SecuROM: Something EA Gamers Should Definitely Know About!
Back in February 1982, Trip Hawkins had a meeting with Don Valentine of Sequoia to discuss starting a new venture, Amazin’ Software. Hawkins was encouraged to leave Apple, where Hawkins served as director of Project Marketing, and to persuade him, Valentine allowed him to used Sequoia Capital’s spare office space to start off with. On May 28, our dear friend Trip incorporated and established the company with a personal investment of an estimated 200,000 USD.
Twenty-seven years later in 2009, Amazin’ Software is Electronic Arts, and they are one of the world’s largest third-party developers with studios stationed around the world. Their brand name Maxis released a new, big video game named Spore that only few know contains a type of invasive DRM (Digital Rights Management) software inside going by the name of SecuROM, a software that acts as a rootkit to protect game developers’ precious games from piracy. SecuROM is installed with Spore without knowledge of the end user, and Electronic Arts is being sued over SecuROM in that with the installation of Spore is a “second, undisclosed program” and that although “consumers are told that the game uses access control and copy protection technology, consumers are not told that this technology is actually an entire separate, stand-alone program which will download, install, and operate on their computers, along with the Spore download. Consumers are given no control, rights, or options over SecuROM. The program is uninstallable. Once installed, it becomes a permanent part of a computer’s software portfolio. Even if the user uninstalls Spore and entirely deletes it from their computer [which can be done easily with the uninstaller executable], SecuROM remains a fixture in their computer unless and until the consumer completely wipes their hard drive through reformatting or replacement of the drive.”
It just so happens that I managed to pick up SecuROM by downloading the Spore Creature Creator. I found it when running rootkitrevealer, and when I found it, I accidentally mistook it for Sony’s XCP rootkit that I had not so long ago. When I actually studied the path well enough and I found the words “securom”, I decided to google it. When I did, I found a procedure to remove it. It looked like it would be some work, since I would have to work on editing the registry. It turned out not to be that hard. I simply extracted some files, ran the command prompt, deleted a few registry entries, and restarted the computer. You can find out how to remove it here, and then we’ll all hope that EA and Sony (the company who made SecuROM) loses, and we’ll never see this rootkit again.
Notes: Getting rid of SecuROM only works if you don’t have Spore on your computer, and you keep spore off once uninstalled.
You can find more information about SecuROM lawsuits here.
SecuROM is not only with Spore, it also comes with other games, like some of The Sims 2 expansion packs.
SecuROM will not be included with The Sims 3, however it might be included with it’s expansion packs.
Tyler Tadlog is a blogger from Switzerland, who not only recently lost his voice, he also recently lost his mind. If you know the location of his brain, which is probably hidden in a pile of cabbage, please email him here so he can easily regain the knowledge of where his bed is. You can find his personal blog here.
Show us some
YEah man…. world it going crazier and more complex by the minute.
Guess we should all switch to open source and linux!
Are there any OS games out there?
Switching to open scource and linux is a good idea, but there are still a lot of applications that are available for Mac/Windows there aren’t there for the Linux community, an I seriously couldn’t live without my iPod and John Lennon. I get my linux fix through a vmware fusion virtual machine on my pc, I have Ubuntu and openSUSE KDE Linux distros running. I think you could play SecuROM games like Spore and F.E.A.R. on your linux computer with Wine, and the SecuROM would not have any negative effect, but I haven’t checked that out yet. Please continue to write comments, I would love to see your feedback!
-Tyler Tadlog
@SAWJ Please define what you mean by “OS Games”!
Open source.
Well linux operating systems come with these small games like 2D Chess, etc which I believe are open scource, but there is not a lot of work you can do to basic games like that! There are closed source, proprietary games for linux, but that kinda goes as far as running RuneScape in a browser window. But when you go to the extent of spore, basically no. The most popular game Linux *could have* natively ran was World of Warcraft, but its native linux version was phased out in the beta stage, however with a little tweaking, a software called wine can run windows applications and games on unix-like operating systems like Mac Os X, Ubuntu, openSUSE, and other linux distros, assuming they are built for the x86 or x86-64 architecture. Wine is not an emulator, and as a matter of fact the name ‘Wine’ derives from the recursive acronym Wine Is Not an Emulator.
I hope my answer helps!
-Tyler Tadlog
Oh yes.
Why use your RSS feed as a link here mate when you can simply use your blog’s address?
Oops that was a mistake
It was an autocomplete thing when I couldn’t see the whole entry and I simply selected it. When I looked to see what I had put, it was too late, and I just let it alone, since I didn’t want to send the comment twice 
By the way, why when you write a comment your entry has a dark background and white text?
I want that too!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Haha man, that’s because I’m the post author. I’ll make you an account and you can post your next entry from that, okay? That way you’ll have this background too.
Keep the conversation going!
i was beginning to feel i might probably end up being the only person whom thought about this, at the least at this point i comprehend i’m not weird
i’ll be sure to pay a visit to a couple of additional posts after i get some caffeine in me, it really is tough to read without having my coffee, I was really late last night practicing zynga poker and after polishing off a few ales i finished up losing all my facebook poker chips cheers 