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Warezed SoundForge Files In Windows Media Player
An anonymous reader writes "German PC-Welt magazine reports that Microsoft used an illegal copy of SoundForge 4.5 (Google translation) for editing Wave files shipped with Windows Media Player. You can check that yourself by opening any file in the [Windows location] \Help\Tours\WindowsMediaPlayer\Audio\Wav\ folder in notepad or other editors of your choice and looking at the last line. There you will find a reference to SoundForge 4.5 and also a user called 'Deepz0ne' who happens to be one of the founders of an audio software cracking group called Radium."
In case the linked JPG goes down, mirrored here: http://img41.exs.cx/img41/9093/winwarez.jpg
Read here...
Actually, the tool required to see the code would be a hex editor, not a regular text editor like Notepad.
Odd, the tool "required" on my laptop was notepad. It did the job just fine.
Dedicated Cthulhu Cultist since 4523 BC.
Okay, my bad... I had to turn word wrap on to see it. :)
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Sound Forge 4.5 isn't GPL software. Basically, someone in Microsoft used a pirated version of some sound-editing software to make a sound file for Windows XP, and the evidence of the piracy is in the metadata of the WAV file. It just proves that they pirated some proprietary software to make a sound file, not that they ripped off GNU source code and put it in Windows.
Um, those programs use BSD licensed code, not GPL'd code, so your claim is not valid.
"Nature doesn't care how smart you are. You can still be wrong." - Richard Feynman
They're probably going to respond saying that it's an outside contractor, bla bla bla.
Typical face-saving measure.
Belief is the currency of delusion.
c:\windows\media\*.wav showed several instances of "Sound Forge 4.0" but no sign of a crack.
What bothers me the most is that unofficial copies of tools wound up on in a production enviroment.
I'll really be mad if Longhorn has this problem. Once is an oversight. Ignoring it is just asking everyone to make fun of you.
What's next? They use a cracked compiler that secretly embeds a virus? Oh wait, that'd be redundant.
Technically, under the law, they ARE a singular entity. That's the entire idea behind a corporation: the company is a seperate entity, and if any part of the entity breaks the law, the entity as a whole can be sued for it. It allows for individuals to evade financial consequences if their company is held responsible for something.
For instance, let's say I start a company, and that company's product ends up causing a lot of accidental deaths. Instead of the individuals that compose the company being sued, the company itself is sued, and money can't be taken from the individuals...just the company. It lowers the risk of starting a business by making sure that only the business itself can be financially destroyed, not the individuals behind it.
However, on the same token, every employee of Microsoft is a representative of Microsoft as a corporation. "Some dude who worked at Microsoft" who used a cracked copy of Sound Forge is a representative of the company, and by breaking the law, the entity of Microsoft as a corporation is responsible for breaking the law.
I am NOT an MS apologist but they were saying that the wav files shipped with windows media player were created and/or edited at some point with a warezed copy of sound forge. Not that warezed compiled code was shipped with windows...
ie; (no pun intended) this is like them compiling windows with a warezed version of Borland's compiler, not like distributing Borland's compiler.
Who are you? The new #2 Who is #1? You are #617565. I am not a number, I am a free man! Muhahaha.
Dahlmann tightly grips the knife, which he may have no idea how to use, and steps out into the plain.
Here is a (hand-written) translation that's easier on the eyes. Be nice to my server.
There is one catch, though. Microsoft has an army of temporary employees (having been in some trouble for perma-temps, if I recall correctly). If the offending person was a contract agent or the employee of a temp service, and not a Microsoft employee, then the MS corporate entity didn't commit the act.
However, the corporation is still responsible for its products. Strict liability in tort, and all. They are responsible for checking the work of their agents, so they are still the major party in the suit, even if the contractor or temp agency is also named.
A corporation does not totally protect its owners / employees from legal liability. Corporations do provide protection from financial risk, but they don't totally protect you from civil or criminal liability.
Corporations are legal entities, but they are unable to act on their own. Their employees and management act as agents of the corporation--they have a duty to act in ways that are in the best interest of the corporation.
If an employee, acting on behalf of the corporation, exposes the corporation to a lawsuit, then he is being negligent in his duty to the corporation--if the corporation is sued, it could in turn sue its employee to recover the damages.
(note: IANAL)
They're probably going to respond saying that it's an outside contractor, bla bla bla
Actually, Microsoft makes heavy use of 'temporary workers'--rather than go through the pains of actually hiring an employee, they hire contractors for extended periods of time.
Being an outside contractor to Microsoft is the next-best thing to actually being an employee.
Nobody has to use a Warezed version of Visual Studio. Between the .NET SDK, and the Visual C++ 7.1 Toolkit, and the PlatformSDK, you can download all the tools you need to build (including the optimizing C compiler) for free.
Even if you have a legal copy of Visual Studio you should be doing your automated build process with the free tools anyway.
I used to use SoundForge4.5 Radium release (having since bought SF5 and 6) and I checked out some old files that I sampled in to 4.5.
In wmpaud5.wav on WinXp the last bytes are: LISTR INFOICRD 2000-04-06 IENG Deepz0ne ISFT Sound Forge 4.5;Sound Forge 4.0In my samples from 4.5 I had: LIST0 INFOICRD 2000-01-09 ISFT Sound Forge 4.5
And on 5.0 and 6, there appears no plain text meta info.
If Microsoft is let off the hook on this, then I would hazard that it could be used against them in a prosecution of someone else.
The "metadata" is in a LIST INFO chunk following the data chunk. To my knowledge, this is not part of the WAV standard. I don't find it in the Microsoft multimedia Standards Update. I think that such LIST INFO data may be a holdover from the Electronic Arts IFF format on which RIFF (of which WAV is a subpart) is based.
I used to support adobe apps for a living - I know for a fact Acrobat, Illustrator, Photoshop, Indesign and Framemaker containg information similar to this (usually only the user profile name though).
they're loosing money
That's LOSING not LOOSING
They don't monitor the every move of their employees.
They save that precious gift for their users.
Oh fer christ sakes quit being so melodramatic; the case was about a hashing patent [that stac bought]. Essentially Stac claimed to own any algorithm that looks up matches in LZ compression in O(1) time and won on that basis. The code was not the same or even similiar, in fact, totally different algorithms, only similarity was run-time efficiency.
Mostly out of experience. Basically, they're on a drug, and in many cases wish they weren't.
It's not hypocrisy - it's good advice.
I beg to defer
"differ".
At least as far as Word is concerned (the only Office app other than Outlook that I use much at all), go to File -> Properties and you can change/remove the author details.
I assume that they're in there as it's often very useful indeed to be able to track down the original author of a document - after all, they're the one that should know the most about the subject. In the context of business especially this can be critical when trying to discern exactly what was specified, or what was meant by a particular part of the document, etc, and why (often the most critical if you're in a CYA situation).
It's not like the information is hidden, though - it's even visible via explorer. I don't use OpenOffice much, but I'd be amazed if it didn't do similar. Open sauce it may be, but it's still a useful feature.
It's official. Most of you are morons.