Slashdot Mirror
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?
Just WHO is this publisher?
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
Its been going on for quite some time now.
You use the illegal software, I don't see any reason why someone who's life work might involve *writing* said software would not want to catch you pirating/using is Illegally.
I'n not all that sure how I feel about the users computer information being fired off in an email, but I have always considered that a possibility in the past. Seems like I was right.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order- Ed Howdershelt Via Tass
DecafJedi
DecafJedi
my weblog: apropos of something
There's a legend that Microsoft actually encountered this back with Microsoft Word 1.0 - it formatted the hard drive if the CRC of the program changed. Bad karma there, hosing innocent users if they got infected. (BTW - I've seen Vesselin Bontchev reference it here and other places, but it could just be he picked up a convenient rumor. Anyone have verification of this story?
If it's not documented in the EULA for the product, it might even be a potential civil suit against the company. Doesn't Europe have fairly restrictive privacy laws that could come into effect here? Could be criminal there if so, especially if it misfired on an innocent user. Although of course - IANAL.
BTW - what product?
I write code.
How many packets does your machine send out that you have not looked at personally ? Mine does that *all* the time (I don't have the time nor the resources to check them all).
:)
This means that if say MS is checking the contents of my machine and starts harassing me over possibly illegal software that I would have no way of knowing that the info was retrieved using spyware. it's the stupidity of the 'presentation' that gives this one away, if they were a bit more clever about it you'd never have known that it was spyware related.
The best way to avoid this kind of trouble is to go completely open source or make sure your licenses are paid up
are you on the grapevine yet ?
MP3 Search Engine
With the game Black and White that I own, the cd copy protection gave my computer so much problems and the only solution the publisher gave me was to install a new cdrom, so I was forced to install the cd crack to actually play the game. I'd hate to be labeled a pirate and taken to court because I actually wanted to play a game I legally purchased(Hell I preorded).
Have you ever been to a turkish prison?
I can't tell, but I'm assuming that you work at an ISP (AUP complaint?). Why on earth would you care about this information?
"Oh no! One of our users is doing something illegal and it has nothing to do with us! Quick, pull the plug on him!!!"
Seriously...unless you are law enforcement, what could you possibly do with this information? If I wrote your ISP and told them I saw you smoking pot, should I expect them to pull the plug on your connection??? How is this any less rediculous?!?
"The market alone cannot provide sufficient constraints on corporation's penchant to cause harm." -- Joel Bakan
Erm...while I grant you that in a civil case the rules of evidence will be much more lenient than in a criminal one, there are statutes related to industrial espionage which you could cover yourself with.
IANAL etc etc, but I am under the impression that, unless you explicitly agree to a function which is not arguably part of the 'core' raison d'etre of the software, things like collecting information without someone's consent on legitimately licensed PCs could be construed as breaking and entering, or the digital equivalent.
If the software only does this for unlicensed copies, I wonder whether you couldn't use a similar strain of argument (license was not active for arcane technical reasons, whatever.)
Admittedly, without starting an argument about it, I don't have strong moral qualms about piracy, and I do believe there are certain limits as to what's allowed in terms of evidence collection/snooping even if you are doing something legally "wrong".
Frankly, I think companies should try to use free/open software anyway if they can, so this never even becomes an issue (ask SCO!
Cole's Law: Thinly sliced cabbage
As someone who makes a living writing peer-to-peer software, I completely disagree that "STEALING IS STEALING" as you say.
I don't want to get into semantics with you, but here goes:
Stealing involves the deprivation of someone's property, removing thier ability to benefit from it. (paraphrase)
Information "theft" is not really theft or stealing.
Thousands of my users probably "steal" my software, but guess what! I DON'T CARE! It is information, which I CANNOT OWN!
Noone, corporation or individual, has a right to profit.
Everyone has a NATURAL right to consume and reproduce information. How do I know? Look how we are physically built, for crying out loud!
Let me close with this somewhat fanatical thought: Every month new ground is broken in the attempt to produce objects by piecing them together molecule by molecule.
Now, it will probably take longer than my lifetime to occur, but EVENTUALLY you all will be able build a generic THING from its component molecular pieces.
Consider this "future" world for a moment: No more scarcity, no more hunger, no more epidemics caused by lack of medicines.
Now consider the same world, with *your* "STEALING IS STEALING end of story" claim: Should the first person/company that creates a new molecular structure have a monopolistic control over said structure? Should you be able to produce (from scratch, not by "physically stealing") a replacement Brake Pad for your car without paying Ford for the privelidge? What about creating your very own "claritin-like" substance for your allergies? Should you have to pay Mosanto?
I stated before, and firmly believe, that information wants to be worthless, in an economic sense. Information has no "owner" that I recognize, and, as such, I do not consider the "copying" of information to be "theft".
If someone broke into my office and stole the computer I was writing my source code on, then THAT is theft of information, as it has deprived me of it.
If someone copies (without my permission) my program and uses it without paying me, oh well! I haven't been deprived of anything! I still have my program! The only thing I *may* have lost is potential profits, but NOONE HAS A NATURAL RIGHT TO PROFIT! NOONE!
(Thats why "Step 2: ???" is so common! heh)
In the above "idealistic copying world" example above, noone could profit! There would be no object scarcity, therefore (almost) no intrinsic value to *ANYTHING*, let alone "strictly informational things."
Time to end this rant, but PLEASE PLEASE consider:
The end result of personal "posession & ownership" of information, combined with monopolistic control, and the added "Lets consider artificial entities with the stated goal of financial wealth accumulation (corporations) the same as people, with the same 'rights' to own information, etc, is a CORPORATE FEUDAL SYSTEM, not the (what I consider) ideallic, everything-copying society that we COULD have then.
The road we are starting down today is leading us towards the scarier of the two, I believe.
-vDave-
{dave -at- bearshare -dotcom-}
Help me out, and use BearShare for all of your p2p (INFORMATION COPYING) needs!
The pig browse. With Google. Sigh is to the chicken. Chicken is fool. Giggle. The DailyWTF giggle.
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.
And for those situations where stealing doesn't mean stealing?
Two trivial examples that I suspect most us us could get "caught" for:
First, a friend purchased (completely legal, nothing unkosher whatsoever, not even grey-market) a copy of Age of Empires - AoK. It has a rather annoying copy protection scheme, however, which annoys legitimate users (whereas pirates just run a cracked version with no hassles at all). So the solution? He uses a cracked copy of the game. A stupid software test for known program cracks would flag him as "stealing", yet he did no such thing.
Second, and even more difficult to deal with - I have all of my CD collection on my HDD, since I only ever listen to them while at the computer. Legal format-shifting as allowed even by the DMCA. Yet, can I "prove" to some stupid spyware bot that yes, in fact, I really do own the CD? Nope. And even if I could, I shouldn't NEED to; my computer serves me, I do not serve my computer.
More important than false positives, though, we should consider the issue of why we buy software in general. If I buy a game, I buy it to play that game. If nowhere in the documentation (or preferably, on the outside of the packaging) does it describe its "RIAA-friendly anti-piracy technology", it damn well better not have any. I don't buy software to spy on me, I buy it to do the task it describes itself as performing. Nothing more, and nothing less.
- Unplug the phone jack/ethernet card
- Find out where its' sending packets to, and edit your hosts file on your proxy/firewall accordingly
- Remove the software (duh!)
Or, to take the parent posters' idea of a virus (actually, a worm) to the next step, have it scout the net looking for legit copies, and installing the crack on their machines. So even legit customers would end up "phoning home".Seriously, just remove the software. If it does something you want/need, you have three choices:
- buy a legit copy
- develop a competing product
- put up with the knowledge that it is phoning home
Mind you, if I wrote it, I wouldn't have it phone home, - I'd have it phone a (very) expensive 900 number (say, $50.00 a call) that I'd own, and you'd end up paying for your license when you got your next phone billSo the (alleged) spyware sends copies of certain information about your computer back to the company that produced the software.
The user still has all the information they started with. No one has been deprived of any information. All that has happened is that an additional copy of this information has been created and distributed.
In order to object to this, you have to admit that some information does have owners, and also that it is wrong to copy information without the consent of the owner.
Then, this being slashdot, you have to do a little song and dance, like this: "when other people create music and software and movies, and I make a copy of their stuff, it's fine. But when someone else makes a copy of information from me without my consent, that's wrong!"
Your information wants to be free; my information wants to be private. See?
My own beliefs are the same as Linus Torvalds: "He who writes the code chooses the license". If you don't like spyware, don't friggin run it. I don't.
Say you're a small shop. You have need of 3 copies of s/w package X.
You go down to BigBox store, and buy 3 copies of X.
Back at the office, you use one CD to load all the machines. Leave the other 2 in the shrinkwrapped boxes, on the shelf. Perfectly normal...happens all the time.
The running s/w sees 2 other copies of the same s/n on the LAN, and phones home. PIRATE! PIRATE!
You're 'legal'. You have paid your fees for the 3 copies. But Company X, due to their incorrect reporting and intrusive networking, thinks you are in violation. They send the BSA after you, with all the attendant fees.
At this point, you're guilty until you can prove your innocence.
Absolute BS, I say.
"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."
That's fine provided due process is followed. Calling home and saying "I'm cracked" is not evidence of guilt. I have a piece of cracked software on my laptop. Am I guilty of piracy? Have I stolen anything? Absolutely not! I paid for the software. However, I cannot have a dongle sticking out of the back of my laptop. It's not worth risking breaking of the dongle, or worse, the laptop.
End of story? Me thinks not. If somebody installs cracked software they haven't paid for simply to evaluate it, have they stolen it? Ethically speaking, no. The fact of the matter is that you cannot return software. The only people who are truely guilty of commiting theft are the people who acquire the software without paying for it, and make use of it.
I would advise not trying to oversimplify this down to black and white. It is nowhere near as 'end of story' as you're making it out to be.
Doesn't this fall under Entrapment laws, or does that just apply to law enforcement agencies?