SafeCast (child protection) is a patented labelling means of protecting children from seeing inappropriate video materials on television and the internet. In 2015 the British company Cachebox TV Limited registered Safecast at the UK Trade Mark Registry as its registered trademark for implementation of its patented technology to protect the television watershed in catch-up and timeshifted viewing.
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Safecast (casting technology) is a non-ferrous metal casting technology. In 2017 the British company Mechatherm registered Safecast at the UK Trade Mark Registry as its registered trademark for its non-ferrous metal technology
SafeCast (software protection) was originally a registered trademark for Macrovision's legacy software protection system. Macrovision abandoned the trademark at the European Trade Mark office thereby allowing it to gain the new trademark meaning requested by Cachebox and subsequently by Mechatherm.
Note: There is no connection between Cachebox and Macrovision or Mechatherm).
Macrovision's Safecast featured product activation (via telephone, or through internet), and executable wrapping technology which was easily defeated with a keygen.
Controversy
SafeCast (software protection) exploits the lack of operating-system security in Microsoft Windows and writes directly to the boot track of the local disk as part of its operation. TurboTax, Intuit's tax-preparation software product, uses SafeCast in some versions, and the protection scheme has been blamed for a wide variety of problems with product activation and use, leading Intuit to partially remove the technology. Adobe also uses a version of SafeCast for its CS products, and has had similar but less frequent problems, particularly with certain types of disk configurations (RAID, multiple-boot), but continues to use the technology for copy protection.
Dangers
SafeCast with old versions of TrueCrypt can leave a machine in an unbootable state. This is a problem of SafeCast Protection and not TrueCrypt. The makers of TrueCrypt, however, have further insulated the drives from external writes in the later versions, and it can now handle this protection scheme with no damage to data.
Removing SafeCast
SafeCast nests itself into the user's computer deeply and therefore it can be quite challenging to remove all of its components. The procedure of removing SafeCast includes the deletion of several files, the removal of information from the Windows registry as well as manipulating data directly of the hard drive.