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BSA Accuses OpenOffice Mirrors
sqrt529 writes "A German university was accused by the BSA of pirating MS Office, because they mirrored OpenOffice.org. The scripts from the BSA only check for "Office" in the filename and then automatically send out notices to the ftp admins. Did any of you get similar notices from the BSA?"
This is really funny actually. I'm going to start uploading mp3s named "office.mp3" to ftp sites now for fun.
Remember,democracy never lasts long.It soon wastes, exhausts and murders itself. John Adams (1814)
The Boy Scouts of America should stick to tying knots and keep their jamboreeing noses out of I.T.!
"It's not a bug, it's a feature."
1. Create automated application to look for piracy 2. Shoot self in foot
this HAS to be one of the dumbest things I've heard!
If Office Depot had an ftp site where you could get their latest catalogue, they'd be accused of pirating M$ Office?!
I think they went a bit too far this time.
~Jon~
This space for rent, inquire within.
Let's make sure BSA gets some legal police powers soon.
A) Get a life
B) Hire some real programmers
C) Spend more time actually doing their job
D) Figure out a better way to do their job
E) Change their paradyme from assuming pirating to assuming not
F) Hire CoyboyNeal to do their dirty work
G) All of the above
Well, I leave it up to you guys to figure out what they should do.
CoyboyNeal anyone?
We were all warned a long time ago that MS products sucked, remember the Magic 8 Ball said, "Outlook not so good"
Can anyone say "premature ejaculation"?
Google:
Searched the web for Office.
Results 1 - 10 of about 78,600,000. Search took 0.10 seconds.
Start sending the letters!
as an interesting side note, the first link is US Copyright Office
You think that I'm crazy, you should see this guy!
Those damn communists and their "open sores" threaten the good, god loving corporations.
This sig was cut off by the sla
A German university was accused by the BSA of pirating MS Office, because they mirrored OpenOffice.org. The scripts from the BSA only check for "Office" in the filename and then automatically send out notices to the ftp admins.
Dadgumit, the Boy Scouts of America have gone too far this time! Back in my day, we helped little old ladies across the street... Now they're policing for pirated software? Sheesh...
In walking, just walk. In sitting, just sit. Above all, don't wobble.
-- Yun-Men
Quote: "As you know, illegal on-line activities can result in 50 million people on the Internet accessing and downloading a copyrighted product worldwide without authorization - a highly damaging activity for the copyright holder."
Well I suppose 50 million people downloading OpenOffice would damage Microsoft's Office sales :)
Hey you stole my joke :)... I can forgive you.. i love that joke.. and I'm glad others think of it..
:P
Here's my post.
Ha beat you to it.. but seems nobody noticed mine
Who makes you Sig?
As president of Ashdo Software Inc., I take software piracy very seriously. Recently, the sophisticated scanning software of the Business Software Alliance has detected that your website "www.slashdot.org" is most certainly hosting and distributing illegally-obtained copies of proprietary Ashdo programs. You are hereby ordered to cease and desist the above activities, which I'm sure are also in violation of the DMCA in some way or another.
Sincerely,
Hiram Ashdo
President, Ashdo Software Inc.
cc: BSA
In Soviet Rush, today's Tom Sawyer gets high on you.
Send them a bill for the bandwith used.
Then take them to small claims court when they don't pay!
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
/me is glad the Cold War is over :-)
When I am king, you will be first against the wall.
Well, look at the filename - it contained
SRPMS/OpenOffice
Look it contains 'MS' and 'Office'! Just ignore the '/Open' bit inbetween and send off the letters!
I don't know what's funnier... that they're claiming copyright infringement of OpenOffice, or that they thought Microsoft Office came as RPMs!!
This is the part I refer to:
-
What was located as infringing content:
Oh hell, I needed a laugh this morning...Filename: /mandrake_current/SRPMS/OpenOffice.org-1.0.1-9mdk. src.rpm /mandrake_current/i586/Mandrake/RPMS/OpenOffice.or g-libs-1.0.1-9mdk.i586.rpm
(199,643kb)
Filename:
(35,444kb)
The above computer program(s) is/are being made available for copying, through downloading, at the above location without authorization from the copyright owner(s).
"...America's great minds of today, teaching America's great minds of tomorrow. Poor bastards." -- A Beautiful Min
Just remember everyone, Unix-like operating systems (Free-BSD, Linux, GNU/Linux, HPUX, Solaris, etc.) have the capability to have "Empty" files. When you do an `ls`, they CAN show up as huge....
I think I'll go making a download page at my website with "Office.zip", "Word.zip", and "Outlook.zip", which all will appear to be 600 megs or larger.....
LongTail SSH Brute Force analysis tool is here!
.../mandrake_current/SRPMS/OpenOffice.org-1.0.1-9m dk.src.rpm
Hmmm, seem's as if their regexps need some fine-tuning...
-- There is no place like $HOME.
Alternatively, one could say, "The Business Software Alliance (BSA) declares that OpenOffice is identical to Microsoft Office." Wow! That's how to sell software!
--- Jason Olshefsky
Karma: Poser (mostly affected by adding this line long after everyone else did)
Micro$oft!
Been here long?
You think that I'm crazy, you should see this guy!
6. That BSA must allow uni unrestricted access to BSA premises for the purpose of auditing BSA spider systems to ensure they will no longer falsely detect uni's legitimate files.
What would you put to him, in that position?
I don't know. . . stuff. Nothing grandiose or complicated - just simple things like leg irons, hot pokers, thumbscrews. . .
ftp> ls -la . ..
227 Entering Passive Mode (127,0,0,1,249,244)
150 Here comes the directory listing.
drwxr-xr-x 2 502 502 4096 Feb 28 15:40
drwxr-xr-x 12 502 502 4096 Feb 28 15:36
-rw-rw-r-- 1 502 502 0 Feb 28 15:37 BSA-are-morons.zip
-rw-rw-r-- 1 502 502 0 Feb 28 15:36 Microsoft.Office.XP-sucks.zip
-rw-rw-r-- 1 502 502 0 Feb 28 15:39 hazxxx0r
-rw-rw-r-- 1 502 502 0 Feb 28 15:39 illegal
-rw-rw-r-- 1 502 502 0 Feb 28 15:38 illegal.mp3
-rw-rw-r-- 1 502 502 0 Feb 28 15:39 microsoft.salty.bastard.zip
-rw-rw-r-- 1 502 502 0 Feb 28 15:37 microsoft.zip
-rw-rw-r-- 1 502 502 0 Feb 28 15:37 office.zip
-rw-rw-r-- 1 502 502 0 Feb 28 15:37 openoffice is better than microsoft word.zip
-rw-rw-r-- 1 502 502 0 Feb 28 15:38 touchisagreattool
-rw-rw-r-- 1 502 502 0 Feb 28 15:39 warezr0kr.rar
226 Directory send OK.
now i just sit back and wait for them to spider my ftp and send me a notice, then i can have the joy of telling them to piss off.
hopefully this will fuck them off a bit.
and put in the public/pirated/ms directory. Maybe the files can be filled with repeat copies of the US Constitution and the GPL. Add links from your website. Put out advertisements for it on Kazaa.
End of Line.
Last Tuesday. Did you miss the meeting?
No, it's more like this:
After college you use a small inheritance to open up a wicker basket shop. What's wrong with that? Just because you're a man doesn't mean you can't sell wicker bastkets! It has NOTHING to do with your sexuality. Anyway, one day an odd man walks into your shop, picks up a basket, and starts screaming "You haff stolen mein design! Look at zis basket!"
Quickly you rush over to get him to stop screaming. He looks at you oddly for a second, then mutters "my mistake" and shoves the basket into your hands and stumbles out. As you start to put the basket back on the shelf, you notice a strange capsule on the bottom. "Odd." you think.
Since it's your lunch hour the next time the shop is empty you put up your closed sign and sit back in your office. Examining the small capsule you realize that you can open it. When you do so a small piece of translucent plastic pops out. "Wait a minute," you think, "that almost looks like microfilm..." This has turned into a strange day. You put the plastic back in the capsule and hide it in the office safe, behind the picture of dogs playing poker. All through the rest of the day you puzzle over the odd events. Finally, you close up shop and leave; since tomorrow is Saturday, you open up late. Maybe you can head over to your alma mater, the local community college where you studied Wicker Science and use one of their microfiche machines to see if that strange strip of plastic really is microfilm.
As you stop by your office early Saturday morning you sense something is wrong. Quickly entering your office you're horrified to find that the place is trashed; papers are strewn about, furniture has been moved, and figurines from your porcelain kitten collection have been thrown to the ground, and now lay in shards. Breathlessly you check your safe; apparently they didn't check the painting, and the capsule is still there. You feel a cold ball of fear settle in your stomach; what the hell is going on?
If you've read this far you'll find it's not really an analogy, but I wanted to write a little story featuring a wicker shop. Maybe next time a post on slashdot mentions a wicker basket shop I'll write part II of the story.
why not place on every server one or more link to msoffice.exe pointing to a fake file? BSA would send million of notices... (and spend a lot if the notice is sent by snail mail)
You missed the part where you actually get inside one of the baskets and hear a voice, "It is dark here. You may be eaten by a grue." :)
I do not have a signature
>Searched the web for Office.
>Results 1 - 10 of about 78,600,000. Search took 0.10 seconds.
>Start sending the letters!
Hey, at $400 a copy that's $31,440,000,000 in lost revenues! Damn pirates...
That's a great idea. Maybe someone should get in contact with the folks from the TV show "This old house" and get them to take a bunch of photos of windows that are used from their shows. They have a lot of windows that are shipped directly from the manufacturers and sometimes I am sure some have to get shipped back. Put these images on a CD and make it into an ISO. Call it: Windows2003-TOH-RTM.iso. I'm sure the BSA will get a great kick out of it. (TOH in the file name is for This Old House.)
On the bright side, Corinna Beck is real. I telephoned the BSA 202-872-5500, waded through the directory (hit 3 and then type in "BECK", 2325, and asked her if she could clarify their policy on issuing warnings to web sites with the word "office" on them.
She put me on hold and didn't pick up again before I gave up, but at least she exists.
I think it is time to start to develop a special "BSA Honeypot Server", wich is just producing big big files with filenames wich are very close to commercial products.
I would kill my self to see them diging around at my ftp and trying to download the files.
To fool them eaven more you could add serval *.nfo and *.diz files to the directory containing those "fake" files.
And don't forgett to use the letter Z as much you can: aPPz, GaMeZ, UpLoAdZ, WaReZ, SerialZ, CrACkZ, KeyGenZ, etc...
Be sure to multiply by 3 times that number to account for the people with broadband connections...
With your heart beating heavily, you grab the capsule and head off to the college.
;-)
:)
The library is busy, with both microfiche machines in use. You pace impatiently, waiting for one machine to become free. After the longest five minutes that you can remember, the student at the right hand machine gathers up his papers, pushes the chair back, stands up and leaves.
Quickly, you grab the chair and sit, tense with anticipation of what you might find. Opening the capsule hastily, the film flutters out onto the desk. Carefully, you place the film in the viewer.
Blurry lines come into view. A few seconds play with the controls and you start to see a photograph of a document. It looks like an internal memo for some organisation. At the top of the page, a small logo that look like an eye in an equilateral triangle stares blurrily at you from the screen. Underneath the logo, two succinct sentences explain:
"Le Méridien Heliopolis, Cairo. March 1st, 4pm Main Bar.
"1-555-648-9777"
Why would this need to be on microfiche? What was the eye in the triangle? Why was there a phone number?
You quickly copy the details and, pausing only to see if your activities have attracted attention (they haven't), you grab the film and head to a nearby phone booth. You stare at the phone for a long time before deciding to call the number. I mean, what harm could it do? A public phone. Whatever the number was, you could call it and hang up if things got weird.
You dial the number. Within one ring, a women answers, addresses you by name, and tells you that your flight will be leaving this evening and that it would be in your interest to be there on time. Oh, and your ticket, passport and expenses can be picked up from the AirEgypt check-in.
"But, hang..." - the phone is already dead. You redial. This time you get a line disconnected tone.
Your shop is trashed, you're no longer the Wicker Man(tm). Curiosity killed the cat but, after the day you've had, you decide you need to follow this through.
The pickup at the airport is smooth, the passport is a perfect fake. "Dr. Kim Brown, Phd". Apparently you are an Australian importer going to check out some sculptures for your company. Wicker to sculptures? You're sure you can make the transition easily enough.
The flight is long and uneventful. You sleep fitfully with omenous dreams. You awake as the screach of tyres on asphalt announces your arrival. You go straight to the hotel and unpack. Still an hour to go.
AT five minutes to four, you enter the bar and buy a large shot of Bourbon to steady your nerves. As you bring down your glass, you see a man sat opposite you smiling.
"Dr. Brown, welcome. Please come with me. I need your help to move some 'rocks'."
You follow the small stranger down several back alleys until the streets open up and you are in a field. With real rocks. Not rocks.
"Help me push this rock", your guide motions.
Both of you push the rock, but it is stuck solid.
"We need some more help. Go to the street and grab five or six people to give us a hand. Tell them I'll pay them 5 pounds each if they'll help."
Ten minutes later I return with six locals, happy to make some easy money. We all push together, but the stone is still solid. My guide thinks for a second.
"We need more help."
He asks each of the locals to run off and grab some others to help.
Suddenly, realisation dawns on you and you run, run for your life. What a fool you have been. You travel halfway around the world under mysterious circumstance, only to find out it's a damn Pyramid Scheme.
Better luck next time, eh?
cLive
ps - if you made it here, well done
-- Trinity in high heels carrying a whip: The donimatrix - there is no spoonerism