The gawd-almighty merged DRM in Silent Hunter V thread

[Letum]

Nah, that's not the bit...one moment...

edit: Here we go:

I'm not quoting in full, so I advise anyone reading this to read it from HERE.

Q.11. There are reports by consumers that some DRM software damages optical drives. StarForce, SecuROM, etc. Do you think these complaints are based on objective reality? If so, what causes this technically?

[...]

-b. If so, have you taken steps to correct this?

In 2006 when it was first mentioned about optical drives being damaged started to appear over the internet, we launched a round of deep investigations and tests with help of our clients and partners worldwide. No one was able to reproduce the issue and we were in great confidence that StarForce didn’t have anything to do with it.

But reports were continuing to come in and things were that we had to attempt something towards solving the issue. That was a tough decision but we’ve removed some tricks that were most bug capacious such as direct hardware access (DHA). DHA had been designed to communicate with optical drive directly bypassing the Windows drivers- cdrom.sys and atapi.sys and allowed us to implement tremendous anti-emulation stuff. Removing that feature reduced overall reliability level, but greatly improved compatibility. We believed that DHA made optical drive un-accessible by the OS and seems we were right - since that time we haven’t receive any optical drive failure reports.