This is exactly what I have been telling UBI....No one thinks it would be a game doing it. I have instructions on what to do...Shoot me your email in a pm on here and I will send u the instructions on what to do.
As far as contacting UBI.... Its vital you write me!

Well, to supply a little contect to the discussion...

In the past few years that I have been Moderating these forums I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of threads I have had to lock.

At least up until the Starforce situation arose.

Since then I bet I have had to lock or delete over a dozen threads and spend a great deal of time watching the few that survived until they came to their own natural conclusion.

And the reason is that peole... some people.... go completely off the deep end at the meer mention of the word Starforce. Ordinarilly rational people totally lose it on the subject and jump way WAY over the boundaries of what is acceptable behaviour on these forums. Name calling, conspiracy theories, threats and plain old verbal abuse.... you name it and the topic of Starforce delivers in spades.

Now, just for a second, put yourself in the position of the people who developed Starforce. Why did they do it?

(Anyone who thinks that they developed it with the intent of screwing people over please stop reading this now, because you are either pretty much a lost cause or you are too immature to get what follows.)

The only rational conclusion is that they developed it in an attempt to put out a product that the manufacturers could use to help maximize their profit (to reinvest in future developement) and to make a living for themselves. So then, on that basis, how would you feel to be the subject of the type of personal abuse you have seen on these and other forums.

I can tell you I sure as hell would be defensive. And then some.

And lastly I am always amazed that people who proclaim the loudest that they don't believe in warez always seem to know where all the best sites are and all about the latest developments. I couldn't find a real warez site with both hands, a roadmap and a flashlight, but some people always seem to have their fingers on the pulse of that particular situation.

Given that, I would be even more defensive.

JCC

Because this is such a generalized Starforce thread, I think it should be in general.

Besides that, I dunno 'bout "begginer level hackers." Not the spelling, mind you, but the hacking part. This thread just reminded me to check for the....fixes, and lo and behold, there's one available for v1.4b. For months only v1.0 was available; I'd call that "beginner". Now that v1.4b has been taken care of, I'd call that intermediate. They've been promoted to intermediate level hackers.


First and formost, StarForce Technologies is a company. You will toe the company line, just like Microsoft and Wal-Mart and Target and Best Buy, or your company will fall. That stands above anything else. So StarForce had better argue it's side without hesitation or doubt, because another company will do a better job of marketing and your company will go under. Tomshardware has made ripples in the past with Ati, Intel, Nvidia, and even AMD; but Slashdot has linked them quite a few times over the years, and that's one massive aspect of marketing. Don't catch a bad Slashdot link. If you have a poor product, you don't want Slashdot linking to it. The problem now is the the majority of Slashdot readers also know about Tomshardware, because of the linkings.

Secondly, this issue is building. You can argue all you'd like, but the end result is like the gun vote in Brazil. Your investors don't mean Jack compared to your customers, and regardless of the lies for which you manage to purchase CNN airtime, your customers are the final judge and jury. You can talk all day long, but when your customers have problems because Liton drives are cheap at Newegg, your sales are going to drop. Just like the MPAA and the RIAA are having trouble with the college kids; this next generation will pinch off a loaf on the entire marketing sector, just as soon as they start hitting the voting booths in their late 20's. It's coming around with just a little bit more time, and a few more 14 year olds sued. StarForce had better address the hardware issues, today, right now, or the entire Digital-Rights-Management/Digital-Restrictions-Management-Because-You-Have-No-Rights-To-Digital-Media will become a focal topic for even the most common Joe Sixpack. The kind of people that see 400x digital zoom and now understand why that is inferior to 22x optical zoom. Or why a 10 watt LED light-group is so much more efficient than a 100 watt incandescent bulb.


The entire internet is the bane of marketing. Shut down the internet to keep your business model, or adapt. Or fail.

Failure is an option.

John I want you to know this has been a personal issue yes and I have personally been working with UBI on this issue. We have started the STARFORCE INVESTIGATION....Namely when UBI sees this on an email they will respond accordingly. Many people have personally wrote me asking what can I do SF or UBI isnt helping and my drive isnt working. WELL now UBI is trying and SF trys to a pont and then leaves us hanging! Thats why I was so upset with SF response to the TOMS hardware article. I guess if it hasnt happened to you you just don't have the passion as many of us do.

Never in gaming history have I had so much trouble. Im 46... Build PCS..thats my business.

But I thank you John for your comments anyway.
Also I want you to know I do NOT hack. I have no hack tools what soever on my system...I can tell you thats the first thing that SF blames you for doing and it upsets many of us who buy these games to support the developers.

Have you given them the link to the Starforce driver update? IIRC they have already released three updates. Have you tried the update? Sometimes even an update of the CD burning software could help.

Its a bit hard to try the latest update when its been determined that the drive died because of Starforce. But you probably haven't seen my past thread to know that. I have many others who have been in touch with SF going through UBI first and again nothing has worked. Some lose all functions and some lose just part of the drives functions. Yes SF has them try the uninstall utility. Sometimes with partial success. Other times it did nothing to help. Please I appreciate you trying to help but I have done more than you will ever know! This has been an on going thing with me since about May of this year. Ihave even sent the drive in for testing and talked to the head of Plextor.

How can you be so sure that SF killed your drive? All kind of manufacturers have all kinds of quality problems, I´ve seen a lot of hardware components die prematurely.

That information along with others info is and has been gathered. In alot of these cases the drive in question would spin up very very fast and for a prolonged period of time when the computer is first booted up. We are still gathering info...People continue to write and almost every letter I get its almost the same scenerio. Look at the recent poster in here. It happend after the install of the game. But would the normal person ever think it was the game or part of it that would do that? Heck NO! I didnt...

But this post is not a debate over if it was SF ..IT WAS! I would like to stick to the topic.
Also...Plextor got my drive and have never seen anything like this before. Its many many documents that I have recieved from many people. There is NO doubt that it was SF that did this. NO doubt.

Well, even if SF triggered it (which is bad enough and shouldn´t have happened), the real cause seems to be that the drive had a crappy firmware/OS design. A "good" drive cannot be over-revved!

I'd be happy if my SH3 (DVD) disc could be removed from the drive, for safe-keeping, regardless of the type protection it uses, although I'm betting SF must need the DVD in the drive..

True.

From my experience, if i find a fix so i can preserve the original this does not mean i have visited a warez site to find it? i wouldn't go near a warez site with a 10 foot pole. They contain viruses, porn dialup hacks etc., total rubbish. There are good popular sites where fixes are available they dont support warez. They are clean, they have forums with rules etc., The site i visit has AMD support!
The trouble is these days is if you mention crack or fixes or talk that language then you are considered a warez downloader, or hacker or pirate. The label has stuck. I personally hate warez.

A good copy protection should not cause problems with the drives..How about that to chew on? I didn't ask to buy a game for my drive to malfunction. I'ts easy for you to blame someone else, many cdrw and combo drive manufacturers huh? Its not just Plextor.

Of course it shouldn´t! But can you prove that SF alone is responsible for killing drives and not a combination of chipset, a certain optical drive with a certain (faulty) firmware revision, IDE drivers and SF? I doubt you can!!! I would be very happy if you could, for that would mean that SF is in real trouble. But computer problems are not always black/white, most problems are a combination of many factors.

Plextor and other manufacturers should check their drives/firmware, something is wrong if a driver or any piece of software can cause the drive to seriously over-rev. As I said, the drive should not allow that! Maybe SF just sends some kind of standard command to the optical drive that it somehow "misinterprets", who knows... I know about 7 systems with very different chipsets and drives were SF doesn´t cause any problems at all, so it´s, as you know, not a general problem.

I, unfortunatly, tried sh3 on a brand new laptop ( acer travelmate 4501 WLMi ) who was working fine, including a out of the box nero 6 (not OEM). Used it to watch vd while travelling ....

- The games stared fine, then crashed.
- I decided to updated the sf drivers, gone fine.
- After restart, realized my hardware was "incomptible" (ati mobility radeon 9700/64 was not powrfull enought )
- Used he desinstalled software AND the sf tols provided online.


Since then, i can't read anymore dvd. My drives just go spinning up very very fast, and then veryvery low ... before the reading stop's

I just don't want to resintall every thing from scratch ....



After a little thinking, i have to assume thos facts:
- before sh3 test, my laptop was fine
- after sh3 test, no more dvd movies on it.

SF is the only thing who come up to me ....

Three email + one written letter to SF, i am still waiting for support.


I am thinking to rma my laptop to acer, but, does the use of SF drivers a breach to acer eula ?? and shoulda point my finger to SF when talking to acer ???

Reboot Windows to "Safe Mode", then use the SF removal tool. Maybe it works then. If it still doesn´t work boot "Safe Mode" again and delete sfsync02.dll and sfdrv01.dll in c:\windows\system32\drivers.