S2HD Keylogger No Longer the Case, Safe to Download Again

Those who have downloaded and promptly deleted the alpha demo of Sonic 2 HD no longer need to fear of alleged keylogging, GeneHF of Sonic Retro shares, saying that the game demo is safe of said malicious software. This announcement follows that of LOst being booted from the S2HD team. Read the full story after the jump.

The Sonic 2 HD team announced today amidst the flurry and confusion of an alleged “keylogger” being detected in the program that it has decided to move on without their head programmer, LOst.

The decision comes on top of several allegations from team members that LOst held the project hostage through the inclusion of DRM, public feedback of a bloated engine running an otherwise simplistic game, and other behind the scenes issues. The final straw was the massive negative reception after reports of a keylogger were detected by various antivirus software.

After some careful examination by forum member Guess_Who, the “keylogger” was confirmed to be benign and a false positive, revealing that it was a result of shoddy DirectInput programming. This is how the program was able to register key presses even when the window was not selected and running in the background. In other words, it’s like how CW Cheat can trigger antiviruses as a trojan horse, despite having no malicious software behind it.

As such, we’ve since corrected our earlier PSA.

The original PSA, which initially warned of the possible keylogger and which we’ve covered earlier on, has been edited with the following added in.

EDIT 10 APRIL 2012: I promised more information. More information has come. It turns out the input error causing the situation not only does not phone the data but does not store it; it is merely an error in input programming. I sincerely apologize for any undue panic this may have caused and accept full culpability for any pants panicking bullshit.

As such, Sonic 2 HD‘s Alpha Demo is safe for playing, just as it was before the unintentional keylogger scare. Players can download the demo again, still available on S2HD‘s website.

I repeat: ease your worries, the Sonic 2 HD demo is safe.

Like Sonic Retro, we apologize for any inconvenience our earlier report may have brought you.

For more details as to the nature of the false positive and the full story behind the keylogger scare, I highly recommend you read Guess_Who’s examination on Reddit.com.

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VizardJeffhog

Unparalleled Canadian greatness! Jeffrey is a writer for TSS and Gamnesia, a pianist obsessed with video game music, and a recent university graduate majoring in Communications. Loves all things Sonic and Nintendo to a fault.

15 Comments

  1. Good thing everything is sorted out now. 🙂 I’ve been repeatedly downloading and deleting the demo over and over again, I just got sick of the game now. XD Still, good to know that the demo is safe.

  2. I’m glad that isn’t the case.They worked hard on that project,though one thing needs to be fixed:The loading of the next act takes aaaaagggeeeesss to start.Apart from that,It’s a great demo!

  3. wow and i literally saw on a yahoo news story that S2HD still may cause antivirus problems

  4. Kids, there’s nothing more cool than having a programmer for your demo, but it they try to change it or add stuff in a way that makes you feel uncomfortable, thats nooo good. It’s your demo, no one has the right to add DRM if you dont want them to. So what do you do? First, you say NOOO! Then, you kick their as outta there. Most important, you gotta tell the Sonic fanbase, like a forum, Retro, or the Stadium.

    Hi, there’s a Sonic Sez 🙂

  5. okay so i got this game the other day and it said this is a zip folder would you like to open it i clicked yea then it showed me info music sprites everything thats in the game now how do i open it so i can play it

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