More info here on a worrying trend by a copy protection vendor.
http://www.tgdaily.com/2006/02/13/starforce_revisited/It was early October of last year that I first spoke about copy protection and the ongoing The War on Game Pirates. Since then one of the star examples of that article, StarForce, has gone on to generate a grass roots effort against its use; and a few high-profile headlines after threatening to sue journalists for reporting on the alleged harmful effects of the system.
For those of you not familiar with it, StarForce is a rather belligerent anti-piracy measure which installs a hidden driver onto user's machines as they install a game using the system. This driver is, as described by Boycott StarForce, a driver which "grants ring 0 (system level) privileges to any code under the ring 3 (user level) privileges.
Thus, any virus or trojan can get OS privileges and totally control your system. Since Windows 2000, the Windows line security and stability got enhanced by separating those privileges, but with the Starforce drivers, the old system holes and instabilities are back and any program (or virus) can reach the core of your system by using the Starforce drivers as a backdoor
I think any copy protection measure that leaves a PC open to abuse should be promptlyt classified a trojan and terminated, we are the owners of our machines, not some over-zealous money hunter.
