One more thing - This article was never posted on Toms USA - I just looked again. It is only on the UK version of the site.

-S

It´s on http://www.tgdaily.com, an affiliate site. The link to the article also appears on the main Tomshardware.com site.

Subman...First off... I perfectly understand your frustration and how you feel. I have emails from loyal UBI customers saying they have already began thinking of doing what you suggested. And what people do in their own living rooms and bedrooms or basements is no concern of mine. And you nor I nor any moderator can stop them... Maybe the Internet police can? LOL

As far as the article... Aaron told me it will be located in the USA as well.
I will ask him for more detail on this for you. The article will not change at all...Same article.

HA here it is: http://www.tgdaily.com/2006/02/13/starforce_revisited/


SC

Perhaps not, but I can sure as hell stop the discussions about it here!

Wanna see?

JCC

No need to test your powers here though - "I agree!" "I agree!" Is that good enough? :D

-S

Guys,

make your votes with your wallets, and Starforce either will stay (then all discussions are useless), or it will not trigger discussions anymore, for it will be gone.

I know of two companies at least in Germany that have kicked it out due to losses in sales for their software products. Probably there are more. The wallet-method works, and very well so.

The generalization that all customers complaining about SF are just hallucinating or have a system-typical problem or are potential pirates or do not know nothing, cannot be defended seriously, and that the producers of SF have censored, deleted, banned even polite questions and critical feedback is obvious fact for everyone who has visited their forums in the past and saw this kind of things happening - like me. The ring 1 - ring 3 issue I cannot judge, for I am not technically competent to do so, but the arguments that describe it sound reasonable for me. It also was repeatedly mentioned and illustrated in various boards now, that SF actively tries to manipulate the general anti-SF-atmosphere on several boards, by sending their "agents" there and making according postings, nevertheless hide their identity of having relations with SF. I do not say by that that this is taking place in this forum, too, but I would advise both critics and defenders of SF to formulate their arguments accordingly. Else you can easily get misunderstood.

Last I say: I had problems whenever I had SF beeing part of my installation. probelems did not pop up if i made sure that SF was gone. multiple experience like this, on two different systems. I do not need more arguments.

Again: make your votes with your wallets. That is the only language business does understand. Petitions will not change anything , if the wallet-vote shows a different result, so spare your time for something more precious.

On the question of who chooses the copy protection...
I just got a reponse from Ubisoft.
They choose it.
I actually knew this as they told me in the past they had a contract with SF. :yep:

SC

A Note:

I was just interviewed for a radio show regarding Starforce. More details to be posted as they come in.

Cool. Is it an internet friendly radio that streams their broadcast?

-S

Yeah. It'll go live February 22. I'll give details then.

I didn't do a stellar performance, personally, but I got the point across, I think.

Some of you may be interested what I have done, given the way that some Ubisoft have been treating the users in the Ubi forums in the past few days.

I have issued this notice:

Under European law it now falls upon Ubisoft to prove that these issues where not known, are not being caused by software installed with their games.


Simple guide to the sale of goods act on the Department of Trade and Industry site.

http://www.dti.gov.uk/ccp/topics1/fa...legoodsact.htm

I thought it was a logical impossiblity to prove a negative.

JCC

I thought it was very illogical to also prove that SF copy protection was flawed with Starforces rules of their contest.

These UK laws are written by and for the consumer.
Not by people that are playing games with contests.
Did you read the guide John?

If a consumer chooses to request a repair or replacement, then for the first six months after purchase it will be for the retailer to prove the goods did conform to contract (e.g. were not inherently faulty)

Can you point me to some top tier journalists who have tested and evaluated SF? I've found one: StarForce Interview and Piracy Discussion http://www.firingsquad.com/features/...rce_interview/

It gives an interview with SF and their replies to questions.

Have there been any other independant reviews of SF?

thanks.
Neal

I wish that article was unbiased.

However its based upon 80% Security Technologies Marketing spiel and 20% industry issued hype.

Those of us in the industry (That do not listen to marketing spiel, only genuine facts) are fully aware that the markets are barely affected by Software piracy. The reality is that although people are purchasing more than they ever did the market has not grown enough to compensate for the saturation/Diversity of platforms.

Sadly what could have been a good balanced article representing both sides of the argument ends up being yet more of the standard issue media spiel.

Most of the media are to reliant upon being at press conferences to risk losing that position to their rivals. So rarely these days do we get members of the press going that extra mile to report what is really going on.

Gone are the days when we could trust the press to supply us real untainted information.

If you want real reports, search on the blog sites. There data is so raw that even Governments try to silence them.

Lets look at Rootkits, did any top tier journalist test for Rootkits and publish it before the class action was brought?

Its the same with TrojanKits, they are all aware of them, however nobody will risk going to press with the entire story until they have the legal assurance of litigation being in place.

Realistically does not take a Top Tier Journalist or somebody like me that has been in the industry for over 1/4 of Century to tell you that this is a time bomb of issues just waiting to go off.

DRM's fail, Service packs kill them. How long do you think it is going to be financially viable to support older versions. When SP3 hits your systems do you think the likes of Ubisoft etc will be willing to still fund updates for a DRM on what is by then a seriously bargain bin game?

So wave bye bye to your favourite games.........

btw its good to see you up in this section taking an interest.

I get it, we can only trust information that comes with a "Boycott Starforce" tag.

hehe, probably the same as we can only trust information that comes from SF itself...

(you can trust that, 'cause I got a 'boycott SF' tag)

Sry, sarcasm off. 'Vested interests' as it were on both sides of the argument, but I'll say this; neither Soulcommander or ThirteenthHouR have made my ROM drive spin up endlessly by their talk. But SF's words have not fixed my problems, and since certain drivers are now gone from my system so is my spinning drive issue.

Hey Jumpy,

Can you enlighten me to what your sig says? I don't understand that all your base belong to Islam thing - does that mean all of us belong to Islam? Or what? Sounds ominous!

-S

That is not precisely the case, many other independents are prepared to stick their necks out and produce a balanced article on these issues.

Personally I was shocked by just how biased the Firing Squad response was. They did have the means to produce a well balanced and informative article, but instead chose to take a cracker/pirate bashing stance which really does detract from the real technical issues that are involved (A real cop out in most peoples eyes).

As I said nobody (Other than sales executives buys into that junk), however the problem is that it is sales executives who decide what DRM's they are going to use onf software. If they had actually run the complexity of SF's driver past the engineers they would have pointed out that although it is extremely clever in concept. With the complexity of the verification process it is just a catalogue of errors waiting to happen.

In the case of the Demo or Free game versions, the only way it can protect is to attack the ATAPI filter section of the registry to prevent 3rd party apps like Kernel debuggers and drive emulators from working. If this only occurred whilst the game was running nobody would have any problems with that, however these are permanent changes which mostly result in Code 31, Code 32, Code 19, Code 39, or Code 41 errors within windows.

This includes, the illusion that your CD/DVD drive has failed (Unless you own a plextor, LC, Liteon or Samsung in which it can be actual physical failure, Ubisoft already paid Soulcommander in kind for the damage caused to his Plextor drive by SF's Virtual IDE protection Driver, they gave him 4* latest title PS2 games as compensation, so it shard to understand how they can deny this is happening when they have already accepted liability). Problems with burning apps, unable to run many programming IDE's (because according to Security Technologies, because you program code you must be a cracker or a pirate), you cannot use Alcohol120% or any other virtual drive in their eyes either as you must be stealing the software (Although those 3rd party applications actually have many legitimate uses).


Before you jump on me about this, go back and look at that rather biased article Security Technologies openly admit to blocking those applications.

Do you really think Security Technologies should be deciding what you can or cannot run on your system when the game is not running?

lol np, scroll down the page in the following link for posts by TteFAboB and myself.
http://www.subsim.com/phpBB/viewtopi...e+belong+islam

It's a comment from TteFAboB playing on this, at the time I thought it was particularily funny and was ideal material for a sig, as I mention further down the page in the subsim link.
Not meant to be overly sinister, just an amusing reflection on things given the current trend of middleast topics here on Subsim ;)