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Using Spyware to Report Pirates?
An anonymous reader asks: "I have visibility to AUP complaints we receive at work, and we receive messages from a software vendor that make it obvious that their product is phoning home when it discovers it is running a cracked copy of itself." Apparently the software phones home, and then the publisher's legal department sends the administrator an e-mail. "The message goes on to detail the users IP, a timestamp, the product in question, the users PC name, username, and MAC address.
This falls under -my- definition of 'spyware.' What are your thoughts?" Software has been making surreptitious checks for "piracy" for over a decade, yet these checks are usually limited to the software itself, and not data on the user's machine. Do you feel software publishers should have the right to peer into users data, if their software suspects foul play on the machine, or should it do the easy and intelligent thing and just stop working?
Seriously folks I think lately we've forgotten that stealing is stealing, and if you're stealing a piece of software you should be punnished for stealing a piece of software. It seems as if we look beyond the crime far too often lately and we forget the obvious... STEALING IS A CRIME... end of story.
transmission_err
I have no problem with this, as long as it is in the agreement box, or they make it clear that it till collect the user data and send it to the company if the software checks itself to be a crack.
You don't like it then don't use it.
Or should we brutally rape blue haired old ladies?
What kind of question is that?
Software has every right to phone home. It's what software does, i.e. it executes code that it was told to execute. If you believe (as I believe) that software has the right to be Free (as in Freedom), then you have to be in favor of software publishers reserving the right to verify that you are not using their software in violation of agreement (or lack thereof in the case of warez).
Freedom for software also entails Freedom for developers, though sometimes these are quite at odds. In those cases the developers' Freedom ought to take priority over the software.
In any application where data is sent from within the company (or home) consent is vital. Perhaps you would argue that stealing the software removes the obligation to ask for consent, but the potential for the software to mistakenly think it is pirated is too high.
POPFile has an option to check to see if there's a new version available. It's incredibly innocuous: it hits a server and check it's version number, the server junks its logs daily. I keep no record. This was initially on by default but people were upset, it's now off.
The simplest solution is that a piece of software that thinks it is pirated start warning 30 days before it's going to shut itself off to give the user a chance to do something and finally disable itself. That is effective and friendly.
And get yourself a copy of ZoneAlarm so that you can see which apps would like to talk to the outside world.
John.
Do you have the right to install Lojack in your car? Yup. Do you have the right to go hunt the asshole down, and kill him with a crowbar? Alas, no. Do with this data what you will.
> You use the illegal software
But doesn't this imply owners of the legal software are also being spied upon?
-- Don't Tase me, bro!
It's not spyware, it's a fucking anti-theft system. Don't like it? Don't steal it.
Okay, this one seems simple enough.
Let's say I am a small book publisher. I publish books about historical battles. I find out that there is someone out in the world who, instead of buying a copy of my book, has simply photocopied a friend's purchased copy of the book.
Now, let's say I track this person down. Then let's say I break into their house. Then let's say I rifle through all of their belongings. Let's say I get their credit card number, bank PIN number, passwords, social security number, medical history, personal communications, personal habits and all of this information for each person in their family, too. Then let's say I take all of this data and give it to the police or the government. Or maybe I even go much further and just burn the house down with everyone in it.
Was I justified? I mean, I must be right? After all the person had a photographed copy of my book and didn't pay me the $39.95 for a legitimate right to read it...!
filter the ports at your firewall. Problem solved, right?
Ultimately if you get taken to court because of a copyright violation that was discovered because the cracked software phoned home, I doubt the court will grant you much leighway.
If the software's anti-theft tracking was being put in place by the police, that would be a violation of the fourth amendment. On the other hand, this is being done by a private corporation which has far more rights.
Think about LoJack, the car anti-theft mechanism, that tracks the car. Isn't that effectively the same thing? That's perfectly legal.
I don't like the notion of a company installing such spyware because there's little guarantee that they are only reporting pirates. Furthermore, what's to keep them from reporting subtle violations of the license agreement that aren't in fact illegal under copyright law. Once the spyware is there, there's effectively no limit on what it can do.
This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service
Ok, so if the program is smart enough to discover that it's a cracked copy of itself, why doesnt it just not start up and prevent the user from using the cracked copy.
[alk]
you need to tighten up your firewall!
If you don't even know which software or machine is communicating with which outside hosts, don't be surprised when you find out some inside box is relaying spam or leaving out the welcome mat for unwelcomed visitors.
In any case, what exactly prevents you from naming the offending software? Why speak in generalities and obfuscation?
Anyway, they absolutely should be free to use such methods. Of course, we are all free to not use their software if we don't like their methods.
That is, if whoever started all this would step up to the plate and tell us who the publisher is...
Call the company. Say you found the user and pirated software, and appreciate their notice. Tell them the software has been deleted and the user has been reprimanded. Tell them you have banned said software company wide because your company does not use pirated software - or spyware.
I write code.
I think it is wrong to monitor end users. When I buy a copy of Word or Office, I should be able to instal it on every PC I own. If they are now monitoring my PC then they have crossed the line. I would like to see a civil liberty group file a lawsuit. What is next, call the local police in Alabama to arrest someone for watching what they consider obscene, the same item which might be fine in New York?
Rosco: "If brains were gunpowder, Enos couldn't blow his nose."
There's always the danger that a disgruntled employee could plant a cracked version of the software on a company computer.
And what about shared laptops. Somebody loads on some software while attending a conference and then hands the machine back.
Some floating software licensing schemes work on using IP addresses, MAC addresses, monitoring the real-time clock to make sure dates don't change. What if one of these circuits fails (stray cosmic rays, power surge), does that automatically make the user a criminal?
Sure, software companies have the right to protect their software, but I don't think they have the right to allow their applications to automatically generate crime reports. W It would be more for the application to request new short-term licenses and deny access than do anything destructive. If an application can detect that it has been cracked then it should just refuse to work.
I use some pirated programs myself, but the attitude I take is if you're willing to pirate software, you should be willing to take any risks associated with using it. If you don't want the risks, then don't pirate software! It's really simple!
It's called the "principle of clean hands". Don't go complaining about someone doing something wrong if you're in the midst of doing something wrong yourself! It's like a pot smoker trying to sue a drug dealer for selling him oregano instead of pot... no court will be sympathetic to him.
A few years ago, I ran a serial cracker that installed a virus and wiped out my entire hard drive. I was pissed, but I was pissed at myself. If you use pirated software, the way I see it, if they phone home, I have no qualms with it.
If you pay for the software or if they distribute it for free and it phones home, then I look at this as a violation of my privacy.
What would happen if a crooked employee at Visualware used or shared this information? He now has a valid username and IP address (even if the IP address was NATed, you could match it with the web server logs to find the outside IP.) He can now fire up his favorite cracking program and have at it. If a vulnerability exists in VisualRoute, he now has a list of computers running it that could be exploited. Food for thought...
...or C) the software thinks it's pirated and it isn't. After all, 100% of fully automated piracy detection methods are flawed. The only sure fire way to prove something is pirated is a BSA-style audit. And even those are flawed because of people who don't save original packaging/media.
You are seriously deluded if you think that fact that a piece of software thinks it's pirated is de facto evidence that it is in fact pirated.
It's still low. Spying on your data and sending info is like shooting people because they might be a criminal. Cracks do have perfectly legitimate uses, despite what the software companies try to tell you. (Just ask anyone who has installed the latest patch for Neverwinter Nights and can't run it due to the retarded Securom protection).
This is why everyone should run a decent firewall. The amount of programs that phone home is alarming!
I couldn't disagree more. That's not obnoxious that's an awesome feature!
/saved/ us money, so we didn't have to go get 5 copies of Photoshop for 5 computers when two did just fine, thanks.
We bought one legal copy of Photoshop. We should have the right to run one copy, regardless of how many computers we own. This enforces that and makes us abide by the licenses we agreed to! It makes it impossible to violate their license!
So what did we do when we got this error message more and more and more? We decided "hey, we really need two copies". And we got another license. This actually
Obnoxious? I guess so if your definition of obnoxious includes railings on ledges and lane turtles on roadways. To the rest of us, such things are considered useful.
Microsoft also do this with Office for the Mac. In a corporate LAN, this means that cloning amchines for swift deployment is not an easy option.
I personally (asides from the above caveat) have zero problem with this level of detection, as it leaves it up to the LAN manager or user to deal with licensing issues. I do, however, have a problem with having a phone-home algorithm built in to software to send out proprietory information if some random case happens to be met.
Considering most software companies seem to have problems getting the core functions of their software to work, the assumption there can be a totally bug-free detection of legal use is laughable. This means that legal users of software are going to be spied upon. Would you spy on your legitimate users, or should they expect to be spied upon?
Wish I still had mod points for this one.
I fully agree if the user is distributing the software, they should be nuked, but I'd love to see the AUP/ToS for any ISP that dictated what software you could or could not run on your own machine.
If anyone actually read the documents (and does anyone still read EULAs, AUPs, and other such cruft?), they'd run so fast the ISP wouldn't see them go.
ISPs are responsible for, and thus should worry about, what their customers do WITH THE SERVICE THEY PROVIDE. That does not apply in your pot smoking example, or in the example given in the parent article.
This crap, and any access to MS nets is something I would block on principle.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
um, what? you might have a point if the software in question searched the user's hard disk for these pieces of information, but it's not. According to the post, the information sent from the program to a remote server is:
"the users IP, a timestamp, the product in question, the users PC name, username, and MAC address."
Every single piece of information transferred is accessible through the use of other, perfectly legitimate pieces of software, unlike medical records (which require a plausible reason to access); it should be clear that this program is not 'rifling through anyone's belongings.' And the mentioning of burning down the house is completely absurd; nobody is considering giving this data to law enforcement agencies or blowing up the user's computer if it's running pirated software (to relate your analogy to the situation being discussed). Please take your slippery slope arguments elsewhere.
the coolest club on
Since software publishers can make potentially far more money from people who are using a program 'illegally' then they can from sales of a program, it is in their best interest to have as many (rich) people (corporations) using their program 'illegally' as possible. Then they can use spyware to shake down their 'clients' by getting tens of thousands of dollars in profit from fines and penalities as opposed to simply hundreds of dollars in profit from straight per-unit sales.
They just put some bizarre clause into the End Use Agreement (surely you read that part in the French language section of your agreement that said):
'En cliquetant sur cet accord, l'utilisateur ecrit une obligation legale de nous payer quelque quantite laquelle nous avons choisi de facturer quelque raison au lequel nous pouvons penser.'
*** 'By clicking on this agreement, the user enters a legal obligation to pay us whatever amount that we chose to charge for whatever reason that we can think of.' ***
That line wasn't in the English section of the EUL? Tough Titty! You clicked - You agreed - You entered a legal agreement -- You now owe!
Basically software companies will do anything that they can get away with to take your money.
The situation that you have described where the software company invaded the private section of your PC and is using information taken from there to extort from your company is a major ethical breach on their part.
I believe that you would be justified to tell the slashdot community just who it is who has done this so that we can avoid commerce with them in the future.
Thank you,
Simonetta
Oh, come on. That's ridiculous. There's a distinction between public information and private information. Published programs, even if they're copyrighted, are published. They're not private, like the user's MAC address and personal grooming habits.
I'm not trying to justify running pirated programs, I just think you need to make a better argument.
Now, that's a better argument.Lost: one sig, witty, 120 chars, sentimental value. Reward offered.
If you don't use pirated software why would you even care about this?
Um, maybe for the same reason that American citizens care about the Constitution and understand the concept of a limited government?
"But the thing is, you don't have many suspects who are innocent of a crime. That's contradictory. If a person is innocent of a crime, then he is not a suspect." (former Attorney General) Ed Meese, US News & World Report, 10-15-85
Mod down people who tell people how to mod in their sigs
> You use the illegal software
But doesn't this imply owners of the legal software are also being spied upon?
OK, I'll take serious stick for saying this but here goes (and there goes my karma).
Sometimes, people observe/stake out/spy on others and their suspicions/paranoia prove to unfounded and sometimes they prove to be well-placed. Not everyone who's under police surveilance, has a background check run on them or gets asked for additional ID verification when using a credit card is going to be guilty of wrong-doing, but does that mean the cops, your kids' schools or Amex should never be allowed to verify basic details?
If the software license made it clear up front that the package could and would periodically check that its use was within the boundaries set by the license (eg, full licensing) then I don't see anything wrong with a publisher checking up on its users in this way. After all, permission had been given, just as it had been given (implicitly or otherwise) in the real world examples I gave above.
One thing you need to ask yourself before you potentially start bashing this company's spyware (or whatever you want to call it): am I in violation of a software license or any laws? Make damn sure that their aren't any illegal copies of the software floating around your organisation before kicking up a major fuss otherwise this could really backfire for you.
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
More like, the vehicle detects that you had it serviced at an independent mechanic, instead of at the dealership, and phones home to cancel the warranty.
Your information wants to be free; my information wants to be private. See?
You're mixing up private and public with commercial and free.
Private means that noone else should have, the rest, free or commercial is public.
Commerical means that you can have it - for a price, and free means just that, for free.
When people say that information should be free, they mean that all public information should be free. If you make a speech at a meeting, or a concert performance, they claim that you should be able to do whatever the hell they want with the information you gave, including but not limited to recordings of it.
That does not mean they have the right to read your personal diary to find out what you mean about the same issues, or record you singing in the shower. What you're looking at here is a program that is illegally* transmitting private information to others. (* they may have a CYA clause in the EULA)
Copyright could be abolished, but there would still be private and public, and laws against invasion of privacy. Whether that would be a wise decision or not though, is another story...
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Well that's a pretty sucky way of doing things! I'm glad I don't administer Macs! Rather than letting me just crack open one copy, leaving the rest in a filing cabinet somewhere, then load the install files onto a server and install from there, there going to make me open every bloody box and run the install locally? That sucks! I know I've got licenses for every computer and can produce them if need be, why should they care where the source comes from?
You're using her as bait, Master!
If a person is innocent of a crime, then he is not a suspect.
So all suspects are guilty? That doesn't make any sense to me.
That's not to say that I necessarily agree with all IP related laws. I think the reason for copyright given in the US constitution (to promote the progress of science and useful arts) is a reasonable one but the protections given should be a minimum to achieve the desired effect of promoting invention.
In the long term I see that there could be great danger in steering an economy to a place where it relies too much on artificial scarcity. It could well turn out to be a house of cards.
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
Yes. I was specifically referrring to "call home" gps such as the Chevy offered "OnStar". You simply phone them and tell them your vehicles been stolen. They report the location to the police. I should have been more specific.d els/escalad e/onstar.html For example.
http://www.cadillac.com/cadillacjsp/mo
I am very aware that the analogy isn't perfect, but in the above example you are still trusting that Chevy isn't randomly "following" your vehicle for marketing or whatever reasons.....
Well that's a pretty sucky way of doing things! I'm glad I don't administer Macs! Rather than letting me just crack open one copy, leaving the rest in a filing cabinet somewhere, then load the install files onto a server and install from there, there going to make me open every bloody box and run the install locally? That sucks! I know I've got licenses for every computer and can produce them if need be, why should they care where the source comes from?
You're being lied to by people who don't know what they are talking about.. the corporate versions of said software don't have the same restriction and don't even require a serial number at all.
If you are trying to install a single user copy on 50 computers on the same network without buying the corporate edition, you deserve to have problems.
Can Linux do this?"
Yes. Look into Firestarter. Look into iptables/ipchains.
"If not, Windows is more secure than Linux for a desktop user."
Thats flawed and uninformed reasoning. Amng many reasons why Linux is more secure for a desktop user is that a normal desktop user runing Linux has almost zero chance of double clicking on an atachment and hosing their system w/a virus.
This guy is way out there
Well...yeah. And some legal software (e.g. Gator, Kazaa, etc) spy on you in ways you might not like. But in the end it's all a trade off -- how much do you trust your software manufacturer?
Some of them I do trust. If I find out Adobe is spying on me to be sure I bought my boxed copy of Photoshop 7, I'm not that worried, because I did. I see this in the same light as I see cameras in retail stores...sure, it's a little annoying that they might be laughing at my fat ass trying to squeeze into size 34 pants, but I can deal with that because I respect their right to stop shoplifters. When the guy who came to paint my house asked me to leave my garage open, I did so, because I was paying him scads of money and I trusted him not to walk out with my TV as well.
Really, with proprietary software it's all a matter of trust. It always has been -- it's why my uncle wouldn't let my cousin use his Renegade pirated floppies in his c64, he was afraid of some stupid code going haywire and messing up his $500 machine.
You worried about this spyware stuff? Go whole hog OSS, it's the only way to be sure. I happen to prefer the user interface and trustworthy behavior of some of my proprietary software and don't mind paying a little extra for it, money or privacy. Still, the day I catch ImageReady sending lists of my porn directories back home to corporate is the day i switch to (shudder, ew) The Gimp.
Hey freaks: now you're ju
I have long been wondering why Microsoft doesn't employ this technique in Windows. (And don't flame me for using those two cuss words here. *grin*) Their licensing issues would stop, 'Windows Product Activation' would disappear, and all the headaches associated with pirated copies of their software would just stop. And they would save a lot of money that way. Any time a Windows box boots, it calls home and identifies itself with its product key. If that product key is already identified as running, both machines then shutdown. Makes more sense to me than Activation.
... And I really don't like the idea of software programs running as spyware. How do I *know* that it's not transmitting out personally identifiable information? I don't. That's an inherent danger of the Internet age. When you plug your computer into a network, you take the risk that something on your computer could be retrieved or sent without your permission. Should it happen? No, of course not. But then again, consumers are getting screwed left and right.
...
Personally, I'm not an advocate of spyware. Almost on a daily basis, I run my spyware checker and delete any unidentified directories under 'C:\Program Files'
Hey, we could just do away with the Internet, unplug our computers, and go back to DOS in the 1980's
Who's with me?
Seth Anderson BTW, I'm not 23 anymore -- I am TexasCowboy26 now. =)
If a software publisher prices their software "out of the market" then a potential user has two recourses: 1. don't use it; 2. pirate it.
If the software publisher's decision is inappropriate (i.e., the value is $50 but they charge $2,000), then the user can't be blamed for pirating it. I mean, they can be, but let's face it you can't return software you don't like (because "you might pirate it"), so the default behavior is, pirate it to make sure you like it. Then, if you so choose, pay for it.
I think it's super cool though, that publishers are going to more and more draconian levels in order to "protect their profits" because it just makes open source/free software that much more attractive.
See the Ernie Ball story for more details. (I love that I saw the Ernie Ball and the optic-fiber sponge stories on Excite last night, and then saw those two posted here today.)
I feel fantastic, and I'm still alive.
I'd say that it's certainly proper for the software publisher to do some sort of check to be sure that the software is properly licensed. What they do beyond that, though, is probably a matter best attended to by their legal staff.
My computer should never do anything I don't want it to do. Plain and simple. If I don't want you to scan my network for illicit copies, then don't do it. I don't really care about any legal "right" software companies have to do it. I don't want them to do it; I'm their customer; they shouldn't do it unless they feel like pissing me off and losing me as a customer.
Anyway, any cracker with enough skill to remove normal copy protection techniques (not that much) can remove this sort of protection too.
I agree that I certainly wouldn't want the software to scan around my network looking for illicit copies of stuff. But that's not what we're talking about here. We're talking about a cracked program that, when started, determines that it is cracked, then reports that fact back to the publisher, along with information that will identify where the stolen property is.
This is almost like a Lojak system - the car is stolen, then the security system reports back to the police exactly where the car is. What if you stole the car and it's parked in your garage with the door closed? Yes, I understand that this example doesn't exactly parallel that of the article, but it is similar. The Lojak system doesn't check around the house to see if there are any other stolen things there...it's just concerned about one thing - the car. Much like the software that is described in this article.
Incidentally, neither I nor the article said anything about snooping around the network looking for stuff. And in the case of the software in question, it appears, at least from the limited information available to us in the article, that if this software is reporting information back to the "home office", it would be very hard to suggest that the user is anything remotely resembling a "customer". Unless you consider the guy who steals money from the bank to be a customer.
-h-
Almost any automated detection scheme is going to trigger a false alarm when a machine is re-configured and/or rebuilt.
The frequency that a company reconfigures its hardware is not anybody else's business.
Worse, such software will quickly take the next logical step of assuming that if it cannot "phone home" that it is being prevented from doing so by a pirate, when in fact it may merely be running on a machine that is isolated from the Internet for reasons of project security.
If I have a project that is isolated from the Internet for secrecy, I do not want to have to call each vendor for software that I am running to explain why their software cannot "phone home".
The only problem with this, is there are programs on the Internet that will generate infinite activation codes for specific software. This doesn't require any help from authorized activation code holders. Assuming any relationship between the two, is, uhm, flawed.
and when i pirate it i get 0 error messages. sounds to me like pirating is better.
I agree.
Instead of lugging 10 CDs worth of games because each game requires a CD check, I find a no-CD cracked version of the game for my laptop. No point risking the loss or damage of the CDs when its entirely unnecessary (most games these days copy 90% of their data to the harddrive anyways, so swapping has no real purpose).
Once again, game developers inconvienence legit paying users by putting them through this nonsense, while games get cracked regardless of the copy protection used anyways.
I don't understand this hate against the publisher. I would think they are simply protecting their software. They are in no way harming legitimate paying customers. Even when phoning home about a pirated copy there is no harm, it is the pirate who is harming the publisher.
So we should let the police search your home without a warrant? I mean, if you aren't doing anything illegal, it is in no way harming you, right? Or just allow them to put cameras in all homes (ala 1984) I mean, if you don't do anything illegal, why would you mind?
Tequila: It's not just for breakfast anymore!
I wouldn't have a problem with it either if it didn't require that I copy the entire contents of the CD to my hard drive *and* require the CD.
nohup rm -rf ~/. >& zen &
you can specify things with paths (up to 16 chars), but it does not work one would expect. In fact it matches the string with which the process is known to the system, so if you give full path, the program won't be recognised...
/usr/lib/mozilla/mozilla-bin (this is the actual path on Debian), because the script /usr/bin/mozilla calls it that way... /usr/bin/links /usr/bin/links
/usr/lib/mozilla/mozilla-bin is also allowed...
for example if you ps ux, you get
But if you run
$ links
the name of the program is links
if you run
$
the name is
and for example if you allow mozilla-bin,
This is the code which gets the string from the options
#ifdef IPT_OWNER_COMM
case '5':
check_inverse(optarg, &invert, &optind, 0);
if(strlen(optarg) > sizeof(ownerinfo->comm))
exit_error(PARAMETER_PROBLEM, "OWNER CMD `%s' too long, max %d characters", optarg, sizeof(ownerinfo->comm));
strncpy(ownerinfo->comm, optarg, sizeof(ownerinfo->comm));
if (invert)
ownerinfo->invert |= IPT_OWNER_COMM;
ownerinfo->match |= IPT_OWNER_COMM;
*flags = 1;
break;
#endif
i think to allow bigger names is a matter of resizing an array.... but to have it recognizing programs, I'm afraid you have to hack, i think it's not a matter of manipulating strings...
of course we cannot just force people to call programs with full path...
About already existing solutions,
Don't forget you can also check PID's,
you can check where an executable lies...
if what you are trying to say the whole thing is not easy for the inexperienced user, then you are right.
The point is that developers and distros will solve the problem when the problem will present.
with Debian i did not even allow my system to run non-free software. There is no point I should check for spyware.
Of course there will be need for it, when there is be a lot of non-free software for GNU/Linux (which is something I hope won't happen, since it means that in some way free software developers failed) some programmers will team up and solve the problem.
By the way if you want to start a project to code "the nice front end", I have got some spare time.
If you don't and some others would like to, I think we could do it...
You can mail me.
I don't want to start any blasphemous rumors but I think that God's got a sick sense of humor. DM
> And, duh, how do you propose to complete the loop on that one? The only thing that could "prove" someone guilty is software that is checking itself in the first place, which you appear to declare shouldn't be done unless one is guilty to being with. Hoist by your own petard, or caught by your own 22 as it were.
Hoist by your own, sir. The fact that it's difficult to prove someone guilty does not excuse violation of my privacy rights to make their jobs easier. If they have reason to believe I'm stealing, they can press for a BSA-style audit. If they can't get enough proof for that, that's not my problem. Would you allow police to come into your home without a warrant or probable cause to search for illegal drugs just because that would make it easier for the police to catch drug dealers?
> Any piece of software that has a price tag has the absolute right to 'protect' itself against use that is inconsistent with the software license.
Um, this is limited by proper consequence. That protection must not break any laws or perform actions that are considered excessive. Besides, if I buy a piece of software legally, and then it serreptitiously sends my MAC address to its author, you'd have a very hard case proving that it's defending itself from inconsistent use, unless you agree with the logic put forward in the last paragraph.
> This hue and cry over privacy in this regard is so tiresome and is mainly from those trying to keep 'private' the fact that they're too damned cheap to pay for something they want to use.
Here's the relevance problem: the same hue and cry that pirates use is also applicable to falsely accused, legitimate users (and in the cases of some spyware, innocent bystanders). The fact that some of the affected parties are guilty does not excuse the fact that some are not.
Virg
Why do I never have mod points when I need them? PLEASE, someone mod the parent post up. It is a FACT that it is very often EASIER to pirate than to buy legally. Myself, I've got legal copies of Nero, PowerDVD and other programs, but I pirate them because it's easier.
Lalala