Game
StarForce 5.0 Defeated
StartForce, the used-to-be-popular copy protection system, seems to get some market in China after other big game companies, like Ubisoft, EA, dump it to avoid damage to customers’ PC and potential lawsuit.
A new game title, The Legend of Swordsman & Fairy 4, released on August 2007 in both Taiwan and Mainland China, uses Starforce 5.0 Pro as anti-pirate system. The new Starforce 5.0 includes online activation and the traditional “key disk” verification. On the first day of release, the activating demand is so high that the authentication server was crashed and offline for 24 hours. However, 10 days later, a “patch”, let users bypass the online verification procedure appeared, also with a detailed guide on burning the “key disk” using standard CDR and CD-Writer. Thus the new StarForce 5.0 is completely defeated(again).
This also becomes another case that pirated versions work better than original, since the online system has a ridiculous 10 activations/per year limitation. Also, a paid user has reported that the new StarForce broken the optical driver in his Thinkpad T61 Laptop and was out of warranty since CSR claimed this as solely user’s fault as StarForce was a known malware.
