in a form of bytecode, and wraps them with a virtual machine. It uses a public key, usually in the form of a CD key on the manual but sometimes burned to the disc itself, and a private "key" which is derived from the physical angle between the first and last sectors of the game disc. It also blacklists certain ripping/burning programs and disables SCSI CD-ROM drives if there are any IDE drives on the system. It's also been found that it slowly decreases the burn speed of CD/DVD burners, which can lead to physical hardware damage in certain drives.

It's a nasty bit of work. As bad as a virus. Ubisoft is one of their biggest supporters, so I suggest not buying any of their games.

Wow, even though I've never played it, I now want to buy that game just to support them.

For real.

The drive damage is especially effective on older cd burners.

Next to that, the encripted executables are known for being fairly heavy on the processor. Especially if you work around it with, say, CureROM, if you have an emulated drive running for non-illegal purposes.