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Independent Developers Fight Piracy & Lose
An anonymous reader writes "The author of the Echelon decided to take his fight against software piracy to the next level and then threw in the towel. After someone began posting new serial numbers on a well known hacking site, the author took matters into his own hands. With version 1.0, entering a hacked serial number causes the software deleted the user's Home directory. Yes, you read it right, the software completely erases it (aka rm -rf ~). A variety of people have voiced some some strong opinions on this. While some argue that piracy is good for established companies, a few large companies are battling piracy and having limited success. Small, independent developers, however, are recognising this is a serious problem and are generally stumped by what to do about it."
- Delete Perl
- Stop Apache, Samba, & nfsd and remove their startup scripts.
- Delete X
- Delete ftp, grep, ssh, or other important programs.
The key is to piss off the user. Each of these things are replaceable, but a PITA.That what was all this school was for... to teach us how to solve our own problems. -- janeowit
I guess FADE is something comparable. But it didn't get out of the realm of the game (Operation Flashpoint in this case), but simply degraded controls and ammunition inside the game. It proved not to hold long (as any protection), but I think it enouraged some people to buy the game they liked.
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My thoughts...
If they can figure how to reverse the serial number generator, they can figure out how to block any "delete defense."
Plus, this guy better make sure to heck that he deletes on the pirates. If somebody who bought the software legally gets his/her stuff deleted, bring on the sharks... err, lawers!
AC
Imagine the developers face when he realizes that he forgot a ! in his if statement, while testing that piece of code.
Anyway, this guy's product and any future products will definitely not be getting any of my money (and I certainly won't be downloading his apps).
Ha, who am I kidding, I wouldn't download it anyway. Open source all the way baby!
Instead of deleting the files, they should encrypt the files.
:-)))))))
The decryption key will be provided when the product is registered.
-Mike
and by accident nukes the home dir? is there any responsibility from the part of the software designer?
Deleting a user's home directory is a bad idea. It's not portable. How about those poor folks running Windows 9x. They don't have proper home directories. Even the ones in WinXP are half-baked. You'd have to build in a routine that'll erase the C:\ drive for those poor saps.
I'd think a good way to spook potential buyers from buying your product is making it punish them if they enter the "wrong" key.
It seems that this would break some law or other. Mantraps are quite illegal, and while the stakes are not as high, this is conceptually the exact same thing.
First, at least he didn't start emailing parts of the user's mailspool to address book entries!
I always thought it was kind of ironic when the small people back the groups like SPA / BSA. Those "industry" groups represent those who fund them, and AFAIK will do nothing for the little guy. They are funded by the big players.
There have been a few other similiar cases. I believe one of the popular Windows CD recording packages would burn garbage CDs if you entered the wrong serial number, or entered one of the popular serial numbers found on google.
Southeastern Virginia REPRESENT!
I too have been stung by rampant piracy, however I would never do what these authors did for fear of the potential legal and ethical problems it could cause to knowingly sabotage someone's system. In my case the software in question is Net Weasel, a small HTML editor that has had millions of downloads, has several thousand active users bugging me for support and zero registrations (that's right, not a single person willing to pony up any money). Yet people still email me claiming to have a legitimate copy and demanding that I fix bugs or release a new version. As it happens I do have an updated version I use myself and I'm working on a 2.0, but until I come up with a way to stop people from writing cracks its just not worth my time to release. I'm already compressing and encrypting the executable, there's a point when the copy protection gets to be a bigger project then the application itself.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
If a solution involving online activation and a key component of the program missing with a locked hardware device would work ala the 'sentinel' devices..
Dunno. Heh - little guys are screwed.
"It's not stealing if you don't get caught!"
Curmudgeon Gamer: Not happy
" With version 1.0, entering a hacked serial number causes the software deleted the user's Home directory"
That is simply awesome! Better yet, he should have fdisk'ed/equivalent the entire partition. Being a developer myself, there's nothing more insulting than people taking your hard work for granted. Unfortunately the consequences for doing so are, more often than not, negligible.
I'd love to read his license agreement.
Standalone software is inherently vulnerable. With an increasingly "always-on" net culture, it's highly beneficial to look at your software design and see if there is a way to move some of the functionality to server side (storing account data, etc). This way you maintain some control and create a dependency on you the software vendor.
Wow, didn't I read about this like *two* days ago on MeFi?
Anyways... I think its a perfectly reasonable action. The generated pirate keys were never assigned to anyone, so the only way you could *stumble* upon it is through actually looking for the S/N. The author's kind jest in wiping out the homedir takes care of the d00d-werez-my-0day-S/N lamers.
If anyone lost any critical data due to this 'feature', there could be serious consequences. I'm not sure if rm -rf ~ on OSX makes the files unrecoverable, but the author ought to be liable to pay to recover the data.
In fact, simply writing the software may have been illegal.
If someone steals some CDs from you, you don't have the right to burn their house down.
And, as a matter of fact the software in question may have been violating the GPL. It was basically a front-end to FFMPEG, which is GPL'd, and it may have come bundled with it.
So basically the guy wrote an easy to use front end to some free software, and then trashed people's work when he stopped getting money from it.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
If its in the EULA they can do anything they want and have the arse covered.
By using this software you grant us the right to delete all your files
Echelon - Redifining the Meaning of BOFH (or perhaps BDFH?)
-dave
http://millionnumbers.com/ - own the number of your dreams
UNIX/Linux Consulting
The author wrote and distributed a program with malicious intent and should be convicted of whichever computer-related offenses are most appropriate. Perhaps probation would be preferable to jail time, but I see no way to excuse this person's behavior.
Any software developer with even a remote sense of reality realized long, long ago that preventing piracy is impossible. Make a product that people are willing to pay for, and they will pay for it. That's the best you can do.
I can understand the developers frustration, putting in hours of hard work and love on a prodject only to see it propogated across the internet with no benefit.
Again, not saying what he did was right or ethical, but I can understand it.
Deleteing the $HOME is of course unacceptable and should be punishable by law without much problems. Just because I stole your bike, doesn't mean that you are allowed to burn down my house, both things are a crime and the first doesn't justify the second.
The issue would be quite a bit trickier if instead of doing something obviously illegal the software would instead do something less obvious like trying to find the address, name or other personal information about the computer user who used the cracked serial and mail it to the author of the software so that he in turn could inform the police.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Adding code that can deliberately delete files to software could result in serious liability issues. How does the programmer verify that his code is without defect? Also, if files get deleted, and his software has this capability, how is he protected against lawsuits? I would be hesitant to use software that had a bomb installed in it.
==
I'm a professional software developer myself and while the software I work on isn't piracy prone, I'd never go this far.
Disable your own software, do bad encodes, draw goatse/tubgirl images on the encodings, but dont, DONT mess with files that doesn't belong to your program.
This is just plain immature, not to mention very wrong.
And yes, it seems like the author already removed it, but putting it there in the first place is bad.
I've read that adding timebombs to commercial binaries was potentially illegal. Wouldn't willful destruction of property (rm -rf ~) be even worse as victims would have an easier claim for damages?
I have some mixed feelings about piracy. I believe that, at the core, software piracy is morally reprehensible (sorry about using the term piracy for those of you that quibble about that, but it is the term used in the summary).
As a software developer, I feel that I ought to get paid for the work I do. I do work for a company that pays me to develop, so it's really their responsibility to make sure their software isn't pirated (if they want to protect their business).
Nevertheless, I feel that piracy can be benefically to any company, regardless of size. I think that it may even help smaller companies more than larger companies, because piracy may be the vehicle in which a particual software package becomes very popular. However, one has to realize that 100% of software can't be pirated, otherwise nobody would develop anything meaningful (excepting the free software movement, but that's something pretty special [and I do wholeheartedly support it, even with LOC when I can]--I am speaking in a manner of business). Like most things in economics, it probably requires the right critical mass (you need to have the right number/ratio of people buying your software to make you profitable, but you need to have a certian number/ratio of people pirating it to make it popular).
I never think that software should ever use measures that destroy your property (digital or otherwise) as a means to prevent piracy. I am glad that the author of the software mentioned above took out the folder deleting technique--I cannot believe he did that in the first place.
I am pretty sure that, in the UK, such behaviour in your program would make you liable for prosecution under the computer misuse act, you could be charged with Unauthorised modification of computer material :
:
(from HMSO)
Unauthorised modification of computer material
This could include deleting files, changing the desktop set-up orintroducing viruses with the intent to impair the operation of a computer, or access to programs and data. The word 'intent'means it has to be done deliberately, rather than someone deleting files by mistake. This also includes using a centre's computer to damage other computers outside the centre, even though the computer used to do this isitself not modified in any way. This offence carries a penalty of up to five years and/or a fine.
I'd recommend setting up a 900 number that charges the $40 or whatever the software costs. Then if you enter a hacked serial number it searchs for a com port that responds to AT commands, sets silent mode and dials the number ordering the software. Sure, I think most pirates would freak out and demand a refund, but parents of pirating kiddies would at least find out what was going on. And some people might just give in. The 900 number is more annoying than deleting the home directories, it's reversible, and it could potentially be profitable.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
I was impressed. I was maybe 16, and I wasn't necessarily using keygens because I hated companies or wanted to be malignant, I just had no money. This was the first program that had been able to detect a keygen'd serial. So, I actually bought a license for bpftp... (it was cheap anyway).
Maybe I'm the only one who feels this way, but I had to hand it to 'em. It's a respect thing, I guess.
Or maybe it was just adolescent "logic" running through my head. Nowadays it seems kind of dumb. Oh well, thank god I don't use windows anymore.
I wouldn't use this software even if I did have a legitimate serial number. The fact that a code path that performs a "rm -rf ~" exists is too dangerous IMO. There's nothing stopping an enterprising virus/worm/trojan author from releasing something that could alter your key file so that it could force that code path to execute.
Please, don't support this sort of software. The authors, Digital Schism, are out of their minds.
If software companies enforced their rights and fought piracy more througly, it would lead to interesting things in some countries. In Brazil, for instance, rougly 90% of all home installations of MS Windows are pirated. A lot of those PC ownders wouldnt be willing to buy a legal license, if software piracy control was tougher, thus leading a lot of those people to using Linux and other OpenSource alternatives.
The system I use with my applications is:
Client-server architecture, you login once with a CDKEY. Everytime the program runs, it sends your IP and cdkey to a server.
Now if TOO MANY PEOPLE use a CDKEY, you can cancel it out... Then when people login with that CDKEY they see,"You are using a pirated CDKEY, please get a legitamate one. Email X@X.com"
Sure advanced hackers can skip past the client-server authentication, but its tough and they need to do it for every released version. For the most part people are stumbled here.
Good points:
1)You can track if your software is being pirated at all.
2)You cut people off who have used your software, so its like a free trial and if they like it, they can pay you for a copy... And they may not have bought the software to begin with.
www.geocities.com/James_Sager_PA
God spoke to me.
What kind of moron do you have to be to perform a criminal act when someone violates your copyright? If someone loses data with actual monetary value they can sue the living shit out of him, and that code is going to be running around the internet for eternity. He has essentially created a trojan horse. In fact, if a large group of people lost any data they could file a class action lawsuit against him. They would all have to be sued individually for any assertion of lost sales due to violation of copyright, but they can all sue him into the ground together.
Remember, one crime does not excuse another. If you are thinking of doing something like this, THINK AGAIN BUCKO. Or, you'd better move out of the country, to someplace without extradition treaties and no computer users.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
If the author of the software had simply deleted the software itself, or disabled it in some way, this could be acceptable, but deleting a user's home directory goes WAAAAY over the line.
A good general guideline for ethical behavior in CS is theACM Code of ethics. This violates several points, including:
1.2 Avoid harm to others.
1.3 Be honest and trustworthy.
1.7 Respect the privacy of others.
(1.2 is the most applicable here, I think)
Can you imagine if Auto makers took this attitude towards chip reprogramers? Alter our product and we'll make sure your brakes suddently stop working.
But seriously he has no right to do this and if it happened to me I'd sue and he would lose. I'd have no problem paying whatever civil penalty there was and really nailing him for damages.
If he wants the program not to work because a stolen serial is beig used, fine. If he wants to phone home and then report that users IP to the authorities, fine. If he wants to put up a notice saying "hey you Fucker, don't steal my software!", fine. But the idea of actually destroying a users property is wrong any way you slice it. I can't believe some idiots have posted "you get what you deserve".
Why not convince users to pay for software by only allowing registered users access to online support. People who pay for software a less likely to lend their logins.
Rather than spend a considerable amount of time and effort in a vain attempt to foil copyright violators, try simply putting out a decent product at a fair price. Those who are honest (who, I think, are most of us) will be willing to pay for something they believe is fairly priced, and those who are dishonest won't be willing to pay for something no matter what -- they'll do everything in their power to illicitly copy it instead.
Honestly, I suspect that the return on the money wasted on fighting copyright infringement by fringe elements is far less than the amount actually spent fighting it.
Use 'slashdot stuff' in the subject line in any email you send me if you want to get past the spam filter.
Simple. $20 = case of beer.
The bomb-code was only up for a few hours, and reputedly nobody got nailed, so why is this article in existance, anyway?
I mean, with MS you click "I Agree" to a box that says they can modify or delete anything on your PC anyway. I think the big licenses even include a "search anytime we want" language too.
Oh, wait -- This is a MAC program. They're not used to losing all their data instantly (viruses, hideous crashes... etc...)
Well, you Apple fans don't have any decent viruses yet, and you need something to share our pain...
********* sig: If you don't like the law, get filthy stinking rich, and buy a better one.
CDRWIN, IIRC
Make your software behave in such a way no one is willing to use it and then no one will pirate it!
Seriously, this is not the first time a program detects a hacked serial key and then [insert some behaviour], though this is the worst measure I have ever heard of.
Windows XP for instance doesnt allow you to install SP1 if you are using one of a few leaked keys.
IIRC, CDRWIN (a cd-burning program) would slowly 'degrade' your burns over time if you used an invalid key. Very insiduous, as it would seem to work at first then slowly get worse and worse.
What if you mis-type in your valid serial and the program thinks it now matches a banned key? Whoops!
If you insist on deleting something on the detection of a hacked serial, then trash the programs binary, *not* the users whole home directory. That's just assanine.
I think most serial codes have checksum, to validate data entry (as they tend to be quite badly human-repeatable), so that wouldn't be a problem.
fucktard is a tenderhearted description
I had this "friend" who worked for this small software company. He once replaced the installer binary for the company's software on their download site with the installer for "Gator" -- If the referrer was from known hacker sites, they got the Gator.
Yikes! Apparently it deletes the ability to recognize faults in grammar as well! :)
For * intentionally * causing damage to a users data ( especially due to an unverifiable act ) he should be tossed in jail and sued into oblivion..
Sure, detection could cause an uninstall *his* application ( but leaving the users data intact ), and leave a message ' please contact us at 1800-bla to reinstall ' ) but NOT cause damage.
This is not vigilante justice, its just plain wrong. The guy should be strung up.. Now THAT'S vigilante justice..
---- Booth was a patriot ----
I'm a big supporter of free software, and am totally against software piracy. A contradiction? No SIR!
Free software depends on adherence by users to an agreement with the developers not to illegally use the software in a proprietary manner. If we expect people to abide by free software licenses, we have to abide by commercial software licenses too.
In my opinion, the only thing he did wrong was to not put a clause into his license that when the user clicks on it specifically authorizes the code to delete the home directory if it chooses to.
Stop stealing music, software, etc. while at the same time expecting free software to remain free. It's hypocrisy.
No weapon in the arsenals of the world is so formidable as the will and moral courage of free men.-Ronald Reagan
First, I 100% support the right for the developer to fight back. However, wouldn't deleting the contents of a user's home directory open the developer up to some sort of legal trouble? I could easily imagine someone putting forth a lawsuit claiming absurd damages because of this. Imagine trying to explain to a jury the specifics in this sort of case!
... but kinda expensive way to do this is to use hardware keys. While by no means perfect, it'll deter the standard schmoe because they're hard to copy without the right gear.
What happens if you enter a serial number incorrectly and it triggers the "hacked" serial code that deletes your files?
And what about a random bug in the software that could end up doing the same?
Personally, I wouldn't even consider running a piece of software that has the capacity to delete all my stuff.
Wouldn't it make more sense to hit a webpage and save the ip number or something?
...he did absolutely the right thing...anyone who took damage from him doing this deserved it...end of story.
Power Corrupts,Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutely, leaving one person(group)in charge is absolutely corrupt.
1 - It is NOT harsh to delete an entire directory: You STOLE a peice of property that you're supposed to be buying a license for and you decided to use it without paying. Therefore, you're a thief and should be punished!
2 - On the other hand, if you want a simple solution to how to combat piracy, stop overcharging for software. That is, $800 for Adobe Photoshop, $300 - 500 for Microsoft Office and on and on it goes. So what if a program costs $49.99 - which is already overpriced in itself - when I have to install it on an already inflated operating system and suite of office software products?
But the bottom line is piracy is piracy and I find it ironic that anyone would have any problems with nuking a harddrive because you've stolen property and attempted to use it. It's a just respose to a crime.
-Ba ba
Two wrongs don't make a right.
The developer was on the right track removing a user's home directory but he really should:
- after removing the home directory, installed an init script that re-removes the user's home directory on every reboot.
- disable logins(if this is a *nix box)
- linked all browsers on the system to reboot instead of the browswer binary.
- made a popup that comes up with a "Naughty Pirate" message and an image of a pirate hanging from the ropes
- on the fifth reboot, just plain blank the hard drive.
I mean, come on, if you're gonna go so far as removing someone's home directory, let's have some fun and really get creative.
The Uber
http://www.tulg.org/
http://devurandom.livejournal.com/
If a tree bears more fruit than the consumers can eat, is that a loss or waste?
Are these companies out $13 Billion of their pocket that they had to pay for salaries and overhead?
I am sick and tired of the 'spin' on piracy. I don't condone the unauthorized licensing of software but I hardly believe that these companies are out of pocket $13 billion as the marketing spin would lead you to believe.
I know that it's $13 Billion that pirates make and associated licenses lost but it's also not properly licensed software.
I know that they see each install as a license used (in most cases) and each unlicensed install attributes to the $13 Billion.
How are pirate installs tracked? If someone uses Gimp instead of Photoshop, would Adobe call that a missed sale and add that to the $13 Billion?
if you steal from one source, that is plagiarism, if you steal from many, well, that's just research.
Second of all, there is nothing immoral about this behavior, and until recently nothing illegal, which is as it should be, especially in the US.
Part of the point of the US system is that all rights not specifically taken away from the public remain with them. Under the copyright system as originally (and best) envisaged, the right to share is NOT taken away.
Any views to the contrary are the result of corporate lobbying and insidious propaganda campaigns. Copyright exists only to encourage artists to produce works, not to make everyone who ever uses it have to pay them.
The solution to "piracy" is to stop viewing it as a crime. Software isn't a manufactured good to be sold per unit. It's perfectly easy to make money by offering support and customization under contracts with monthly fees or the like.
How can you care about this shit? MERCATUR.NET has shut down!!!!! Goddam you trolltalk :-(
I can guess how the majority of this discussion will go, so I just have one question. Why do people always try to apply the ideas of OSS to commercial software? It's like people get so used to being able to download anything they want for free that they for some reason take that set of principles and apply it to software they weren't given permission to download without paying for. That's completely the opposite of the free spirit of OSS, which is that someone is purposely giving away their effort of their own volition, and you can contribute back to it for the good of the community. Pirating doesn't contribute anything except lost sales for the people who make a living and feed their families. It's not free advertising, it's not try-before-you-buy (that's what demos are for), it is nothing more than people not wanting to pay for something. Same thing with MP3 piracy, movie piracy, etc.
The Synergy developer's plight was moving when I read it: pirates have reverse engineered the license manager he is using and can generate things like 100 seat licenses at will. As a result the developer has abandoned the product.
But when I clicked through to see what Synergy actually was my sympathy evaporated. The damned thing is a single panel with three buttons on it, which can play/pause/rewind iTunes. The license enforcement code alone has to be more complex than the rest of it put together. And for this Saturday afternoon's worth of work the developer wants 5 Euros per copy.
Legally, what right does he have to modify those files on my computer? I hope someone sues the shit out of this guy as he deserves it.
Before I get flamed for being pro-piracy, listen up, I don't condone people pirating this guys software, but he takes it a step too far, into what must SURELY be cybercrime territory.
Anybody want to post some of his contact information so we can "inform him" of the error of his ways?
Buy Steampunk Clothing Online!
One specifically for "trial" downloads, and one for "paid" downloads? Why even let the "trial" download have the capability of getting converted to the full version simply by typing in a serial number? I would say the developers should stop being lazy and create separate programs, one for trial and one for paid.
No matter if they killed your dog first, if you kill theirs back in revenge you'll just as culpable as they are.
On the other hand, I can understand the difficult situation of small companies defending theirselves (we've also had to deal with similar situations lately).
I just don't accept this course of action. It just doesn't make him any different. Acting like this just proves his ignorance and inability to come up with a suitable defense (has not to be perfect, just enough to generate some reasonable income).
I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all I can think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do.
Even if deleting the home directory of someone who pirated your software was ethical or legal (clue: it's not), what happens if the serial code belonged to an innocent user in the first place?
This developer is presumably scanning warez sites for hacked serial codes, but those serial codes may have come from someone who had his computer rooted, or a keygen program might just have come up with a valid s/n owned by a legit user.
Oh well, it's good advertising for non-proprietary software.
He actually did a mv placed everything in the /tmp directory, then forced the finder to quit and restart itself... when that happened you ended up with a fresh brand spanking new desktop. (everything was deleted). When you try to recover the data, your able to get everything back but all the files are useless because he uses the new feature in 10.3 secure empty trash to prevent you from recovering the files. He made sure you couldn't recover the data either.
Brutal and most likely illegal.
did something a little bit different. it was an extrmely powerful cd recording application. If you entered a hacked serial number, it would burn minor defects into cds it made, so subtle you wouldn't recognize it immediately. However, they also notified the user when entering the serial number, that using a hacked number will result in this.
echelon could do the same, and it will essentially uprevent people from using hacked numbers, at least until somebody cracks it and removes the offending code out.
This guy's smart, but that wouldn't work with ppl like me who run apps like these from dummy guest accounts.
.... Oh wait!! dd:w
If only Microsoft too deletes the users' home directories when they try to install pirated Office XP copies would
"Hmmm...I'm going to try to make money with a business model that does not work well, and when it doesn't work, instead of accepting the fault as my own for choosing a poor business model, I'll instead blame it on others and destroy their property. Yeah, that's the ticket!"
...). I just know shareware is a poor business model.
This guy should be fined or thrown in prison for trying to pull such a stunt! And before you people start assuming I'm some 0-day warez kiddie, I register my shareware (Paint Shop Pro, Cool Edit, WinZip, WinAmp(!),
Try making money by providing a real good or service instead, jackass!
Anti-piracy sabotoge has been around for a long time - it dates back to the days of some manufacturers using 5.25 inch floppies that included an unused disk track containing sandpaper - attempting to copy the master disk would result in moving the floppy read head over the sandpaper covered track, thus destroying it.
This was stopped for probably the same reasons as discussed in the home security thread regarding booby traps. Destroying somebody's PC is illegal, even if they are making illegal copies of your software. Besides, what if they were using somebody else's PC to do it? And who would want to purchase a product that could destroy your PC if you make a mistake? Kind of like purchasing a car with a built in self-destruct as an anti-theft device. God help you if it malfunctions.
My rights don't need management.
would i ever even consider trying a demo by this author. if he HAD code in to do something destructive like that what's to say that it is stable and bug free? ok. he turned it off (for now). maybe he'll turn it back on one day. maybe he'll slip up and it'll be re-enabled one day. maybe it has a bug and goes off after 90 days regardless if you registered or not. saying "only pirates have something to worry about" is foolish.
i'm all for authors protecting their work, but when they do things like this they've crossed the line. i could never recommend ANY software this author helped develop. if someone did this in a corporation they'd be subject to criminal charges
abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz
Join us now and share the software,
you'll be free hackers, you'll be free....
Over the years my employer has had several software packages that used a dongle that plugged into the printer port. Mostly this software was the kind that would be distributed in the hundreds rather than the millions. It seemed to work, I never saw these packages hacked or available as warez.
So the question is, "why don't more developers use this?"
Entering a hacked serial number should NOT have deleted any user data. No company has the right to do that. Instead, they should have had the software simply entirely delete its current installation.
Of course, if the user's home directory is that vulnerable, maybe something deeper needs to be looked at.
My mom always said, "Jim, you're 1 in a million." Given the current population, there are 7000 of me. God help us all!
> How is he protected against lawsuits?
Probably the same way Mr. Gangbanger is protected against lawsuits when he sends in Bubba, to break some knuckles... When you are breaking the law anyways, it's hard to call in the police, and if you do call them, well they don't really care much if the small guys beat each other up.
On a more practical note, who is going to pay the lawyers to do discovery? Yeah, that's right, you can only sue people with deep pockets...
It simply moves it into /tmp/.
/tmp/ is cleaned and the data is lost.
When the user reboots, however,
Pokey The Penguin!
Even product activation can be circumvented when you own the machine the software is running on. I guess the crackers will never stop...obviously not skilled enough to have a real job coding, they need something to amuse themselves when home from the grocery bagging job.
That's why I work for a corporation.
Blar.
Spending time trying to convert them into customers is completely wasted. Stop them from using your program with a perfect protection scheme, and all they'll do is use a different program.
Do it in a rediculous manner like this joker, and all you're going to do is drive away your legitimate customers. I wouldn't pay for this thing in a million years. Who knows what crap this thing could pull in the future? All it takes is one bug, and suddenly it thinks legit users are pirates...
This stunt he pulled has caused far more loss of sales for him than any software piracy.
I favor systems built on trust. I can remember when you could write something, and there was a good chance that people using it would pay up. Of course, in a world where it is considered wrong to pay people for writing code (Thanks Mr. Stallman)...that means there are very few people who will pay for it. Companies like this are not viable from the get go...if there is anything valuable in their design...someone should either sneak a copy of the source code, or reverse engineer and open source it and put the company out of its misery. The sooner the doors of the firm are shut and the programmers are free to pursue open source the better.
There is no such thing as an intellectual property rights. Paying for code is immoral!!!!! The mere act of paying a programmer just feeds the beast. At first I wanted to just agree with your assessment of trust...but see that a world where programmers are not paid for their work is a superior world.
Offer the codes for free. This way you get out of the extortion issue.
However, in order to get the code, the person in question must prove their own identity... Opening themselves to criminal and civil charges.
I like that.
InThane
At the same rate, it's only $20, why register it?
Okay, so the person didn't have permission to use the software. I can certainly understand the urge to do something like this.
However, consider the consequences. The publisher could get sued. Sure, he probably will (might?) win, but it costs money to defend. Oops, there goes more profit. The publisher loses goodwill (hard to define-but not all publicity is good publicity....). Oh, and maybe the publisher gets hacked/cracked by someone he has pissed off (people pirating software may not have the strongest morals/ethics/logic but some may be good at computers). Oops. There goes more profit.
In short, I see a lot of downside and little upside. And I sure as heck wouldn't want to use a product as a LEGITIMATE user if I knew it was designed to screw up my system (even if only for illegitimate users).
What ever happened to just not working when a bad S/N is entered? Not producing garbage output or destroying files, but just not working. If you're going to take the approach of pissing off the user, where's the justification in vandalizing the system to do it? Unless the programmer is trying to invite up-close-and-personal criticism.
Mail? Put "slashdot" in the subject to pass the spam filters.
i'm sorry, but if you ran the program without a proper license, YOU deleted all files in your $HOME, not the author.
the equivalent would be: my bike has uneffective brakes, and I know it, but you come and steal it and you get under a bus. I have absolutely no liability because you had not the right to be riding it anyway. ESPECIALLY if it was in all-caps right in the beginning of the clickthru "EULA", because then it would be properly advertised.
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048
I was going to say 'he sure would' until I thought about it some more. Most if not all software sold now strictly limits the liability of the software purchased to the value of the software bought (ie $20).
So all he has to do is create a 'buglist' that includes the 'arbitrary' destruction of the $HOME directory when 'certain' serial numbers are entered and then don't do anything about 'the bug'. That would prove to the courts that it was a known issue and that the purchaser/pirate is restrained by the EULA.
Do you think Microsoft does business any differently? They have destroyed my PC many a time and are not the least bit liable for it. I have no expectation of that either.
Wow, didn't I read about this like *two* days ago on MeFi?
Slashdot provides a way for the general web public to comment on links. Metafilter doesn't. Details
Obligatory plug - please check out my online novel.
for the moment i thought the autor of this Echelon was taking measures agains piracy...
While I do feel for the guy, this is going way overboard. In effect he's gone and made himself judge, jury and executioner. The simple fact is that it he's opening himself up to major trouble. If for instance someone reverse engineered the algorthim for generating serial numbers, and then started distributing them, a paying customer could get serious screwed when his password is deemed "pirated" by the system. The biggest danger of this is during reinstallation after a system reinstall (never have to that under Windows, though...) -- it's six months since he legally bought the product, and all of a sudden, during reinstall, all of the user data is simply and suddenly gone. He had a choice of either making the software easier to install, sacrificing security of the serial numbers, or more difficult to install. He chose to make it easier to install, and should now live with that choice.
Fight piracy, yes. Vigilante tactics, no.
Just like how microsoft blocked access to SP1 & SP2 for XP if you were using a bootleged serial number. Nobody ever got around that.
You would think by now software developers and companies could take a look at the history books and site the commodore 64 as a prime example of how you CANNOT win a war against illicit software copying. Everything you throw at software crackers, they will defeat.
One word. Keygenerator. Or maybe that's two.
"The Wright brothers were the first to fly with a heavier-than-air machine, but boy did they have a lousy plane"
I think it was a bad idea that the developer stuck in home directory deleting facility, but I can understand where he's coming from. From what I read he quickly saw the error of his ways and removed the code. I don't think he needs to be beat up anymore over this. When you use serial numbers obtained through nefarious channels you are taking a risk, though it seems the risk is so small as to not be enough to make much of an impact.
Flood the pirate community with fake keygens, serials, cracked exe's and patches for your software with fancy ascii art, pirates'll have a hellofva time trying all the fakes, they may actually give up on finding a real hack.
Yeah, it's only $20. But there are maybe 100-200 programs that I have some marginal use for, which are also all $20. That's over $2000. I don't have that. And I'm not going to pay $20 for something I'm only likely to use once, or if I'm not sure that it'll do the job.
Until F/free software covers everything everyone needs there will always be piracy.
BSD WaveStation, a nice program for on-air radio use, also does this. Well almost.. it takes it a step further and actually blows your drive up and makes your machine unbootable!
Just one more reason to use open source software exclusively. You just can't trust closed source software developers.
quidquid latine dictum sit altum videtur.
Bad Idea if you end up hurting a paying customer.
Back in about '82 an acquaintance bought a C64, floppy drive and accounting software. Painstakingly entered data for his employees, customers etc. Took him about 2 weeks of hunt and peck. Program ran great for about a month and then one day when he loaded it up, his master data file had every record replaced with "PIRATE","PIRATE","PIRATE"...
It turned out that the copy protection could be triggered by a slightly misaligned drive head. The program thought it was a pirated copy and activated its anti-piracy code. OOPS!
Buddy was not impressed, since it cost him much time and money. After several nasty letters from lawyers the developer ended up having to pay to have the data re-entered, as well as supplying a version of the software without the anti-pirate code.
None of them can see the clouds; The polished wings don't care.
Just because I stole your bike, doesn't mean that you are allowed to burn down my house, both things are a crime and the first doesn't justify the second.
I've seen this two times now in this discussion. Burning someone's house down is a world of difference from rm-ing someone's home directory when they enter a pirated serial number. Such emotive analogies are silly and don't apply.
This is more like a self-igniting bike. If you steal the bike, it will melt in your garage and take some of your stuff with it. So don't steal the bike! The act is entirely dependent on the software pirate.
As a side note, it's amusing to me that people obsessively argue that software piracy is not theft, yet suddenly when a software author strikes back at piracy, we're seeing analogies that involve theft.
I'd find it much more justified to break the behavior of the program a little bit when used with an invalid serial code. Introduce a little bit of noise there, a glitch here..
;-(. And then there's this "geneve convention"-stuff..
Or replace segments of video with the goatse guy!
And do put it after an hour or so of the video has passed, so the foe is nicely taken by surprise when he's lying on the cough watching the movie.
Although I guess that would be some sort of piracy too
"Don't copy that floppy"-clip could be a suitable replacement too.
Would it be a problem if this guy had just displayed a msg indicating he knew it was a pirated serial #, and then deleted the application? No user data, and something he knida, technically, owns.
Whilst I understand the petty satisfaction the developer might get from doing this, it doesnt' change the fact that he is breaking the law, committing an act of criminal damage.
His only defence is that people won't report him because they pirated the software.
But otherwise, he's going down for computer related crimes - like virus writers go down. In the UK he'd be breaking the Computer Misuse Act 1990. I'm sure other countries have similar laws.
Long ago (circa 1990), plenty of Amiga games used to try to roach any disk (including other floppies) if they thought they were running from non-legit disks.
The response from the Amiga gamer community was basically to drop Amiga as a ligit platform.
Software developers who resort to deletion or destruction of anything other than their own software are morons. When their part-time software projects tank, please remember not to hire these knuckleheads.
How are pirate installs tracked? If someone uses Gimp instead of Photoshop, would Adobe call that a missed sale and add that to the $13 Billion?
Yes. Adobe might pull a patent out of its corporate stern and accuse GIMP users of infringement.
This isn't going to be a problem for anyone is it? I mean everyone has all that important stuff backed up on seperate media somewhere don't they? I work in a tech shop, and pretty much every tech I know has come to the same place as far as data is concerned.
"An 800 lb gorrilla with a jackhammer came in and destroyed your system and nuked all your stuff? Your fault, should have been backed up, give us money and we will try and get it back for you" Anyone who is shocked and horrified by this little trick should check their backup status. Your next head crash is closer than you think.
Anyone remember Jeff Arnold's CDRWIN program? His program was popular years ago for its ability to copy Playstation games. As his program became popular target for pirates, he implemented something similar. But as I recall, the user outrage was enormous, and he had to remove the new "feature". Even then, people didn't trust his software for a long time afterwards.
In Soviet Russia, articles before post read *you*!
It's a little more complicated than that, it provides an informational floater and automatically downloads album art from amazon and the such.
I actually registered it when there was no license enforcement code at all, just a 'I have registered this product' checkbox, because I felt that, while it was perhaps not worth the money (not with my use of it, anyway), it was nice to see an author being trusting. I certainly wouldn't have if it were now, with a required license.
There's only so much you can (and should) do with software. Even the boys in Redmond have a line item to deal with lost sales due to hacked code - it's simply a fact of life that not everyone is going to be a paying customer; it's a cost of doing business.
The problem with socialism is that they always run out of other people's money. - Margaret Thatcher
I think the he has every right to delete your home directory for this.
Because we all know that one person acting as judge, jury, and executioner is a Good Thing. </sarcasm>
Seriously. It's much easier to pirate some games than to buy it. The amount of inconvenience involved in running the legal product is sometimes quite amazing.
For example, recently I bought Neverwinter Nights and both expansions. Previoulsly I had the pirated NWN, but of course I couldn't play online with it. So after I found I in fact like it, I bought two copies of NWN + SoU, and then a HotU one too.
Installing it on Linux was a bit unintuitive, but I can live with that. Next problem was that the font of the CD key was illegible, and "A", "R", and "O", "D" and "0" look the same. Just great, with a pirated CD it installs directly, and with the legal one I need to spend 15 minutes trying to figure out which is the right key. And what if I happen to find another valid one, but which is not mine?
For the SoU expansion, Bioware forgot to include some background music. The sad thing about this is that the pirate copy of SoU probably comes with the sound files on the CD, or at least it's something that could be easily done.
Then there are some games in which copy protection goes to ridiculous levels, like installing special drivers. I *hate* this kind of crap, which is almost all the games I play are on Linux, where this stuff hopefully will never become common.
This type of action is a bit like a war. Bombing an apparently guilty party may make you feel better, and maybe even act as a deterrent to others.
However, there will be innocent bystanders caught in the crossfire. And the author is giving up the moral (and in some jurisdictions the legal) high ground.
I somehow doubt, that this software behaviour will increase his sales - possibly the opposite might happen, i.e. sales will tank, because legitimate users might be afraid to be caught in the crossfire. So while he may be able to re-appear (or have the software re-appear) under a different name, he therefore would lose the goodwill associated with his and the current software name.
It is very understandable that someone reacts harshly to being under attack, but it does not necessarily make it the wisest thing to do, even for oneself.
Stop stealing music, software, etc. while at the same time expecting free software to remain free. It's hypocrisy.
So what if somebody does make a good faith effort to create original music, only to have some publisher successfully sue him for subconscious copyright infringement? It has happened.
I wonder if there was a warning. If BEFORE prompting user for a serial number there is a BIG RED warning stating that entering a "stolen" serial number will DELETE ALL YOUR DATA, then may be, just may be, I can see this as a legitimate, if boneheaded method. Of course if it were me, I'd cancel the installation and put this guy on a mental blacklist forever - who wants to deal with an a-hole. Still, that method would at least be remotely legal. As it stands, lots of you have said it before but I'll repeat it - erasing private data is a crime, period.
Ah, on the topic of cost of software. The interesting thing is that software market is NO MARKET AT ALL! To be a market, one has to be provided with choices of a product doing substantially similar things with prices set by supply and demand and some competition to boot.
Often in software there is no choice - there is one product doing one thing and sold at a fixed price set by developers. When there is a true choice of products, prices still don't seem to be set by the market. Rather, developers randomly set the price and users excercise their market power by pirating (i.e. leveragint their fear of illegal action or acting immorally vs. the cost being too high for functionality provided.) Want to reduce pirating - auction your software. The real price will be found very soon, but it will very likely be a lot lower then $20 most seem to be asking for. BTW, $20 is an astronomical price for all but the most complicated software packages geared for ahome user. I would bet that market set prices would be somwhere between 5 cents and 2$.
Yeah, the idea that you are either for a total free for all WRT intellectual property, or else you support the sort of proprietary mayhem much of the IP-selling giants push in social and legislative venues, is typical diversionary B.S. Any true proponent of free software recognizes that strong copyright protection (and the most basic and fundamental protection of the copyright is very broad and very strong) is fundamental for any kind of license based distribution strategy. In fact, tactics like SCO's floated and extremely offensive suggestion that copyright based license strategies might be illegal by copyright law expose a real underlying conflict - between individual creator ownership and control of IP as the fundamental basis of intellectual property versus the preferential legal treatment for corporate IP ownership that has accreted into the law over the years.
I wholly agree about piracy, however. Too many of us are far too easy going about jacking the intellectual property of others strictly because it's easy to do so. On the other hand, few are pure (who doesn't have/hasn't made a few mix tapes? Straight up illegal, don't even argue about it. Illegal reproduction and distribution, totally unprotected by fair use).
That being said, it may be true that the only thing he did wrong was not telling people what he was about to do to them - caveat emptor, after all, particularly when you didn't actually emptor it in the first place - but that was a very big wrong thing to do considering the scope of the retribution. He deserves the knocking he took and it will hurt his reputation as a developer for a long time to come. Part of the price of working as a creator is you gotta deal with unlawful use of your IP, and if you do it in a way that burns bridges you better look to your future. That goes for one-man development shops just as much as it goes for the RIAA.
It Is the Nature of Information to Transgress Artificial Boundaries
There was a bug in the vBuild component of InstallShield last summer which could result in an accidental `rm -rf ~`. After being bitten by it once (fortunately I noticed the disk activity before it deleted anything for which I didn't have backups), I helped to track down the problem; apparently at one point there was a "mkdir /cachedir; cd /cachedir; rm -rf *" (or rather, the equivalent in C) and they never checked the return codes of the first two operations.
So, to everyone who is asking "what if he made a mistake?": Mistakes can result in data loss even if you don't intend to delete anyone's data.
Tarsnap: Online backups for the truly paranoid
How much does a CD cost?
This is not the greatest sig in the world, this is just a tribute.
but those serial codes may have come from someone who had his computer rooted, or a keygen program might just have come up with a valid s/n owned by a legit user.
You have a point about the keygen, but in the case of "someone who had his computer rooted", the developer of the retaliatory DRM system might be able to pass the blame to the cracker.
The thing is, it's akin to setting up a trap in your car or home for burglars that hurts or kills them
I don't see the problem with this... might actually be a deterent, as opposed to our lame legal system.
Stupid sexy Flanders.
Any software can be copied. With some difficulty, someone, somewhere will rip it and burn it. That's life.
Why not try to use that to your advantage. Instead of trying to force people to support the development costs, realize that being a developer will mean you have people freeloading off you. At least you will get publicity from the software popularity. If the software is worth writing, it should either be novel/good enough for people to voluntarily pay for, or it may be justifiable in it's own right as something worth giving to the world.
If you want to have people pay for your code, embed it in hardware (like microcontrollers). It's cheap enough to build embedded devices, why code only for major platforms?
Anyone who uses serial numbers, registrations, encryption, or nasty underhanded attacks to try to force people to pay for software, is greatly misguided. Software is most often pirated by someone wanting to try a piece of software for a few days, or for a simple task. It is ridiculous to ask 30$ for a single-use software. It isn't ridiculous to ask a user to pay after a month of use. But because a serial number is needed for the first few (unrestricted) uses, the pirated serial has already been used, and the user need not think about giving the developer any reward. (besides, they have spent their time looking up a SN/ or cracking the program)
Software shouldn't cost money.
Problem solving, for specific/custom programming projects should cost money. Open source development should be rewarded by centralized funding pools.
Developers who try to keep their code secret, and who try to charge people money for it, shouldn't be surprised to find that it's a greedy approach that isn't worthwhile for society to protect.
Good luck to those who try anyways. I hope the developer mentioned in the article is charged with some kind of civil law suit for damages.
Howzabout writing softare (producing music, making a movie, etc...) that fills a need you have. If you put it out there in the world and people are willing to pay for more, good. If not, don't be a crybaby (or jackass) about it.
First off I am dumbfounded that you have not sold a single copy of your software :( It looks really nice though and I'm sure if I had a need for an HTML editor I would consider your software!
But I believe we already have some glowing examples of effective anti-piracy measures:
#1) Counter-strike. The video game. Yes, Valve's CD-KEY system actually works here because in order to play the game you have to connect to a server. To be able to connect to a server your CDKEY has to match one of the keys in their database. To be able to play your EXE cannot be cracked/modified as MD5 checksums stop you from joining. I'm sure there are ways around this but I haven't read about anyone who has effectively cracked this mechanism for multiplayer yet. MMORPGs are another good example.
#2) Windows. Microsoft gave up on focusing on the individual user a long, long time ago as Bill Gates realized the real money isn't in individual sales as much as it is in contracts with pc manufacturers to have windows preloaded on new PCs. It would be a little harder for DELL to put a pirated copy of Windows XP on every single computer they sell, so Microsoft eliminates piracy here by making the user buy Windows before they get the computer. Of course, there are ways around this too.
#3) Extreme dongles. Forcing the users to attach a dongle to the computer while running the program makes things harder on the crackers. Not impossible to crack, but more effective then not having it.
But overall the most effective copy protections involve some sort of online "serial # check" or program integerity check of some kind. Since your users are web developers then they'll most likely be online anyways this may work. But another poster pointed out that as long as you are letting people download a "time limited trial version" that unlocks by simply entering a serial code then you've got a problem since the most effective crack is to simply fool your program into thinking trial mode never ends.
It may be better to just distribute a "crippled" version that cannot unlock and let people who buy the software get an "unlocked version" that pings you with a serial number. You start to see 2 serials pinging you, then you block the serial and tell the owner to contact you for a new #, etc.
Course people will think your software is spying on them by pinging back to you.. so definetely go out of your way to explain whats going on to the user.
Good luck!
...unfortunately no one can be told what The Mat^H^H^HGoatse is...they must experience it for themselves...
If an author is automatically going to assume that a invalid serial implies piracy, or even that a few "non-purchase" serial numbers are cause for worry, then I won't use his software.
I'll even go so far as to notify everyone within earshot that they should steer clear of the developer and any of his other software as well!
If you're going to assume that everyone's a criminal, how do you tell the good from the bad? The one who sends you money could very well be handing his serial number off to relatives and friends, and (gasp) posting it on Kazaa...
Deleting someone's entire home folder over a bad serial on a $20.00 piece of software (which is also a very redundant piece of software - There's lot of competing solutions on the Mac, and many of them are free) is just insane. This guy deserves every bit of hatred and bad karma he gets over such a decision. If this gets publicized a lot in the Mac world, I can guarantee this guys software sales will plummet. Justifiably so IMHO.
1) The shareware can charge whatever price they feel is right. If the price is too high then nobody will register. It is the shareware author's choice.
2) If you have a copy of the software that does not work as you expect it, then DON'T BUY IT, and don't ask for support. If you use the software then buy it! It is that simple.
3) Piracy has NO justifications whatsoever. If you don't like it, use open source and don't pay a cent. But don't pirate because you are a cheap ass.
"You can't make a race horse of a pig"
"No," said Samuel, "but you can make very fast pig"
so if something like this came about, (i know the dev has deleted the code already) but if it did, i would have to actually read the 3000 lines of eula garbage to sift out the line that translates into: make a mistake typing the key and l0se j00 pr0n! not worth it.take anything but that.
---
My sig was stolen - the insurance company replaced it with this one.
often I have used "cracked" codes because the feature I wanted to use was not in the "free trial" version. So I am a legit user, but I am using a "cracked" code. So how is it right I am to be treated as a criminal?
I sent the developers of ReGet Deluxe 20 bucks because I found it to be the "absolut" best download manager for windows. Unfortunately those wacky russians have decided I never paypal'd them that twenty bucks at all and have denied me support for quite some time. As a result I felt no unease at all about using cracked versions of their software.
Of course, now that I no longer rely on windows they have been replaced by a very nice OSS package - RIP ReGet.) Quite frankly, I think ANY developer nowdays who tries to sell "consumer software" and worries about piracy is not too much different than, say, Dow suing that farmer in canada for growing "their" rape (or is it wheat?) when the seed blew in from neighboring pastureland.
There is so much open source software nowdays it's becoming harder to find "shareware" that ISN'T in some way based at least partly on OSS. I have no qualms with someone trying to make a living writing software, I just think they need to choose their market carefully. Nowhere in our law does it PROMISE you an income simply for offering something for sale, and there are limits to how far one is allowed to go to "police" behavior.
The best anti-piracy serial number solution I've seen was one (I can't remember the program) that, when you entered a known pirated serial number, it said "You just entered a pirated serial number. I know I can't stop you, but I can sure make you feel guilty. You can use the program now withouth the nagging now, you cheap bastard" (Or similar, it's been a while.)
It worked. I decided to delete the program until I could convince work to buy it for me. (New job, so the copy stayed with them.) I've never looked at pirating serial numbers the same since. I try hard to get work to buy the smaller software companies stuff that I use, or I delete it, or look for freeware so at least I'm being cheap but without the guilt.
I am, and always will be, an idiot. Karma: Coma (mostly effected by
Software developers that have a problem with piracy are making an incorrect assumption. And that is that anything other than a small fraction of their user base is willing to pay. They are, incorrectly, looking at the number of downloads, comparing that to the number of sales, and are seeing the difference as losses. They are not. I personally would never pay for Echelon. I may download it and use it if free, but if I had to pay for it, then it drops below my radar of things-I-want-to-do. Or, some other developer has a 30 day trial I can use. The point is, some random small shareware app very rarely does something Im willing to consider paying money for. 90% of things like echelon I download Ill run once, think "thats cute" then totally forget about. Im not willing to spend $10 or more a time simply because Im curious about something. Sheesh, Why these software authros think that their tool is going to become an indispensible part of my life such that I need to pay for it. Crikey. Anyway, if shareware authors stopped lamentin gthe rampant "piracy", which is users of their software who would never buy it anyway, and concentrated instead on expanding the base of paying users, then they just might get somewhere.
This is ridiculous, especially considering that Echelon is a program that benefits primarily from the piracy of commercial video.
Anyway, there are ways to make money off software that allow freeloaders to benefit, too, and there's nothing wrong with that! (See: linux)
with a bit of luck the next user to get burnt for mis-typing his keycode and loosing his life's work , is you..
If he ended up loosing his life's work he'd just have to tighten it again...
Clause or no clause, its illegal.
WRONG! If the user agreed to a click-through contract that said the software might delete his home directory, it is not illegal. PERIOD. No court has yet ruled that a click-through contract (as opposed to a traditional one) is invalid because the user did not read or understand it. Please cite references to the contrary.
If reversing serials is too error prone then crackers will simply write a crack for the program.
Either a crack that hard-patches the programs binary or a loader than runs the program then patches it in memory.
I don't think this is going to accomplish much for the author, except perhaps to gain publicity (maybe bad publicity..)
Just to swing the conversation away from what he did, to what he endured, I think that with all the people ranting and raving that software should be free, some people think that it actually is. It takes time and money to develop software. For someone like me, a small independant software developer, I spend all day every day writing software and if someone doesn't pay for it, I will have to go find a real job. I would love to rely on donations but I think that it would be awefully hard to write software out of a tent in my parents backyard. Some software is free, some isn't. Just as with music, just because you think something should be free, it doesn't make it ok to steal it.
Those lowly MS users among us... How is this different from our occassional upgrades. I feel I take great risks when I install a patch from MS, or from my router vendor... I've experienced catastrophic failure before as a result of "an upgrade". Sounds like business as usual.
Busy aligning my non-linear thoughts.
Any such act that might prevent a user or company from doing business could have legal consequences. IMO the risk of that is probably more than the return of having such things in place.
entering a hacked serial number causes the software deleted the user's Home directory.
This and is be problem could was?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Just because the program is a front end for an open source project doesn't make the piracy of it any less wrong. The developper obviously put work into it, regardless of whether it was little or a lot, and if he wants to charge for it then he has the right to do so.
Likewise, this doesn't make his decision to delete the home directory any more or less extreme.
How illegal would it to be to have systems with pirated serial numbers produce trashed output files? If the Echelon developer was really cruel, the Mpegs could be good for a few megabytes, so the preview would be okay (along with a quick check of the video).
I admit that deleting the root directory is too far and I would agree encrypting somebody's files but surely a program using a pirated serial number could not be expected to work properly?
Maybe they could even catch a few pirates that asked for support for the "defective" software!
myke
Mimetics Inc. Twitter
That misses the point entirely.
This is a free market economy. He is welcome to say that a sunday afternoon's worth of programming work is worth five euros. If you disagree, you're welcome to NOT purchase the product.
But because a product was easy to make does NOT give you the write to pirate it.
Comment of the year
Shouldn't the subject line for this story read "Independent Developer Fight Piracy & Loses it?
You download a trial of the software. You hack it so that it's no longer time/serial restrictred.
Now, if the software detects this and encrypts/destroys itself, did it really affect your property?
You didn't legally acquire the software. You're the one breaking the law. If the software says it will do this-perhaps in a splash screen-then does it really count as ransom?
That's like saying you're violating a crook's privacy by using lojack to trace a stolen car.
Slashdot. It's Not For Common Sense
You know guys, trying to delete the user's home directory or messing with them in other ways might seem clever, but what if they decide to run their program in a chroot jail?
Dear Slashdot,
I'm an independent car manufacturer. The cars I build are licensed to be driven only by the purchaser. Sort of like the airline industry selling non-transferable, non-refundable tickets. Recently I have been losing money to transporation pirates who loan their cars to friends. They keep defeating whatever user-identifying technology I build into the cars. Based on one new car purchase per unauthorized transport, I estimate that I lose $400 billion annually to these pirates.
I've already bribed Orrin Hatch to make it illegal to drive somebody else's car. I even got Congress to spend billions of taxpayer dollars to install anti-piracy, I mean anti-terrorism cameras on every freeway overpass, to photograph people driving other people's cars, in case they're terrorists. Transportation pirates soon discovered they could simply wear a paper mask of the car owner's face. Some driver-id protestors even wear opaque, featureless masks when they drive their own cars. I've tried randomly suing people, but the shock value wore off pretty quickly and I barely recovered my legal costs. But at least I proved that I'm right.
Accepting that my business model doesn't work in today's world and going into another line of business is not an option. I don't want to face reality, I want to change the world to be the way I want it to be, regardless of the side effects. I also want everybody to be on my side and admit that I'm right. What should I do?
Isn't this akin to one drug dealer stealing from another? It's not like he/she can call the police to report drugs being stolen from them.
Nore could you really complain that in your act of piracy your home directory got fscked.
I don't like it, but it does seem to be a good way to keep the hands out of the cookie jar.
Apple free since 1990!
The software was video (MPEG) editing/compression. The majority of people dealing with MPEG (DivX) formats are movie pirates - since you can't legally copy DVDs, right? Or am I missing something?
I quote from the reviews: None of the my DV cameras output in DiVX, or AVI, or mpeg for that matter. The content that I create comes in through Firewire as a .DV file. So my question is what is this software good for?
If he is charging too much for his software, then those people have every right to NOT USE THE SOFTWARE. If it is good enough to be stolen, then it is good enough to be paid for, even if it doesnt work as advertised.
As far as responding in kind, the customers were the ones who started the harsh treatement. Older computer programs did not have much copy protection until it became easier to copy the programs.
Totally illegal to set any sort of mechanical traps like that, BUT, there's a nifty loophole, it's called "rottweiler". Totally legal and effective in most cases.
Seriously. Deleting a users data as direct revenge for him using a hacked serial is WRONG!
And in any case 2 wrongs don't make a right.
P.S. It wouldn't be the first time that I use a serial number from internet for a software I purchased, just because I forgot, lost or temporarily misplaced the original codes. Which by the way is a perfectly legal thing to do.
And I'm pretty sure I'm not the only one.
Besides, if you mess with my data, you better run god-damit!
His website: - http://homepage.mac.com/digitalschism/ "Echelon has been discontinued due to lack of support, anyone who previously bought the program may still get support from , otherwise we no longer sell/distribute the product."
Considering nothing has happened to anyone by the use of the codes, no i dont have the same 'strong statements' as i do for the person that intentionally damanged the users data like a common vandal.
And if you are going to refer to 'well they stole the software' dont bother, as i wont even read the comment as its a totally bogus argument that I'm tired of being involved with.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Which is to keep part of the application's logic on the server side. It depends on the nature of the application of course, but sometimes it's perfectly acceptable to use your server for some essential processing. People can then copy the application all they want, because you can control access to your server quite perfectly..
Um, I don't know what you're smoking, but Synergy is a helluva lot more than "a single panel with three buttons".
Sure, it's got those butttons - in the menu bar, so you can have access to iTunes at any time, from any application. It ALSO allows you to control those buttons directly from the keyboard by any key combination of your choosing. It ALSO generates a nice little floating window with info about the song that's playing, including title, artist, artwork... and all this once again is totally customizable by the user. (There's also foofah about dozens of customizable skins, but that's not a concern for me.)
There is also NOTHING on the Synergy main page stating that he's abandoned the project; in fact, he just released version 1.3 last week. He suggested on a news page that he MIGHT give it up if the jackass pirates keep it up, but I've certainly gotten nothing off of the Synergy mailing list (good way for paying customers like myself to get news about updates and bug fixes) to indicate that Synergy has been abandoned.
If this program is so simple, let's see YOU write a clone of it in a Saturday afternoon.
Come to the University of Mars! Classes starting soon!
Yet another reason why reasonable computer users should be making regular backups. This may be an unusual case, but it makes the point: You can't ever trust software on your system. Always assume the worst and plan for it.
I would never do what this guy has done, but I have huge sympathy for him. If you work every hour god sends on some software and the next thing you see is some pathetic little script kiddie not only stealing your work but helping others to do the same, then you want blood.
I feel the same way if iI see people steal my games. I think he has gone way too far, but I have a huge amount more sympathy for him than I do the thieving scumbags who lost their home directories (if any). Its not like you can use a pirated serial by mistake, you KNOW if you had to enter your credit card details or not. If you go to a warez site and next thing you know you are reformatting, then I really can't shed many tears for you.
DRM-free indie games for the PC and Mac: Positech Games
The worm writers sure aren't getting a tough punishment, and think of all the damage they've done. It's clear to me that the law has failed those who use technology.
/
Besides...It's easier to ask for forgiveness than to get permission.
I'd rm -R
Blar.
there is no excuse for this and an example should be made as a deterrent.
Just because someone does something illegal to you, does not mean you have a right to do something illegal to them.
Lets take an example:
Doctor pirates your program because he wants to record something, but doesn't want to pay. He enters a pirated key, which then in turn rm -fr's ~ directory.
Now, ~ contains patient records and prescription information, which are now all gone. Because Doctor's records are gone, doctor does not know that Mrs Granny Smith is allergic to PCN, and he gives her a prescription to take it for an ear infection.
Mrs Granny Smith dies from a reaction.
You know what that means to you, the developer of the program, right?
You are guilty of causing her death indirectly. A jury would still most likely convict you, even though what the doctor did was wrong and illegal himself.
You could go to jail for a long time, all because you went overboard with your anti-piracy measures.
A far out possibility, but it could still happen. There are alot of things that could happen thanks to your program's actions.
You could destroy the work of someone with more money then you'd make in 100 lifetimes, and has the best lawyers on the planet, and find yourself on the receiving end of a lawsuit you can't possibly win, even if what he was doing was illegal.
Hopefully this will be a good lesson to all shareware developers who are considering this type of anti-piracy methods.
Brielle
User 'absym' wrote:
The almighty 'Dante' writes:
NB: they have turned on forum registration so you may need to create an id first.
$19.95 is too much. Psychologically speaking, $20 is "real money" and $19.95 is $20. You have to go down to $15 to be "not real money". This is a sweet spot that many shareware authors find profitable. In this case, for an unremarkable utility, I'd suggest staying under $10.
The $4.95 EDS item that automatically adds itself to your shopping cart is like a big, "FUCK YOU, CUSTOMER!" It's not clear whether it's necessary or not, and having accepted $20, he will find $25 completely unreasonable.
Have you tested the purchasing system, by having a friend register? If you really have 0 registrations, it might well be broken.
No, I think in real-world terms, the psycho would, instead, leave you alive and kill all your friends, family and acquaintances.
Any sufficiently well-organized Government is indistinguishable from bullshit.
I've read enough Slashdot discussions on the issue of music piracy to observe that a majority share of the opinion of Slashdotters (or at least a significant portion) is that musicians -- whether they enlist the aid of a record company, or go it alone -- shouldn't get too uppity about asking that they be paid for their services. Instead, a better place for them is similar to the folks who play on street corners -- if you're good, you'll get paid, and if you don't, fighting for your so-called "rights" is simply wrong-headed, you "just don't get it," and P2P is some long-awaited relief for consumers at large to take what's theirs, settle the score from decades of overcharging by musicians and record companies, and fight against those who'd dare to demand payment for what's essentially a bunch of ones and zeroes. Perhaps I'm being a bit hyperbolic, but this isn't too far off from the outlook of a significant portion of Slashdot readership when it comes to musicians, songwriters, and other musical artists.
While a few folks in this thread have posted similar views about software developers (whether they're an independent or work for a large company which exploits them), I'm genuinely surprised to see that they're in the minority. Some are even defending the counter-measures, which leads to an interesting comparison to the reaction from Slashdotters whenever the discussion of destructive countermeasures against music pirates is brought up.
The all-too-obvious reason for this disparity is, of course, that more Slashdotters make their living as coders (or know people that do) than as musicians, and it's generally easy to respect one's own skills while not understanding the skills of others. But, I'm wondering if there's something substantiative behind this -- do programmers deserve more respect than musicians? Is it because being a musician is easy compared to writing software? If this is an "all artists are equal, but some are more equal than others" situation, to use the Orwellian reference, can somebody explain why software developers are the "pigs" in this Animal Farm analogy?
Sitting in my day care, the art is decopainted.
We went the route of requiring licenese certificates. Since our business model is subscription-based, we issue software certificates that are good for about one month. (depending on the contract and payment terms)
Getting a certificate is an automated, push-button process - we made it as easy as humanly possible.
But, we didn't stop there. We decided to capitalize on this certificate process, and in fact perform a full backup of the user's database, along with publishing software updates.
Further, we allow them to use their software on any computer or any number of computers. We don't restrict when and where, or on what computers they can install the software, and everywhere the user goes, their data follows.
It's an ASP business model, with a sort of "rent-a-software" hosted application twist. Since we bill by the data size, we really don't care. And the benefits are enormous.
1) Since we keep redundant backups of the users' data, it's not a big deal if the user's computer crashes or is stolen.
2) We get paid for providing quality software.
3) Customers are happy to see software updates when hooking up to backup their data and get a new certificate.
4) Customers love the freedom to work on whatever computer and at whatever location they desire.
Just recently, we had a user in tears on the phone, thanking us for providing this service. Her computer had been thoroughly hosed by a worm, and she lost all her data. 100%, and no backups - months worth of work gone forever. Except for the extensive work she'd done with our software product. Because of the frequent backups obtained with the re-certifying of her software, we had a recent backup of all her stuff on our servers and she was able to recover it automatically!
Product registration is a pain in the 4ss, but you can either hate it, or find some way to make it really worthwhile to the consumer.
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
I do more or less the same thing. However, if the program can't access my server and the key is valid, the program will run without problem. Besides, I ask the customer's e-mail along with the key, and the key is not generated from the e-mail. Thus, only my server and the customer know the e-mail that goes with the key. They can't have their number highjacked then.
I loosened the process a lot in my lasts version, because I think it is *much* more important *not* to piss paying customer than piss non-paying ones.
I accepted piracy. In fact, I changed my philosophy: "pirates" are a part of your userbase. They might even make word of mouth publicity. Thay may report bugs. The may suggest useful features.
perception is reality
User 'absym' wrote:
The almighty 'Dante' writes:
NB: they have turned on forum registration so you may need to create an id first.
Oh, wait. That already is a business model.
You can't buy a car and the clone a million time.
perception is reality
Seriously hard to crack license code is above trivial -- but not that far. A few parameters, a good salt, a timestamp, and a decent two-way hash algorithm that generates 25-character alphanumeric codes are what you need. My current employer used to use simple serial numbers, and they were cracked. For the current generation of product, we invested maybe two programmer days in beefing it up. We've seen requests for keygens and cracks, but we don't think that there are any out there. The crypto function is the hard part - but you don't write your own, you look up a good one.
When the RIAA proposes destroying people's stuff when they discover somebody who's pirated their music, everybody in the discussion is outraged.
When a software write actually tries to destroy people's stuff when people pirate his program, half the people in the discussion cheer him on.
Now, I know that slashdot's readership is a big group with diverse opinions. Even so, the sheer volume in both cases is staggering, and I'd have a hard time believing that there is no overlap.
Can't you people see past your noses? It's the same thing, and equally wrong in both cases.
Mod down posts with a "Free Mac Mini/iPod" sig, they're spam!
Independent Developers Fight Piracy & Lose
Yeah? What was the score?
Business isn't willing to pay for products, innovation and careers, so we get brands, mortgage commercials and layoffs.
OMG! That deer is coming STRAIGHT AT ME!
I pirate things I could possibly like, back in the days of shareware, this wasn't required to taste a game before you bought it.
:)
So nowadays I'll grab something off BT and see if I like it, if I do, I'll buy it, if not, in the delete bin it goes. The reason I do this is because:
a) I live in a rural area, I don't feel like taking an hour drive just to grab a game.
b) I like my content on demand, including movies and games. I like to play/see things as SOON as possible. I'm getting old and tired of waiting 5 bazillion weeks for the movie to hit my theater (which I'll go and see...even with all the goddamn commercials anyway) so I download it first.
c) Sometimes games are so old, or so hard to get ahold of there's no other choice. Why wait when you have such a short time to live? I don't feel regret because I pay for what I keep, sounds fair to me
Some five or six years ago one particular independent software publisher (that shall remain nameless) released a piece of software, where if a serial number generated by "keygen" is entered, it erases system32 directory of windows 9x system it is installed on.
After been alerted such action is illegal, he released additional version of the said software with the deletion code removed.
ELOI, ELOI, LAMA SABACHTHANI!?
I'd quietly screw up the performance and the output of the program, here are some examples:
1. randomly drop some frames
2. insert some dummy frames
3. throw in some random sleep(1)
4. empty loops to occupy 100% CPU
5. leak 100 MB of memory
6. create a 2GB swap file without using it
7. turn slightly up the lossy compression ratio,
8. revert the meaning of random user preferences, etc.
The bottom line is, as long as you don't do anything destructive to the pirate's existing data, anything else is game.
I use programs like that to rip DVDs all the time. I only want to buy "Milo and Otis" once, but my preschool-age children want to watch it constantly and can trash a DVD in no time flat. You are correct that many of us use DVD ripping programs to exercise our legal and moral right to make working backup copies of our movie libraries.
What was your point again?
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
> The publisher could get sued.
More like -will- get sued.
I'd gladly admit to one count of copyright voilation and pay my dues if I could at the same time prove he deleted a million or two dollars worth of IP from my account.
Then on top of it, toss in any/all new malware and trojan horse laws at him, add a pinch of whatever they are calling 'cyber terrorism' nowadays, mix, stir, sit back and laugh all the way to the bank.
Worst part for the author about this, his software is 'out there'. It's not something he can easily take back.
One could spend a few months cleaning up any piracy connections they have, building/collecting this few million dollars in ligit IP, and install his software knowing what will happen. Its alot harder to prove someone isnt stupid than it is to prove this software author intended for his program to do this.
About the only recourse is posting a warning on his site that whichever version this is is seriously broken and will (read; WILL) cause damage to your system.
I'm sure there are even courts that will not look favourably at that, based fully on his intent.
Dude seriously needs some perspective.
It may feel good to pump 12 rounds into an unarmed tresspasser, but comon...
For those who didn't want to RTFA
This post below is from one of the developers friends. It's mostly a sob story about how broke the developer is. If you didn't bother to read the app automates encoding movie files which is, I must admit, a cool thing to write. The windows world doesn't have much of this. discreet makes Cleaner (purchased from Terran) but it costs way more then $20. For the price it really is a decent piece of ware. the closest the windows world has is TMPEG but last I checked it doesn't work with nearly as many formats (divx, etc).
"I happen to know the developer in question, and while I don't agree with what he did, I empathize with his frustration over this whole matter. He's spent many months getting ready for this release, and the next day, some brainless low-life had reverse-engineered his serial gen code, and released several working serials for it. Since the numbers were posted, registrations for his app completely stopped, and he's now facing the grim situation of possibly halting all development on this very useful program. He's in debt, and broke, and getting nothing for all his hard work. Seeing all his hard work getting flushed down the toilet made him understandably angry, and he was mainly trying to get revenge on the cracker, and to scare people away from attempting to pirate his software. That being said, he's already seen the error in his ways (so to speak), and the current build of his app has the home directory wiping code removed. If you download it now, the serials won't work, but it won't wipe your home directory anymore. He's contemplating less drastic measures, and new ways to protect his app, but won't be destroying user data anymore, even if they are just pirates. I think this was something that was done in the heat of the moment, in the frustration of seeing the thoughtless acts of a cracker destroy his income from this work, and went a bit overboard. I wouldn't be so hard on him, as I'm sure it's something many developers have thought of doing, and wished they had the balls to actually carry through. I think many in his position would have done something similar. At this point, the offending code is gone, and the pirates' data is safe, however the future of the (extremely useful) app is very uncertain, as registrations have all but stopped. I hope he doesn't have to stop development due to lack of support, but the actions of that cracker who shall not be named may well have forsaken this app's future."
Posted by: WiseWeasel on September 7, 2004 04:51 AM
Another of the developers friends fingers the cracker in another post
"C'mon. As its been stated, the scheme in question only targeted the cracker (iDave) and his cronies...and the specific serials created. What's more, since slava misreported this, the app didn't really delete the home directory; it obfuscated it. Only by further PIRATE THIEF ACTION would it actually have been wiped."
Posted by: JackHandy on September 7, 2004 12:25 PM
The publisher could get sued. Sure, he probably will (might?) win
No, he will not win, he will loose and have to pay damages. The law does not give anyone the right to take it upon themselves to publish someone for a crime.
Imagine if this was OK? How far can he go? Let's say he vandalizes your car? Is that OK? Burns your house down? Is that OK? What is OK? Nothing. That has to be the answer, unless if it backup up by the legal decision on *my* case.
If this guy deletes all my files, I got no opportunity to argue my side of the case before the *punishment* was handed down.
This would be like the police just killing someone they though has committed murder.
This is just silly...
I seem to remember an article by Dvorak or Cringely about 12-14 years ago, where a big named software product did something like this. But instead of nailing a pirate, they bagged a New York Times reporter, who got it into the paper. I'm thinking Aldus Pagemaker. Might be wrong.
Here's a scenario that has happened to me a couple times:
I download something and either a) discover that the demo is too crippled to get a real feel for whether the software is worth the money, or b) I run it the first time and then don't have time to get back to it before the demo period expires. I have been known, on such occasions to grab an illicit serial number. If I like the software, though, I buy it. I mean, really, software from small developers is so cheap, why not buy it? A couple hundred bucks can by a lot of nifty little tools, or one big bloated MS product. I'll gladly give the small guy my money. But...
If one of the above scenarios were to occur to me and the software decided to delete my home directory in response, well, I would be inclined to put a severe dent in the developer's head.
My three cents.
// This is not a sig.
Could one then find it reasonable to either:
a) firebomb the developer's house.
b) attack his computers and delete their contents.
After all, you've paid for the software and it doesn't work as advertised. Why not over react to buggy software by taking it out on the developer. Sheesh.
No agreement in the world would absolve you of the act of intentionally causing someone harm.
We aren't talking about 'not responsible for accidental data loss' clause here, we are talking about a premeditated intent to destroy data.
If you don't believe me, try it sometime, and of course document your intent as this fool did..
---- Booth was a patriot ----
You pirate the software, you lose your data. Sounds fair enough to me. The software developer is merely trying to protect his livlihood.
Personally, I'd go for a different approach.. find all personally identifiable information on the computer of the pirate, and send that information to the software developer. Automatically send an e-mail to the pirate saying they have 48 hours to obtain a proper license for the software, or legal action will ensue.
You don't piss off your customers in this way, because people who pirate your software are *NOT* customers.
I am the maverick of Slashdot
Like Windows??? ;)
Seriously, though... That's pushing reality a bit too far. I understand what you mean and I may be inclined to agree in theory, but even a 2-bit sneak-thief knows your statement is NOT true. I would be willing to bet most pirated software is "tasted" and then deleted (probably all within the same 3 days).
I'm sure you are above reproach and have never applied a crack or "copied that floppy", but it happens all the time, and not all of those pirated apps are used more than once. I would even say "most", but I would be basing that on a gut feeling instead of facts...
Come and see the violence inherent in the system!
So what happens when someone cracks the software with the number you bought? You suffer for innocence.
I agree this is a problem, but this seems like a bad way to handle it.
I see a lot of downside and little upside.
I see a developer that's just plain wigged out, He's definatedly crossed the line between trash talking about doing something in-excusable and doing it
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
>I'm sure Echelon had legitimate uses (yeah, right)
yes there is,
i have more than one dvd which has a little crack on it, i know there are not much times viewing left before it will break and little silver thingies will ruin my dvd-player
so i mad backups which i use to see
btw the cracks came
a from start on there
and
b wrongly taken out (ok that was the first time i used an dvd-case with this push thingie in the middle ^^;;)
excuse my poor engrish
I have to agree with those who think that kind of "check the server" security is a kiss of death for software. Remember all the hoopla about Windows Activation? There was some foundation, which people seem to have forgotten, to the concern.
If Microsoft was a smaller company (and here we are talking about tiny shareware companies) I would be concerned about the fact that you can install XP for only 30 days without activation. After that it goes dark. Now if Microsoft stops activating people's XP installations, you had better have your money in hand. [I am aware that corporations use a activation-less version: there is a reason it was demanded]. Unlikely, due to the size of the company and the backlash they would get, but...
If TinyOneManShop goes under, I'm basically out my money. In this case it is $20, which probably wouldn't cause many tears. However, there are several games I bought on-line a while back. My machine got blown away and I replaced it. Put the games back on the new machine, but there was no way to actually play them because... suprise, they went out of business. Now I'm out $100 for entertainment product which no longer entertains. Or does anything. That pisses me off.
Now look at a company like Macromedia. I refuse to purchase the newer versions of their software because they are playing this exact game. Well, that's all well and good as long as Macromedia doesn't decide to use it as a method of forced upgrades ("Sorry, your software doesn't activate anymore because Spiffy Version X is out") or just go out of buisiness.
I have likewise had CAD/CAM software become unusable after Windows NT 4.0 SP6 because it nuked the hardware key drivers. I have had CD key checking software puke because I have a DVD and a CD-RW. Let's face it... either your software is good enough to survive some piracy or you probably shouldn't be in the market. People who *really* want a corporate package are willing to buy support. Heck, they buy support for OSS for goodness sake. Interesting: the one thing his users want is support, and he isn't willing to see *that*.
Sig under construction since 1998.
I don't expect this to be a popular viewpoint with everyone (i.e., there are going to be some rabid shareware devs reading this post), but hear me out. At least it can provoke some honest discussion. I've been in the front lines of this war since the late 80s, and I have some challenging points to make.
<rant>
This does not actually come as a shock to me. It has happened before, and it will probably happen again. This is an extremely good argument for why cracked software is sometimes better than the original commercial/shareware versions, regardless of whether or not you paid for it.
Copy protection inconveniences or dangers only legitimate users, or extremely casual or dumb pirates. The stronger the protection, the stronger the impetus to break it. If the protection booby-traps or mindsets behind them are dangerous, why would you tolerate the author treating you, perhaps even the purchased user, as a potential enemy?
I thought shareware devs had grew out of this in the 1980s, but there's always one or two complete fucking moron control freaks that remind me why I started cracking. Sometimes the authors are actually mental enough to put malware into their applications - really unusually serious booby-traps, including overtly destructive ones like this, or covertly destructive ones like changing data during copies, deliberately and covertly corrupting or encrypting data, and so on. Often without any understanding of normal methods of cracking (an act like this is not only easy to trace but makes the protection checks easier to trace by sheer overtness), and without any consideration for what happens when the booby-traps inevitably misfire.
Code has bugs. Fact of life. All copy protection can be cracked. Another fact of life. Copy protection code is notorious for creating false positives, especially with compatibility issues with future versions of platforms.
And losing trust with the author is not worth a few scattered, potentially lost $20s. It's not only a complete overreaction to a few people perhaps deciding that maybe a poor VirtualDub wannabe from a flaky twit of a shareware developer with no prospect of future support is not worth, say, a whole fifteenth of the entire retail price of Microsoft Windows XP Professional (for instance) - it's illegal and destroys his entire reputation (not that his reputation is not spamdexed to 5/5 in the first place).
Please note that it's illegal and unethical to write or distribute this program (it contains a destructive logic bomb), and an act of anti-malware public service to crack it, and distribute the crack as widely as possible, to punish the author for being a utter and complete fuckwit with no regard for the potential consequences of his actions.
If you're running any commercial or shareware software, do you know what booby-traps and logic bombs they might have put in? If the author does not trust you, why should you trust the author?
Wouldn't you prefer to run software that has had an extra pair of eyes over it, looking especially to remove deliberate limitations and neutralise malicious code, and to protect you, the user, against the author's possibly malicious intentions? Well that's cracked software (or of course, open-source software that has undergone peer review, but very few twits this flaky have the mindset to help the community enough to develop open-source software). Crackers defuse copy protection minefields no-one should have to walk through, least of all the poor users who paid for that crap.
I've seen too many crap programs written by too many tinpot shareware authors with delusions of grandeur and a hyper-over-protectiveness that can drive them to dangerous extremes, as here, sometimes to a level that I really think they should seek professional mental help. I've disassembled and made safe far too many booby-traps to run anything that isn't open-source or cracked now. Even the stuff I bought is cracked, and happily so. Copy protec
Hmmm justifiable $HOMEacide?
Sorry, couln't help myself
Go ahead mod me to oblivion
Help! help!, the termites are eating my DRAM!!!
Software in general is covered by copyright, whether it be closed source or open source. Piracy is breaking copyright laws because you are using software that you are not entitled to. Therefore a pirate is no better than those corporations that steal Open Source software.
The problem with the analogy of putting something illegal into the contract is that it is not illegal. For example the program rm can be used to delete your home directory, and yet it is not considered illegal. If you delete your home directory you cannot sue the creators of the rm program.
So now consider if a program that has a button that can be used to delete the files in your home directory. Well that is legal, just don't press the button. Now if the license of the program states that if you use an illegal copy it will delete your home directory, then that is fine as you are being warned. Murder and slavery are illegal by definition, deleting your files in your home directory is not. What is illegal is to do delete the files without having stated the conditions ahead of time.
"You can't make a race horse of a pig"
"No," said Samuel, "but you can make very fast pig"
When I lose the serial to a piece of software I own (read: software I have bought and paid for), I go to some website and find another serial for that program. I simply don't have the time to call and wait on hold (or email and wait for a response) only to try to convince the vendor that I'm a legitimate purchaser. Some vendors have streamlined procedures for handling this situation; many more, particularly small ISVs, do not.
Am I behaving unethically? Should I simply throw myself on the mercy of the vendor? I don't think so. I own my copy of that program, and I don't lose my right to use it just because I haven't needed it in awhile and lost my serial. I don't need to get the vendor's permission to continue using it.
The point being: if my home directory were deleted due to using a copied serial for a program I had legitimately purchased, just because some asshat like this guy decided to get tough on "pirates", I would sue his ass. Seriously. There's nothing inherently dirty, unethical or illegal about a serial number on a website; what matters is how that number is used. This is so way, way over the line that only a total idiot could think it a good idea.
In 1989 a company sent out a large number of floppy disks to various people in Europe, with an EULA that allowed them to encrypt your data if you ran their floppy. They then requested money from you to decrypt your data. See http://www.cknow.com/vtutor/vtsladepranks.htm for some more details. The US were next on the list to be targeted.
You raise a point on something that does not exactly relate to the point. Yes piracy is a problem, and maybe it is overstated. But the results of piracy is that small business owners are being hurt more often than the big business owners.
In fact the pirates are only making it easier for the big corporations to squash the smaller companies. The big companies can deal with piracy because it is a calculated factor. The small companies cannot deal with piracy as you are literally taking the food of the software vendor off the table.
Pirates no matter how it is spun are hurting everybody involved. The only not hurt are the big coporations, which I think is ironic!
"You can't make a race horse of a pig"
"No," said Samuel, "but you can make very fast pig"
Well, I just took a look at Net Weasel. It looks to me as if you've made a few fairly basic mistakes from the marketing perspective, so let me try and come up with some helpful comments as to why you're not getting the response you're looking for.
...if I've missed some compelling must-have functionality your program offers, then your web site needs drastic improvement.
1. Firstly, as far as I can tell your product is an HTML editor with no CSS support. Well, these days that's like trying to sell a graphics editor that doesn't do PNG, or an e-mail program that doesn't handle attachments. Even people who don't want to do their entire site design in CSS still want to be able to do the neat stuff you can only do with CSS.
2. Related to the above, HTML standards have changed a bit in the last 5 years, and you haven't kept up to date by the looks of things. Not valid XHTML, no DTD statement, and so on.
3. You've chosen a field where there is massive amounts of competition, and that's never a good way to make money. Everyone and his dog has made a simple text editor that handles HTML and makes it a bit easier. So, even if you had the best HTML editor in the world, I still wouldn't expect you to be raking in big bucks, because you'd be up against at least half a dozen big companies with big advertising dollars, shelf space in every Best Buy, and major mindshare.
4. Think about who your target market is. You're not going to stand a chance of cracking the pro web designer market with the product you have; pro web designers need CSS, template libraries, DTD validation, image slicing, applet and plugin integration, and so on. At the opposite end, you're not going to get the Joe Sixpack market either, because they'll see raw HTML and recoil in horror. So, you're going after what I'll call the "dabbler" market--people who've learned a bit of HTML for fun and want to build a small personal web site. That's a pretty small niche to be in.
5. You don't have enough differentiation from the free offerings for that niche, in my view. Every half-decent free text editor can edit HTML with syntax coloring, and usually validate it and generate IMG tags too. You clearly know what your differentiators are, which is good: they're the table editor, the form editor and the frameset editor, and maybe the font dialog if it supported CSS, which it doesn't. Trouble is, dabblers generally don't need forms or tabular data--they use tables for layout, which it doesn't look as if your table editor is suitable for. They sometimes use framesets, but most of them know by now that frames suck. So, what can your product do that makes it an essential $20 upgrade from vim or jEdit? Nothing as far as I can see, and...
6.
I don't honestly think that you can hope to make money in the market you're currently aiming at. To do so, you'd have to fix all the defects and shortcomings, and then come up with some "killer app" functionality to beat Mozilla Composer, jEdit and the rest.
So you'd have to get up to date with the standards, and support XHTML and CSS. Then you'd need to add all the other features the free text editors have that people just expect these days, like file browsers, folding, abbreviations/macros, regexp search and replace, autosave, bracket/tag matching, multiple cut/paste buffers, and spelling correction. And then, you'd need to add more compelling features, like a graphical color selector with tools to help users pick complementary colors, and something to search and replace across multiple pages.
That's a hell of a lot of work for a product which, realistically, people would still only pay $20 or $30 for. If I were you, I'd cut your losses and write software that does something nobody else has done yet, or nobody has done cheaply, or nobody else has done well.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
Shrink software will go by the wayside.
And it should. It's 2004. Do something better.
If you can't make money doing what you're doing
then don't depend on the government to allow you
to. You're in a dreamworld if you think the
supply of software is really limited. It's "artificial scarcity". You cannot stop
software piracy with software -- it has
_never_ been done and cannot be done. It
is only a stall tactic.
Free the information and free the market.
This should be modded up - here is a large outcry against one developer attempting to protect his intellectual property (granted, an unpopular concept here on /. it seems) with malicious consequences for pirating the software.
How is this different from Microsoft's "activate within 30 days or the Windows/Office becomes unusable"? If your computer won't boot to desktop or you can't read your files because you pirated the software, should Microsoft be legally liable for damages? What if you try to restoring your system with the system cds, which wipes out your home directory? At what point do we cross the line between "developer's fault" and "user's stupidity"?
Or my favorite - "I lost / misplaced my registration key, so I just found one on the net". Just because you can't manage your information (== email or reg keys) effectively, does not give you the right to use an illicit key and expect to be recognized as a legit user. Microsoft doesn't care if you bought a license to XP & then used a warez key.
Yeah, damn right. His program was aimed at taking DivX and MPG movies in commonly downloaded formats, and turning them into DVDs.
So, he wrote a program whose main audience was people who violate copyright, and was then surprised to find people pirating his software? Oh, cry me a river.
I feel the same way about people who write shareware "file sharing" applications, and then act all irate when we share the registration codes for those applications. If you don't want your work to be ripped off, it'd help if you didn't go out of your way to assist people in ripping off the work of others. I've registered fifteen pieces of shareware, but I'm sure as hell not registering "file sharing" software.
Plus, the "meat" of his software was apparently GPLed projects such as ffmpeg anyway...
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
What scares me is that you actually believe this. First copyright was introduced in England to promote the ability of the publisher to recoup their costs when creating a work. Prior to that publishing houses in the 17'th century would copy like manics thus depriving the artists of their income. So please check your history a bit. In fact copyright was considered in Roman times. Just nothing was done about it, until printing presses made it cheap to pirate literature. You see before copyright the king and queen dictated who printed what, when and how!
The solution to piracy is not to consider everything as sharing. The solution is to either buy or not buy. If you don't buy then use Open Source.
About making money by offering support is a model that some can take advantage of. However, it is not a right that you enforce. It is choice of the software provider.
"You can't make a race horse of a pig"
"No," said Samuel, "but you can make very fast pig"
1. Buy a copy of the software.
2. Misplace the legit serial #; that do what anyone would in that situation: get online and find a serial.
3. Get your home directory wiped. Loose a $100M in irreplaceable source code to your company's yet-unreleased valuable application. Or what not.
4. Sue the heck out of Mr. Prankster.
See, for once - a slashdot business plan with ??? under number 3. So perfectly hideous, it's scary.
P.S. If you think the course of events under number 2 is unrealistic, read the MS knowledge base article that explains how to change the key in a WinXP installation and ponder why MS had to explain this to their customers.
You know that is NOT YOUR CHOICE to make. If somebody wants to sell their software for 50 USD then it is their right. If they don't end up selling anything then it is their problem. It is NOT your right to share that software.
Just like it is not the right of any corporation to take GPL software integrate it into their software without giving the changes or deriviations back. The copyright knife cuts two ways.
"You can't make a race horse of a pig"
"No," said Samuel, "but you can make very fast pig"
I'm surprised I haven't seen someone comment on this (or I'm too lazy to search the entire thread for this comment) is that the original US PATRIOT act included provisions that made it possible for copyright holders to hack your computers and even possibly due damages if they felt you were infringing on their copyrights. The "Deterrence and Prevention of Cyberterrorism" portion of the act would criminalize any act of hacking that caused damages or losses of over $5000 would be considered an acto fo terroism. The RIAA lobbied for a bypass so they could hack/destroy without any worries of criminal charges.
With this ammendment, they can hack into peoples computers, search for infringing materials, and add them to their "TO SUE" list. Not only that, they were wanting to be able to be proactive, in a sense find people that are supposedly using P2P software and hack their systems so that they are unable to trade copyrighted material, or delete any offending materials.
This ammendment did get knocked down, but then the MPAA tried a similar amendment. i believe this didn't make it either, but both these organizations have kept bringing up new forms of these bills in one way or another.
Sound familiar?
Here's more details...
I am not condonning pirating software BUT a lot of the software I buy comes with a non-refundable clause. I have several packages which looked ok when I demoed them but have since turned out to be incomplete or buggy.
It is all very good to on one hand expect your software to be pirated but then shareware authors should not screw honest people who buy their sofware and would like to return it.
People would be much more willing to shell out the few dollars required to register software if they did not feel that this was a monetary black hole which did not quaranty that the software will really be working as advertized, or as the users assumes it would.
Places like Wal-mart etc... have long learned that it is better to keep people happy then to stick it to them. Maybe software makers should start doing the same.
If everybody had to pay for every software he uses, common people (not just geeks) would become sensible and finally appreciate the value of free software.
If piracy were impossible, I imagine 90% of the software would be free, with the exception of games. Microsoft, in particular, would be relegated to a niche market.
If only "Palladium" were released, things could change --- OTOH we know it won't work: if it did, MS would commit suicide.
"But a man can dream... a man can dream." ----Professor Hubert Farnsworth
So... If someone is going to take the time to reverse-engineer a program to develop a key generator, why not just remove the code that checks for the registration key altogether?
I guess that the crack would have to be redone for every future release of the program, and maybe keys generated with the keygen might last for a few future versions of the program.
Still, it seems to me that it would be every bit as "challenging" to develop a crack for a program, rather than a keygen. And that's supposedly the rationale everyone cites for doing it, right? "The challenge"? It's not about stealing, it's about the challenge of hacking the code?
Seems to me there is little justification that someone could have for writing keygens. Even cracks are hardly justifiable... What's more challenging: cracking someone else's code or creating something useful for people?
Ok, so some poor bastard types in his (bought) key after a reinstall, only to find that his home directory got removed by, well lets face it, an unauthorised program. This user's PC was cracked into a few months back and information (including said key). Just one of probably many false positives. A retarded idea, IMHO.
Test it by buying a legit copy, using a hacked serial to register, then sue the author when your homedir gets erased.
Why don't the people this matters to form a new Open Source copy protection project. Don't be daft an open source project so the cracker can see the source you say. Well I'd have thought any real solution to this problem would have to overcome this hurdle anyway as IMO introducing some method of disabling debuggers etc. is unpalatable. Off the top of my head would this work 1. Create a database of lot's of slightly different serial number generating algorithms with a valid serial number for the algorithm and a program identifier (hash id). 2. Create a script that pulls a serial number algorithm from the database and inserts it in place for compiling 3. The script then inserts the retrieved program hash id in place for compilation 4. Compiles the program and loops back to 1 for as many copies as you want Then release for download, if someone wants to register they come on your site and enter their programs hash id and if they validate you give them the corresponding serial no. If a cracker cracks the serial no for a copy then he's only done it for his one copy. If they then try to forge the hash to match the cracked copy you would see multiple requests for a single hash in your database and deny them. Just my 2 cents and probably not worth much more than that ;)
Some of the most potent Sci-Fi high-tech literature heavily incorperated "Black Ice" into most of the security in future settings. Wether that future is to be realized or not is still in question, but at the rate piracy is increasing, drastic measures need to be taken to stem the tide of unchecked, widely accepted piracy.
Data Bombs and similar devices may not be the most effective detterants, but with all the brainpower behind the open source movement, there has to be something that can help closed source projects keep security intact without resorting to mass-lawsuit ventures. Without adequate protection, cracks come out within days, if not hours, and ISO's are released as soon as the CD's hit the market.
For shareware, it's worse in that they are always out in the open to be sniped at any time by someone who wants a full version for free.
It was the fear of the law that kept people from pirating before, but we have a new generation now. It's time to instill a new fear. Data is the commodity, and it should be what is at stake.
The cost of software is more then just getting the software and a nice shiny disk.
You get support, materials, etc..
These things make it enough value to purchase.
i dont belive that most people who use keycodes would not have purchased it anyway.. so its not a fair comparison..
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Wiping my hard drive is a little much for making a typo during the install process. I wonder if people with dyslexia could sue for discrimination?
Not to be nitpicky, but if he made no modifications to the ffmpeg source then he was not required to distribute it at any point.
This post written under Gentoo-linux with an SCO IP license.
Hey. I know this is a enabling you to run my program. I know you think you need this program for whatever purposes you think necessary, and either you don't have the money to pay for it, or simply don't want to pay for it.
I have to admit as a developer, I've done the same from time to time, when I needed something to use once or whatever. So I understand, to a degree. And therefore, I'm not going to do anything that I am able to do by your blindly running this hacked software (like deleting your home directory, recording your current IP or ident information for prosecution, etc.)
But what I am going to do is tell you this: Real people coded this, that took real time out of their real lives. For the X dollars (MSRP) for this software, you got:
- # of lines of code changed in this patch.
- # of lines of code changed since last major release.
- # of people it took to create this software.
- # of hours/days/weeks/months for us to put it together.
- Total lines of code.
- Total # of people involved, ever.
Next time you run me, I'm going to tell you this again, until you hack this message out of the binary or uninstall this illegally used and obtained software.downloaded an evaluation copy of a "certain" program, liked it, looked for a "keygen", found it, scanned it for virii, clean (excellent!), ran it...
;-) (yeah I know...shoulda done that anyway.)
watched in horror as my monitor went instantly black and the computer rebooted (of course this was windoze). hard drived was hosed beyong hope. had to rebuild from scratch.
Now, do I blame them for publishing a malicious keygen? Not really. It was my fault for trying to get the product for free. Do I think that hosing my hard drive was a bit extreme? yes sir, and I would like to slap them 1000 times with a wet hose for it.
Oh well... now I run my keygens as a "guest" account.
Is the juice worth the sqeeze?
Generally I agree with you, except that I would not phrase it that they aren't a lost sale (shich is true) - instead I would go further to say that pirates are your best sales opportunity!
You have a user that wants your program enough to track it down and dwonload it elsewhere. So you KNOW you have a user that really wants to use your program, instead of having to convince them to use it!
Authors need to figure out how to capitalize on that opportunity to make money from pirates. Perhaps that means detection of invalid serial numbers and offering them a valid one for a buck. That's a buck more than you would have had, and potenatially improves the percentage of sales. Of course you risk loosing the support of people paying more for the software, but hopefully you are doing something extra for them anyway.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Thanks, I thought the same reading the article and skimmed the comments here.
Self righteous judgement is the last we need to protect us from something and there is no way anyone can convince me that a general delete of all files on a "pirate" machine is even debatable. This is "justice" in the same way murder for "disrespect" is "justice" - unproportionate, indiscriminating and error-prone.
What if the piracy detection flags the wrong user? What if the home directory contains data of a thousand times the value of the pirated software? What if this somehow manages to shut down business and production machines?
Many comments here have been more or less paraphrasing "don't do the crime if you can't do the time" - a bit disappointing from the standpoint of freedom and justice. We cannot seriously advocate mob tactics, intimidation and outright unfair punishments. We do not smash the cars of speeders, windows of noisy neighbours or brains of annoying fellows.
We couldn't leave our houses if more people would give in to this urge. Or we'd have smashed cars every day someone thinks we might have remotely endangered their kid or have a gunfight each time someone makes other people wait in line behind hin at the ATM or the supermarket.
all the major software revolutions have been spawned by capitalist endeavors
That is simply, plain incorrect. Was UNIX started as a capitalist endavour: no. How about GNU? Linux? What about C++, or Lisp, or C, or FORTRAN? They were not spawned by capitalist endavours. How about all that networking software (TCP/IP, etc)? Lets see, the WWW. Oh, that wasn't spawned by capitalist endavours either. What about the idea of computer games? The first one was written before anyone had ever sold a computer, so not much by the way of capitalism there.
In fact, many, many software revolutions came from the time where the money was in the hardware, and software was kind of something extra that you needed. Like all the early development of operating systems and languages.
When you're trying to make a point (like piracy is bad), it does help if you fabricate examples which are plainly incorrect.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
No. Echelon is that government network stretching across the the majority of the world used to spy on most all communications especially voice communication by the phone system and likely the cell networks.
Carnivore was the answer to their desire for greater listening capabilities of the general public through new phone technology that didn't have back doors built in.
Now as far as decrypting dvds so you can watch them that was decss.
Were you seriously asking or are you just a troll?
Having said that though, what about the case where the program detects a leaked serial number and immediately throws up a dialog. Said dialog tells you in no uncertain terms that the serial number supplied has been pirated, blah blah. Dialog then continues on to tell you that if you may continue the installation. Further the dialog explicitly and in horrifying detail tells you exactly what it will do if you do continue (erase ~, sleep with your wife, beat your kids, etc.) and then simply asks if you want to continue. If you're a nice guy, you make sure that they page down to the bottom of the dialog before allowing continue to be selected.
Voila! Now you have gotten the users permission to punish him for pirating your code. IANAL, but it's probably even legal. Best of all, you can curb one mailicious and one stupid tendency in one pass, piracy, and not reading dialogs...
"Talk minus action equals nothing" - Joey Shithead, D.O.A.
"Talk minus action equals
I'm sorry it seems someone has named a program after the spy network known as Echelon.
I'll tell you, if this happened to me because of fatfingering the serial number or because of code error or the "little misunderstandings" that sometimes occur between computer and software, I would PRESS CHARGES for malicious destruction of data.
I would also sue the living FUCK out of the person who programmed the software.
Stupid, stupid.
Intolerance for ambiguity is the mark of the authoritarian personality.
Just because I "expect" a program to believe a specific way doesn't mean it will. Look at windows, lots of people "expect" it to work in a certain way, but quite often it does all sorts of funky things (some which can involve data loss).
Now, if you really wanted to, if you purchase a piece of software and doesn't behave as advertised, you could probably try and get your money back.
However, if you downloaded the software, or pirated it, or cracked it, what reasonable expectation do you have that it will work as you want? The expectation really is "works as advertised when used properly", and I don't count cracking as using a piece of software properly.
AutoCAD had a nice anti-piracy feature. Cracking the code that handled the dongle was (relatively) easy. There was then a further bit of code that made your drawings get fainter every time you saved them with a cracked version of AutoCAD. You'd be amazed how often "My drawings look faint" appeared in help forums...
How is this different from Microsoft's "activate within 30 days or the Windows/Office becomes unusable"?
Um, because that doesn't disable or destroy anything other than itself. It Office or Windows wiped your drive after the 30 days, Microsoft would be looking at the wrong end of a multi-billion dollar lawsuit.
How to solve most of our problems: 1.Lots of nuclear plants. 2.Cure aging.
I am currently making my living as a database developer. We put in a lot of hard work, so I understand this guy not wanting people to pirate his program, but as a developer I also know that sometimes programs behave unexpectedly. I also know that people sometimes mistype numbers.
What if a legit serial was sufficiently similar to a bogus serial that some user mistyped a bogus serial instead of their legit one? The ill will alone will be enough to kill your project. If the program refused to work, or even uninstalled itself that would be cool in my book, but to trash an entire user directory is fucked up.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
Echelon is NOT for decrypting DVDs, it's for taking divx-avi's and writing them out as a DVD. It has no legitimate purpose...if you want to backup your DVDs, you don't downsample them to divx first, you just copy them with 100% digital fidelity using something like said decss...
Dear Slashdot,
I am an independent woman. I had highly valued my virginity until age 14. I had hoped only to have sex with men whom I gave permission to. Kinda like how airlines would only let you on the plane if you had a ticket. Recently, I have been raped each afternoon that I walk home from school.
My parents' and grandparents' generation bribed the state government to make rape against the law. There is even a federal violence against women act that is supposed to protect me. Many of the men wear masks so that I cannot identify them.
Accepting that my model of modesty doesn't work in today's world and becoming a whore like someof the other girls is not an option. I don't want to facereality. I want to change the world to be the way I want it to be, regardless of the side effects. I also want everybody to be on my side and admit that I'mright. What should I do?
When there's a known checksum of the real release, faking wont work - since the checksums of the real release will be made public and anything not matching the real releases will end up being nuked.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
"Well its like this Officer. I downloaded a program and used a serial number I got off the net so I could use the software without paying for it...."
Conor "You're not married,you haven't got a girlfriend and you've never seen Star Trek? Good Lord!" - Patrick Stewart
I've been doing some work with FFmpeg recently and I noticed it's licensed under the LGPL, not the GPL. (There are some optional modules you can include that put the package under the GPL, but they are not compiled in unless you explicitly request them to be.) The LGPL permits the software to be included without modification as part of a product that is not under the GPL. So there's no GPL violation here.
How's this...
* Ask for validation on install.
* If validation fails then display a clear message stating that the software is pirated and may damage files on the computer.
It's best not to delete the files. That's way to obvious and they will often be restorable from backup. The best thing to do is to slowly corrupt data in the files. That way you can corrupt the backups too! It would be another software project in its own right to corrupt the data in such a way as to be most damaging without being immediately obvious.
Just a thought....I'm a philosopher as well as a software engineer.....I wouldn't necessarily condone this.
Thankfully I don't need to worry about this as my software has a big dongle.
Stick it in the EULA, and advertise the personal data file protection as part of the product's "functionality" - make sure to disclaim it properly, though, so that people don't go using it for that purpose on purpose.
Also indicate that in order to protect the data, you may not release decryption keys without proof of who the person is...
Yeah, I know, I'm just dreamin'. Still...
InThane
Erasing all the ~? This sounds really stupid to me. It could erase the program itself from hd, that's something i would understand. But to lose maybe a month of work because your 15 yrs old boy though that "crak-that-warez dot d0rk" was cool, or the original serial number was more than 3mt away from the keyboard and that means wasting more than 3 kilojoules and google's just there... well, that would be an occasion to NOT to buy that damn software anyway. And to tell my friends not to, too.
Moreover, think about a network share mounted inside my homedir, with the docs of all the department i work with for commodity reasons... whoops. Instantly lawsuit, just add the angerness.
Add to this that, expecially for small-medium companies, some employee could want to try the program out before buying it (I know many of you don't like it and say it's piracy, but it happens everyday no matter what you think). So erasing the homedir would definitely be an harakiri for the author.
My solution? Use opensource/freesoftware. At least you can do a "cd src && grep -Ri 'rm -Rf' ./* | less" :-)
IANAL, but erasing something it's not your program on the end user pc isn't legal (unless it's written explicitly in the license that wrong serials can erase your homedir), and the author should refund them.
42.
Assuming the thrft analogy (an issue in itself), if I stole a chocolate bar from a store, the owner does not have the right to smash up my car, however justified he may feel himself to be.
The developers recourse is to contact the police/proper authorities, not to inflict harm like some sort of cyber-vigilante.
This is illegal in every sense, whether "just" or not.
Anyone affected by this would do well to file a claim in court.
Look what his target market is:
.mov as well as many other formats. It contains queue capabilities and has a built in preview window."
"Echelon is a MPEG-1/2 video encoding program that accepts a wide array of media formats with custom settings and customizable presets. Accepts a wide variety of avi (divx, 3ivx, etc...) mpeg-1/2,
It's video encoding software, not illegal at all and has many legal uses - but is also attractive to those who are ripping DVDs or dealing with pirated copyright video. According to a comment on the linked article, this software is popular for people trying to encode video for VCD and SVCD.
If they expect all those people who are encoding ripped movies to pay up, then they're targeting the wrong niche. Oh I understand - they want to make money from people ripping off other people's work.
Piracy is kind of like spam, in that it's a cost of using the internet. Just as there are a bunch of things you can do to reduce spam, but no silver bullet for eliminating it, people in the business have a laundry list of steps for reducing piracy to acceptable levels. Some of them include:
- Use well-known "locking" software. After a few weeks on the ASP newsgroup, you quickly discover the handful of tools for serial-number locking that generally offer the best results for software products.
- Maintain and exchange blocking lists. A lot of cracks result in a sudden burst of download activity from "warez" sites. When these crop up, ASP members block the appropriate IP addresses, and often offer them to others (sounds more like spam, don't it?)
- Get the warez site shut down. This is something ASP members have a lot of experience with. Being able to have helpful friends in some of the far-off countries that some warez sites live in is sometimes the key to getting their plug pulled.
- Offer value that requires a website connection. That free serial number ain't so cool if a significant part of the value comes a feature that involves connecting back to the publisher's website, and you find your serial number was already "used up". Some members are also experimenting with schemes that allow remote revocation of serial numbers.
Just like spam, there's no silver bullet for software piracy. However, just like spam, little guys continue to band together to create and exchange schemes for effectively reducing the cost of the problem.if anyone thinks they have the right to delete my data for any fucking reason then they are a moron. this guy shows his true form by these actions. i bet what ever he is writing is probably over priced and a piece of crap. here's a clue to the fuckwit - write decent software and come up with a decent key scheme.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
We have a situation where property rights for software have nearly vanished, and surprise, at least one programmer gave up.
Compare this to societies where there are no property rights: no one is willing to do any more than the bare minimum and everyone has given up.
Productive economies need property rights.
I'm pretty damn sure this would be in breach of the Computer Misuse Act 1990 specifically Section 3, Unauthorised modification of computer material.
I think there's similar legislation in most EU countries, but I'm not sure.
It's a criminal act btw, meaning Crown prosecution and a jail sentence, not a civil matter. Not a problem if the chap doesn't plan on entering the EU.
It really doesn't matter if somebody is in the process of pirating his software. That's a seperate offence and doesn't give him license to commit unauthorised modification of a computers data.... and I can sense the pedantics gathering in the wings, but it doesn't really matter how you want to split hairs on what is unauthorised modification of data, the Crown Prosecution Service and the courts get to decide that.
really.. one of the 15 links in this story links to the page (I hope) about the actual story. Why do slashdotters feel the need to provide links to all sorts of irrelevant stuff, thus obscuring the bit we're supposed to be reading?
I am Wincent Colaiuta, the developer of Synergy (posting as anonymous coward because I don't have a slashdot account).
Synergy is nearly 40,000 lines of code. If you think I was able to write that in a Saturday afternoon then you're mistaken. If you could write the same in an afternoon then you're a very gifted programmer.
If you take a look at the the changelog you'll see that it has undergone continuous development since I first released it in November 2002. It is the product of what I estimate to be thousands of hours of work.
What, excatly speaking, does open source movement have to do with piracy ? Open source is all about making the source code of the program available to the end user; it has nothing whatsoever to do with removing copy protection from closed-source programs.
Furthermore, all the various stupid copy protections do is make cracks sometimes an absolutely neccessary part in getting the program to run. For example, the (legally bought) game Morrowind kept crashing on my machine at startup because of copy protection check; applying the no-cd crack solved the problem completely. Copy protection does not slow pirates in any significant way, it simply annoys legal users.
And deleting the users home directory simply ensures that no one will buy your products out of fear of them deleting their directories because of typos when entering serials or programming errors.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
I thought it a good one.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
With access to the binary, it is IMPOSSIBLE to protect a binary from being pirated. This is why neither DRM nor piracy protection nor Palladium schemes will ever work.
I call DRM and other anti-piracy schemes "Brooklyn Bridge Technologies." Wanna buy some?
Setting aside the piracy issue for one moment.
What I do is take one of those label makers and place the serial number right on the CD.
Makes it easier to sell the CD too.
Back to...
"am in no way stealing. This guy is out of line. Removing the home directory of a user is ridiculous. Just delete the f'en product directory."
Good for you. Now what about all the people who aren't so good? It's one thing to defend piracy in the face of a faceless corporation. It's quite another to beat up the little guy, who not only has to face the faceless corporation, but has to fight against those who have zero respect for them.
Whereisit (disk cataloger)
CDRWin (cd burning program)
What do these programs have in common? They (like the program under discussion in this thread) of of greatest use to those not inclined to pay for their content (collectors of warez/mp3z,etc. tend to have lots of files to organize and copyright infringers need to make bit-for-bit copies of CDs, respectively).
One CPU cycle wasted on digital restrictions management is ONE TOO MANY.
If I'm walking down the street and someone robs me, what amount of force am I allowed to use to retrieve my stolen property? Can I chase him down and kill him to get my stuff back?
Anyway, I think the amount of damage that software can do to those that would steal it should be equally proportioned to the situation described above. Loss of home directory sounds like getting off easy.
Then again, just having the software delete itself would be the equivalent of recovering the stolen goods.
"I'd gladly admit to one count of copyright voilation and pay my dues if I could at the same time prove he deleted a million or two dollars worth of IP from my account."
Then you'd find all those "there's no such thing as IP" Slashdot arguments coming home to roost.
"Then on top of it, toss in any/all new malware and trojan horse laws at him, add a pinch of whatever they are calling 'cyber terrorism' nowadays, mix, stir, sit back and laugh all the way to the bank."
I'm certain his lawyer can think of as many lame things as yours can.
The only solution to piracy is to move to a service-oriented model. Microsoft is moving towards this and I think all companies eventually will. For now, things like online activation will become more popular. These things are costly for a small company but perhaps some company will provide registration services to these companies (a business opportunity for an entrepreneur?).
As internet access proliferates, piracy will just keep increasing. It's possible to host pirated stuff in some foreign "lawless" (in a computer industry sense) country. I can probably list at least 60 countries where this can be done right now.
The increase in piracy is inevitable IMO. If piracy doesn't increase then it likely means that governments are cracking down on civil liberties. Civil liberties are more important than piracy and the only way for the software industry to do well is to move to a service-oriented or subscription-based system. In other words, DRM is very bad and should be rejected on civil liberty grounds; however, online activation is ok IMO...
Sivaram Velauthapillai
Seeking the meaning of life... @slashdot of all places
As a courtesy, it would be nice if the Slashdot hordes would be lighter on the last (fifth) link in the second series. From wincent.org: "[Update: This article is attracting heavy traffic from Slashdot... server load is quite low now, although it was probably higher earlier, but it turns out that eZ publish is very inefficient with respect to MySQL. I've changed the (persistent) mysql_pconnect calls to (non-persistent) mysql_connect calls, so hopefully there shouldn't be any more "too many connections" errors. Ironic that in the very article where I describe how piracy is seriously affecting my ability to pay the bandwidth bill, I get a wave of traffic from Slashdot. This server is hosted in Australia, where bandwidth still costs over 10 cents a meg. Incredible, I know...]"
Applications and system files are not located in the user dir, and would need admin privileges to be accessed/deleted. The pirates affected by this offensive copy protection can still fire up their web browser and other applications, and post all they want. They just lost their documents, user preferences, movies, music, pics, etc. That's the nice thing about POSIX OSs like MacOS X, as trojans can't really break your system, unless you're running as a superuser all the time. It hurts, but doesn't hose your system.
"I like systems, their application excepted", George Sand (French)
"[Update: This article is attracting heavy traffic from Slashdot... server load is quite low now, although it was probably higher earlier, but it turns out that eZ publish is very inefficient with respect to MySQL. I've changed the (persistent) mysql_pconnect calls to (non-persistent) mysql_connect calls, so hopefully there shouldn't be any more "too many connections" errors. Ironic that in the very article where I describe how piracy is seriously affecting my ability to pay the bandwidth bill, I get a wave of traffic from Slashdot. This server is hosted in Australia, where bandwidth still costs over 10 cents a meg. Incredible, I know...]
It looks like the pirates have won the war on Synergy.
Since the software was released, there have been occasional serial number leaks which have harmed sales, but the problem has more or less remained under control. It looks like it is now out of control.
Please read on to learn more about what's happened and how I'll be responding to it. Unfortunately, it's all bad news.
Throughout the month of August, a fake license was "doing the rounds" unchecked on a popular serial-sharing forum. Sales dropped 20-30% in response, starting on the day of the leak, and stayed low for the entire month.
On Saturday, I released a major update to Synergy, version 1.2, and was dismayed to see that the very next day a crack was being made available and advertised on the same forum. When the crack was taken down by Apple, who had been unknowingly hosting it, the very next day a "100-user" license for Synergy appeared on the same forum.
I have never sold a 100-user license of Synergy. The license if a fake. The serial number algorithm has been reverse engineered, and the pirates can generate new serial numbers at will. There seems to be very little that I can now do, and it seems certain that the 30% depression in sales will continue indefinitely.
I never made much money from Synergy. It's only 5 (Euros) (evidently too much for the pirates). Nevertheless there are bills to pay. Domain name costs, bandwidth charges, tax on the income earned from the licenses. It's no exaggeration to say that the current piracy problem, if it continues, will put an end to the business.
The business (and myself) are just two of the victims. The collateral damage ends up directed at the customers who've bought licenses in the past.
If the business closes, then there'll be no more updates for those registered users. No more updates for the pirates either.
If the business doesn't close, things still don't look good. Unfortunately, every alternative I consider for addressing the problem has a downside attached to it for legitimate users.
Perhaps the pirates don't stop to think and realize the consequences of their actions, and that their behaviour adversely affects everyone involved. These are just some of the consequences that piracy can provoke:
1. Higher license prices. If pirates won't pay a reasonable fee like 5, then the licenses must go up in price to cover the running costs of the business. The bystanders who foot the bill are honest people, made to pay more because the dishonest people didn't want to pay at all.
2. Less time spent on improving the software and developing new products. If I can't pay the bills from license sales, then I have to spend more time working on things other than software.
3. Less time spent on tangible software features and more time spent on anti-piracy technology. While most users would prefer to see new features and bugfixes, piracy diverts development time towards intangible things which honest end users never get to enjoy (things like improved license code algorithms).
4. Less convenience for honest end-users. Thanks to piracy, honest customers have to deal with
What if I mistype the serial number? What if the software screws up and thinks I have a pirated copy? They have just created an enormous disincentive to run their software, even as a legal, paying customer. What could they possibly offer that would be worth the risk? They also risk getting sued by any customer who finds his disk wiped out unexpectedly.
Perhaps I'm a conceited, arrogant prick, but I've found Windows users (and many of the Linux user who were formerly Windows users) to be cheap ass thieving bastards. It's been a macintosh argument for the past decade that mac users spend money double the size of their market share.
... oh nevermind.
There is no respect in the Windows market. I'm not sure what it would take to instill it. I'd say, just don't develop for Windows.
You won't find many more people willing to pay for your stuff if you develop for Linux, but at least these guys are more honest about it. If you want to make money off of traditional shareware, the macintosh market seems to be the only way to go.
If everyone is trying to rip people off, no respect will ever be had. If everyone thinks it's all supposed to be free, then why would anyone pay? It'd be like paying for bottled water
-theed
A-f***king-man! Nice to see a fellow artist around these parts, balancing the very lopsided scales around here. We need more artists speaking out about piracy and what it means to them.
Small nit.
"Being an artist isn't something that you can control -- its something you are born being."
Maybe. Nature, nurture. Are artists born or made?
It may feel good to pump 12 rounds into an unarmed tresspasser, but comon...
That is perfectly legal where I live.
In fact, I will most likely put 2 into an intruder before I find out if he's armed or not.
Seriously, if someone breaks into your home while you are there, you'd be a fool not to assume that he is armed and act accordingly. Don't issue warnings and threats eg "I just called the cops, you'd better leave", that will only alert the intruder to your location and the fact that you are now a threat to him. If it's within your power, incapacitate him.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
I think what he was suggesting is that the open source movement might be a good resource for helping companies figure out how to protect their products from piracy.
Open source is where great ideas can be brought to the masses. Just because someone can parse the code doesn't mean they can cut the copy protection out. Many of the online games now use key verification and credit card activation that very effectivly prevents copying. This system is not compatable with most other application types.
As far as truly destructive copy protection mechanisms, they are no more unsafe than stupid programers. If someone does not take adequate safeguards to protect legitimate consumers, then they deserve to drive customers away, furthermore, it is inevitable that people will be afraid to use applications whose features include destroying pirates data until such practice is widespread.
People are always afraid of change, but as the internet and the public at large slides into the notion that peer to peer pirating is ok, and other forms of pirating are ok, something beyond making more inadequate unenforced laws must be done.
If you have a million or two dollars worth of IP in your account, with no backups, then you deserve to lose it.
;)
If you are the sort of person with a million or two dollars worth of IP in your account, then what are you doing pirating software? Or is it Valve's IP?
Um, because that doesn't disable or destroy anything other than itself. It Office or Windows wiped your drive after the 30 days, Microsoft would be looking at the wrong end of a multi-billion dollar lawsuit.
/tmp. But if you don't know the tools or methods that are out there (most Windows users don't), then the net result is the same - your data is gone.
Define 'disable'. If you are not prepared nor capable of reinstalling Windows with a legitimate activation key, and Windows won't let you log in to save your files, I'd say the computer is pretty well disabled. Now, you could argue that a savvy user could still boot to command-line mode, or boot to Knoppix and rescue the files, just as a savvy user using this developer's software could have rescued their ~ dir from
Or, similarly, you restore your system after Windows deactivates, and the restore process wipes your data by re-imaging the drive - again, you lose your data.
Now in both of these cases, there is much more warning (Microsoft's annoying reminders and probably the system restore process has a big red warning message) and time (30 days) for a user to seek help, but that's just a matter of degree. How much warning is enough? Just a EULA? Or a nag screen? How much time is enough time - 30 days? 15 days? or how about 15 minutes?
And finally, how savvy does a user have to be to recover their data - do they have to know about Knoppix? Or how to recover deleted files? Or is the data securely deleted, no chance of recovery, hope you have backups?
Like I said, I don't agree with the developer's decision to do what he did, but I don't see it as being that different than what Microsoft does - it's on the same spectrum, just farther down.
Did you see the ads? This is how it works.
The alarm is installed in your car, and can detect when someone breaks in and makes a direct connection to start the engine. At this point the car uses a mobile network to relay the fact that it is being hijacked, and sends off its GPS coordinates. This information triggers a loud buzzer in a control room full of trained operators with computer monitors. The operators generally run away from the room screaming, at this point. Anyway, once the signal is sent, the alarm takes over control. First thing it does is it cuts the gas to the engine. Then it starts to flash headlights and taillights. Then it turns the car so it is now riding on two of the side wheels, just before it goes for a tailspin which infalibly lands the car upside down. Alarm locks all doors. Then gas tank gets ignited, often with a flashy explosion, and thief burns, screaming, inside the stolen car.
They claim that one thief will never hit you again.
Quem a paca cara compra, paca cara pagará.
> If you have a million or two dollars worth of IP in your account, with no
;}
> backups, then you deserve to lose it.
indeed. I'm not saying this is a ligit situation here. Just something a person could do in a way that the courts would agree with.
If you leave a system unpatched, and someone cracks it and trashes the system, it still falls under computer crime laws no matter how stupid we would argue it is to put an unprotected system on a public network.
The courts would even side with an idiot that didn't set a root/admin password and had 'damages' caused by someone simply logging in and viewing files.
In other words, the judge won't blame a stupid person for doing something stupid like not using backups or taking proper security measures (when it comes to computers atleast)
Then again, who's to say i'm not rendering the next LoTR and it gets deleted while in progress or something
There will be technical flaws with any argument put forth, but looking at it from a legal point of view, people could very well get away with a claim like this.
The worst part is that stuff like this encourages the already common sentiment that shareware is always inferior to commercial software and potentially dangerous.
So it's not a legitimate use to take video recorded from TV and burn it off to DVD using this tool?
Idiot.
No, it's not, since all the TV recording software outputs in MPEG2, and support burning to DVD without downsampling to divx first. Face it, you deal with divx, your purpose is piracy, or preparing video for portable devices, and what moron wants to take a DVD down to 1/4 resolution, and then burn it to DVD?
Pirate my latest CD and I will delete all mp3, ogg, and m4p files on your machine.
this almost tempts me to put a file worth a million dollars (or something) in home dir and have the program delete it.
they'd have no chance in a lawsuit.
i mean. if a robber can win a suit against the person he robbed for getting the shit beat out of him, why not this?
why the hell pirate something when it's easier and cheaper to simply buy it?
That answer would be law. If something costs $29K more than you're willing to pay (or maybe $30K), then you might have to find an alternate solution than STEALING it.
If a product costs an abscene amount of money, it's not targeted at you. Demand is low (due to price), so supply should be low. Some companies have expensive products and only want to deal with corporations / consultants with lots of cash willing to make a large commitment. I'm sure if it was possible, said company would hope you never heard of said product, because they're only interested in people willing to pay said price. Nothing personal.
Software is overpriced, espically consumer grade software.
You wouldn't think that after slaving away at your heart's work while paying the mortage. If it wasn't difficult or time consuming, you'd just write your own... but it's not.
Not about piracy, but about your program. I think the reason you aren't seeing registrations is because you've made a pretty much unmarketable product. Now I'm not going to go and extinsevly play with it, but it looks to me like a bit of a glorified text editor. Looks like you've added some things like syntax highlighting, a couple wizards for building tables n' such and, well, that's about it.
Ok, well that's nice. That is certianly more HTML related features than notepad, and even a bit more than my beloved UltraEdit. However, you still face the same problem: You have released a text editor. It has a couple nice features, but it's just a text editor in the end.
Well, that's the kind of thing that most people will take for free, but just aren't willing to pay for. I mean there are some nice features over a basic one, but I have a feeling if you made copying impossible, most people would just do without.
You aren't asking a lot, but then again, you don't give a lot. I mean your HTML wizards for tables and frames seem unique but, really, those aren't that useful. Your editor also lacks most of the advanced features that Ultraedit (slightly more expensive than you) or Textpad (slightly cheaper than you) have.
Finally, your stuff is out of date. Tables and frames are NOT the recommend way for doing layout anymore, layers are. If I was going to get an editor that could help me do something in HTML, layers would be my top choice.
So, what you need to do, if making money is your goal, is do something to make your editor more worth buying. Here are some directions you could take:
1) Go the text editor route. Flush it out with support for huge files, hex editing, regular expressions, alternate encoding, macron, etc. Make it a full featured text editor to comete with Ultraedit, but add something more, like your HTML wizards.
2) Go the wizards route, but have them for EVERYTHING. You list like 3 wizards (form, tables, frames). K, nice start, but you need to add a whole lot more. Layers, style sheets, DHTML, JavaScript, etc. Make it so that the wizards can more or less write anything for you.
3) Go the visual route. Try and make something like Fireworks, only probably less featured (And also less espensive). Something for those that want the pointy-clicky but can't afford a Macromedia product.
However where you are now, I'm not supprised that you aren't getting sales. Your product is nice, and maybe something I'd use for free, but I don't see that I'd want to pay for it, espically not instaead of Ultraedit or Textpad.
Not trying to justify the copying, just trying to explain it and give you some ideas.
Also, the whole OSS/GPL push doesn't help. People are becomming trained that little programs that are downloadable ought to be no cost. Software in a box costs money, not software on the web.
Also, don't feel like no one ever buys things like this. The University of Arizona has a site license for Textpad. People do buy text editors, but you need to find an angle that someone doesn't ahve, or do it better than someone is doing it now.
Doom 3 would not run on my machine, even though the box and tests said it would. Not the first time this has happened, and the last time Iit happened I could not return a game despite having spent several grand at the store that i bought it from over the past few years... and the box having incorrect documentation (one set on the outer box, one inside, another on the publishers website, and another on the retailer's website).
I'm unemployed these days, but the time and hassle of reporting a company to the BBB and requesting arbitration is a pain in the ass. I can't afford a new system and I'm NOT going to go through the hassle of dealing with irresonsible/incorrect/annoying consumer relations. Banks and telco companies already cause enough grief in this dept. Hell, my account just got overdrafted 60$ by rcn because i'm supposed to _drive_ my cable modem to their return location 30 miles from where i live and my car is broken down.
anyway, screw id's incorrect system specs and lack of demo.
and screw the piracy cost numbers, because just like the '$1 billion lost in china!' B.S., they're way off because a lot of people wouldn't buy the product in the first place. it's like donating CDs that would never sell to a library and claiming 16.95 in writeoffs.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
hehehe apparently, cheap ones ;-)
I'm not anti-social, I'm anti-idiot.
like yesterday in the geek security story?
Does he think he has a right to profit? Perhaps he choose the wrong line of work, which is unfortuante for him.
The only way to have him, and other copyright holders, be guarenteed an income is turn society into a police state. That would be the only way to make sure information doesnt spread.
You seems to be conveniently forgetting three things:
1 The punishment must suit the crime. Are you are advocating capital punishment for any crime?
2 The courts should deal with deciding what punishment, if any, should be handed out. Are you advocating vigilantism for anyone or do you personally have the ability and the right to decide is someone should die?
3 Should 1 and 2 be applied to you if someone dies accidentally? eg the neighbour's kid climbs your roof to retrieve his ball and get zapped.
You break all the laws of physics and you seriously think there wouldn't be a price?
"The thing that gets to me is that coders and packagers can spend so long trying to lock up their apps that they spend time on that which could be spent debugging or advertising, fundraising for the next version or putting eye candy in the app so that the people who actually pay for software will find it attractive and pay for it because it looks professional."
Gee, who knew that piracy would be a non-victimless crime. Of course we also complain about the cost of locks, and burglar alarms, and police. We could be putting all that money into making the world a more beautiful place. Gee, wonder why?
Just have every copy of the software call home and give you it's unique ID. First you check that the ID is one of the ones you have sold to retailers, and that you haven't seen it more than say, five times, and then you hand back the unique decryption key to make the program run from that point on. Easy schmeasy.
I personally LOVE Open Source Software. I use it exclusively, and am not above paying for software that I like. I personally think that these developers have every right to put these things in their programs and then warn the user when they run the setup. They really shold warn the user! Blaming the software companies for the user doing something illegal is as ridiculous as blaming the gun manufacturers for firearm related homicide, but you see that every day too. Liberals are killing us with their, "We have a right to free stuff!" philosophy. By the same token, developers have the right to protect their intellectual property...If they so choose. If you want to give away the source code then do it and license it under the GPL, if you want to charge for it, then do so, and protect yourself how you see fit. It is the decision of the user to try to install the pirated software. I have used serials for several pieces of software, and if it had screwed up my home folder, then it was my own fault. You do not have the right to steal. You can be punished for being stupid.
Decaffeinated coffee is kinda like kissing your sister.
If you want to get paid for your work on software, put up a donation box. Implement planned improvements once sufficient funds accumulate. Make the result available freely. Don't waste any resources fighting the ease of information sharing.
If nobody makes a donation, it means there isn't enough demand for your programming skills. Find something else to work on. If you still end up making the improvements without the funds, it means you already found compensation (the enjoyment of programming, perhaps).
You might also add a way to vote on features when making a donation, or perhaps even make those funds available only for that feature.
It's a waste to spend resources on countering the near zero cost of information duplication. Let it work for you.
This newsgroup posting mentions a copy protection method that was used in the past. Specifically, this method involved a damaged area on the program disk. During normal operation of the software, that disk area would never be accessed. Presumably, attempting to copy the entire disk would include accessing the damaged area. The disk drive would be physically damaged when the head hit the damaged area. In the end, however, developers were held liable (and rightly so.)
"I just don't accept this course of action. It just doesn't make him any different. Acting like this just proves his ignorance and inability to come up with a suitable defense (has not to be perfect, just enough to generate some reasonable income). "
But, but? According to slashdotters there's no such thing, so you might as well give up and hand the keys over.
Maybe we should give up. Oh not give them the software, but simply don't offer any kind of software. Commercial or otherwise. Then when the legitimate "former" customers ask why. Simply explain that piracy makes software creation no longer viable. What are they going to do? Get mad at you? Maybe they will. Since we get mad at corporations and politicians, and entirely ignore our role in the whole affair. Eventually they will either write their own (what they should have done in the first place instead of pirating), or do without (also something they should have done instead of pirating). Sometimes the ONLY way to drive a lesson home is to put some pain into it.
It sends lots of information about the user's machine to a server somewhere.
(Put in the EULA that the user gives permission for the software to do this if it detects a cracked key.)
The server also records the IP of the sending machine.
The author of the pirated program gives this info to the appropriate authorities (e.g., the FBI in the USA), and the appropriate authorities take appropriate action.
Those who sacrifice security to condemn liberty deserve to repeat history or something. - Benjamin Santayana
"I'm still very much in favor of revoking copyright for people who use copy protection on their stuff and immediately forcing it into the public domain. So it should be legal to break the copy protection. If you want protection from the law, honor your end of the bargain and place the work into the public domain upon expiration of the copyright. If you don't want protection from the law, then go ahead and use copy protection. but don't whine about piracy, you had your choice."
Oh, gee. Were was all the moral posturing when the software was basically try before you buy, and pay $20 on the honor system? Oh wait there was none until the free ride started getting bumpy because of piracy (Gee guess what? "fucksl4shd0t" is putting his cart before the horse again. Imagine that?)
I was getting tired of the CIA monitoring all my communications.
Ideology is for ideots.
I would probably tend to be one to side with the "crackers deserve what they get" folks, being that I always pay for my software and don't like the fact that folks take stealing software so lightly. However, about a year ago I had installed some shareware that was somewhat crippled until a valid license key was entered. A friend of mine took the liberty of going to a warez site, finding a key for the software and entered that key. He did not ask me nor did he tell me he had activated the software. I found out when I came back from the bathroom. Had that software deleted my entire home directory, I would have been seriously ticked at my friend and the author of the software. I might have been ticked enough to talk to a lawyer.
Send/track messages to 100K people: www.xPressAlert.com
if anyone had bothered RTFA, the progam in question is merely a mac os X frontend to ffmpeg, which would probably take a day or so to do in python.
Nothing to see here, the author is an ass and his program is only needed for clicky-clicky idiots.
Us, smarties, use ffmpeg through teh command line, and don't need to pay anyone anything.
Anybody who has survived as an Independant Multimedia Producer, Unsigned Artist or their crew members in the Entertainment Industry, starting earlier than 1981 (pre-Microsoft Era), knows how dangerously vicious the major players are.
People who resist the organized crime families of Big Enterainment very often end up dead with the crime families scooping up the rights to their works for a song ( e.g., Jim Croce )
Look, mister; I don't do this for a living. I do it to keep from starving to death. BUSKING - STREET ENTERTAINERS - lines from the fringe element. The brain-dead masses of couch potatoes and print media junkies are conditioned to believe that any and all street entertainers lack the talent to "make it" in real "show biz". The fact of the matter is that many are "refuseniks" who will not compromise the integrity of their creative talents for the sake of a contract with maniacs.
That is one of the main reasons that Jerry Garcia and the Grateful Dead tours were what they were up until they were given contracts to play large venues. Their deal with Bill Graham gave them 1/3 of all tickets to comp out as "Miracle Tickets" and they invited their "Guests" to bring their Audio and Video recorders and use a special taping area set up near the sound booth. The result was and is that an incredible body of live concert audio and video tape copyrights are owned by the "Dead Family" and not the recording industry moguls.
I was backing up a street performer in Westwood, CA during 1982(Teenage Babylon) whose audiences threw quarters at his face instead of his guitar case. Winners VS. Losers, Thank You, George H.W.(Poppy)Bush WA.
I play sax, sing, dance and tell wierd stories ala Lenny Bruce, another classic victim of assassination by the industry. The man was a nut about sterile rigs, measured doses and always had a tough time scoring. All of a sudden he's croaked from an overdose? Sounds like a hot-shot to me. Same thing with John Belushi, except that he was much more careless about where he got his shit from and how he put it into himself.
I once met a person claiming that he was one of Jimi Hendrix's roadies. He said that the night Jimi died, the people who watched over him when he was doping were run out of the room by the "managers", that Jimi was dosed, laid out on his back and they watched while he drowned in his own puke. Sick degenerates probably masturbated while he was dying.
Now, in this "New Digital Millenium" the situation is worse, with killer bots prowling the web looking for independant P2P Music and Video networks to destroy. They do not discriminate between legal and illegal sharing. They judge on the basis of whether or not the main Network Administrator person has paid his or her tithe to the great God of Microsoft User-Agent Token Replicator and has been validated to "play in the big leagues".
ACCESS 2000 MONEY 2001 A Spacebar Idiot C++yy. BMW 2002 - Collectible Cars for sale! HARVARD(1)CARS.COM(0)CarTalkRadio Mental-Prize(s01.)
"Dewey, Cheatham & Howe. Attorneys - at - RAW"
Take a daily spin on THEWORLD - WGBH - BOSTON.
Oh? WNUR Northwestern EDU mp3 format your Mozilla JAZZ101/102 From: EVANSTON, IL, US too!
CUT! UT(1)UTampa,FL,USh1, UTennessee, Flush2, UTexas, Flush3, UThailand, Bangkok(4)UTasmania game over at Melbourne"IT"(sprintlink/classmates)
Tally-ban? Al-C-I-A-Da? UTurkey! ANKARA help desk ISTANBUL CRAP!(Internet Toilet Tree(sbcglobal))
Unless and until "We the People..." invoke the Declaration of Independance and remove the despots from their air-conditioned ivory towers and commit them to life sentences at CLUB FED, the browser wars will only continue to escalate, with the little folks and their fans getting whacked, cracked, hacked and deleted from the global media pools.
CIA(1)TWP=Terminate with prejudice - Microsoft Shared(0)TSR=Terminate and stay resident
CIA = Coopt-Interdict-Assassinate OR: Cocaine Importation Agency. See yahoogroups.com/group#CIA-DRUGS.ORG moderated discussion hosted by American Patriot Friends Network. (CYAN-IDE USN Vet Net)
so..where is TFA?
--- widget evolution: enhanced, plus, super, ultra, extreme, exxxtreme, ultra-extreme,
There is no legal worries about using this code in your program. After all, winXP bluescreened on a coworker yesterday, lost some precarious db work he was doing (it was a usb device that did it)
So if this is a feature you pay for, why not features you get if you don't pay for it!
simple, the registered version has some bud fixes that doesn't kill your system.
I like this idea, but only feels good if it is froma small company, an underdog, and for software you are not going to use.
I have read 'horror' stories about office xp deciding it isn't activated and causing people to loose productivity time. This is pretty much the same thing - although only shoots of its own foot, not the home directory.
#hostfile 0.0.0.0 primidi.com 0.0.0.0 www.primidi.com 0.0.0.0 radio.weblogs.com
This is just plain immature
And "drawing draw goatse/tubgirl images on the encodings" isn't?
you clown
And where, pray tell, did he state anything to that effect? He hasn't said a single word about it...
After reading this thread I came to the conculsion that hackers cannot be stopped, thus it is futil to try to make the live hard to the legimitate users (ie: no expiring licenses for legimitate users).
Who to combat piracy then? My idea is that the software's owner should be the first to flood serial sites with with false serials in order to confused the end user and make it way harder to find a license that works.
In order to fool people, the license numbers posted by the software owner could even be real but shortly expiring licenses so that the license wil be considered valid by some user and these serials will not be discarted easly.
The idea is that things should be done so that it is very hard for someone that's searching for a serial to find one that works!
I've run into a tactic like this before many year ago, except instead of a bad serial number being the trigger, it was a missing piece of hardware. I forget the name of the company/software package now (hopefully the head guy is standing in the unemployment line somewhere), but we had a specialized piece of manufacturing software that read CAD files and prepped data for input to our presses. It ran on IBM PS/2 Model 70's (yuck!) that had the system boards modified with a special BIOS chip by the software vendor. Lo and behold one of the system boards died and was replaced without the BIOS chip being transferred to the new board. The next time the software was run it nuked the entire C drive. We had a legitimate right to use the software, but because of a failed piece of hardware we suffered the wrath of some bastard programmer.
I *know* I wouldn't buy a piece of software called 'Echelon'.
Perhaps you've forgotten it already, but that's the name of the US spy system, used to spy on everybody including its 'allies'.
We found quite a big network here in Europe, and were not pleased at all. The citizens are even less pleased by the fact that nothing serious was done about it.
Apologies if I sound angry at this, but the word 'Echelon' triggers dark thoughts.
Free PC version of ChipWits at http://www.breueronline.de/klaus/chipwits/
...to install a pirated copy of XP on their machine!
Some of the most potent Sci-Fi high-tech literature heavily incorperated "Black Ice"
I could be mistaken, but I believe it originated in William Gibson's Neuromancer. Black ICE also happened to be extremely illegal. "Evil" would be a fair characterization.
at the rate piracy is increasing, drastic measures need to be taken
Drastic measures, [sarcasm] lovely [/sarcasm].
I find it most amusing that the "drastic measure" that pops into your mind is Black ICE.
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- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
First a note/discliamer: I'm not the coder of note. I do however know exactly what happened. I know the guy, etc.
Some points/clarifications:
1. He's not evil, or an ass. Just young.
2. The code never actually deleted ~. it was a bit more clever, and used Social Engineering to get the user to do it instead.
3. The code was not in the original app; he re-released it with the code in question for 4 hours to target specific cases/individuals, then replaced the app with a version without it.
4. NO ONE who knows him knew about it beforehand; we would have stopped him if we did.
5. The code was constructed in a way that it would have NEVER, and could not POSSIBLY have run by "mistake'. I've seen it and have verified this myself.
After a short summary, I'll go over each of the above. There are some Mac specific things here that y'all might not be hip to, so for the lack of extra detail about them I apologize in advance :)
He'd worked on Echelon for about, oh, 6 months. He taught himself to code to write the thing, in fact, asking other small devs and folks he knew that did ObjC stuff for hints and help along the way. The kind of thing folks here talk about a lot, etc.
In the Mac world, there is a small, misguided group of folks that play the warez scene game and prop themselves up as 'heroes" helping the "little guy" by cracking, almost exclusively, small demoware and shareware apps. I've always thought this was a punk ass approach, out of fear of the Big Guys, but no matter.
Anyway, the day he released Ech, these fools made it their mission to get it cracked as soon as possible...and because of some OTHER idiocy on the part of Ech's coder (remember, he's inexperienced) were able to do so fairly quickly.
In the Mac Underground, the first place you go to look for these kinds of things is macserialjunkies. Folks have chased these clowns around the world, and they have found a home where they can operate with out getting their access cut, and thanks to the whores at NIC can better hide their identies as well...but thats an aside.
Anyway, the day he released Ech, "iDave" and friends rev-eng'd his serial scheme and posted a couple of reg/serial pairs in a thread on MSJ.
By the NEXT DAY, the coder's registrations ddropped to ZERO. NOTHING. NADA.
If folks do think this stuff matters...well, theirs yer sign right there.
Now...to our points from above:
1. Dude isn't a "bad guy" and he LOVES the Mac platform. He's in college as an art major, but likes (probably less so now) to code, and love video conversion to the largely out-of-fashion IMHO mpeg1/2 formats. Its a hobby of his that he's quite passionate about.
That said, he's impetuous...and a bit of a hothead sometimes. He'll most likely grow out of it.
2. What the code *actually* did was move the user's home dir into the user's sub directory inside of /tmp, in situ.
This REALLY pisses off MacOSX (as it should)..but more importantly, a scriptkid of farquad pirate would have no real way of knowing what was going on, because as soon as they switched back to the Finder, the World Around Them begins to crumble...mas rapido.
Of course, all one must do at this point is log in/drop to a term and move it back out of /tmp and all is well.
Guess what your average Mac User is gonna do? (I think the bright ones in the bunch see where this is going...)
When the user reboots, the system of course, flushes /tmp. Data's gone...he's dead, Jim...you get the idea.
3. The app originally was not released with code that did this. If an invalid serial was entered, it wouldn't work. When he found out about iDave's...help...he added a block of code that specifically and explicitedly looked for the name/code pairs off MSJ
Vlad farted.
There are a lot of open source editor does pretty much your program can do and more. In fact, W3C have been making Amaya for years! For Windows apps, you should watch out for FCKeditor and Nvu.
As you can see, the problem of pirating apps (in your case, Net Weasel) is that there are too many people trying to do the same thing. With some of them willing to do it for free, how can shareware authors compete? Small developers, being low on financial resource, have to find ways other than software sales to fund their works. It affects big developers too, except it would take longer.
is like with everything: 90% of it is crap. People who download shareware often find they end up using a piece of crap that halfway solves their problem, and they are unwilling to spend $25 on something which is not well written and probably not well supported, so they go online to find a pirated key and use the software anyway.
The pizza and cinema analogy are completely flawed. Pizza is a recurring purchase and so if it is crap you don't buy it anymore, and as for movies there is a lot of choice for essentially the same product (2h of entertainment). A lot of it is indeed crap but you only get angry with yourself for choosing a film you didn't like.
Then people get used to not paying for shareware, they don't pay either for the 10% of shareware which is not crap. While they are looking for a key to the crap shareware they may stumble on a key for something else actually useful and someone doesn't get their fair price for the effort they put in the software.
The problem is completely different with open-source. Still 90% of it is crap but it tends to either drop out entirely due to its inherent crapness or gets improved because the developer that sees it may be inspired by it and at least has the source of the crap stuff to get started and sometimes it does help.
For example I remember learning to touch-type on an application for NeXTStep all these years ago (you know the kind, letters dropping out from te top, etc) that was absolute crap. It was slow and leaked all over the place. If it had been shareware I would still have used it for the two weeks it took me to learn the skill (restarting and swearing at the incompetent developer all the time and definitely not paying for it) but it was in fact a free and open-source application. I debugged it and made it fast and non-leaky in about 3h of work, submitted the changes to the original authors and then I was really happy.
People do really get angry at shareware, when they pay the price, it doesn't work as expected, it wastes their time and they can't return the product.
To me shareware is a doomed concept and I don't have a solution for all these clever people who write good software and would like to be paid for their efforts.
Clearly they don't care about customer satisfaction if they're wiping home directories.
Pirates are not customers.
testing out my trending skills