Hatin’ on DRM (and other things)

Someone’s dissected the DRM used in Fallout 3.

http://talkjack.wordpress.com/2008/10/25/fallout-3-drm/

Apparently the DRM implementation here is weird. The game uses SecuROM, but it’s only used in the install and launcher application, but the game itself doesn’t use it. So if you want to, make sure the driver is removed, and just start the proper .exe file (I’ll leave the details to talkjack).

Unfortunately, it seems like the installation process might install the driver. I’m wondering if that means you would have to be an admin to install the game in the first place, or if you can avoid getting the securom driver in the first place by just installing as a normal/limited user.

Pity. A friend of mine bought this game, and he says it’s pretty good. But I’m not buying it.

Tages installs a device driver in ring 0.

Tages has been known to conflict with a few disc image emulators and the presence of both SCSI and SATA drivers in the system. Tages has also in f.ex The Witcher removed certain key non-player characters if it believes your copy is a pirated copy.

For more information: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TAGES

StarForce installs a driver in ring 0. Major drawback is if a game was protected by a SF Pro 3 system, it might not work or even reboot the computer if run on a 64bit OS. Just updating the SF protection is also not sufficient, the games developer/publisher would also have to release an updated version of the game.

Has been known to be distributed on demos, even demos distributed on Steam.

Has been known to cause system instability and hardware malfunctions.

For more information: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/StarForce

The latest version of SafeDisc (v4) installs its own Windows device driver, named “secdrv.sys”, which enables ring0 access to the application. This means that even if you do run your games as a limited account, the game and trojans and other malware might still have admin access.

This has opened up one potential security exploit already, see http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/advisory/944653.mspx if you’re interested.

Also, most installers don’t set the correct permissions, so every user could change this to point at whichever executable you might want, which would then run at the next reboot. And it would run with full admin access.

For more information: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SafeDisc

Current versions (i.e. v7) has 2 modes of running.

If you run as a non-admin, it’ll install a service called UAService7.exe, which works in ring 3 mode (not so bad, and works around one of my pet peeves, i.e. requiring administrator mode to install, or worse, run the game.

If, however, you haven’t wisened up to the benefits of not running as an admin, it’ll install a driver in ring 0, which basically gives it full access to whereever it might want.

For more information: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Securom

Welcome to my ranting corner.

I’ve been a gamer for quite a while, and I’ve bought a lot of games over the years. However, there’s been more and more annoyances associated with doing this, and that is the increasingly draconic DRM which games are infected with.

It’s pissing me off, and this is my little anti-drm ranting corner, where I will try to detail a few of the drawbacks with the current bout of DRM, and which games the gaming industry has lost sales to because they’ve basically just pissed me off too much.