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US Removes Piracy Sanctions From Ukraine
An anonymous reader writes The US has restored Ukraine to their preferred trade partner status after requiring the country to crack down on piracy. The United States had also imposed 100-percent import duties on $75 million worth of Ukrainian exports since 2002." From the article: "Concern over high piracy rates prompted the Bush administration to suspend Ukraine from the program in 2001. At that time, Ukraine was the largest producer and exporter of pirated CDs and DVDs in Europe, USTR said."
. . . Ukraine even had a significant maritime presence, much less was engaged in piracy.
I too have felt the cold finger of injustice.
More like the US has restored Ukraine after installing a puppet who, even if he doesn't solve the privacy problem, is useful to the US in other ways.
I was in Kyiv two weeks ago. The consequences of the election of Yushenko are already evident, Ukrainian young people want to align themselves so much with the West that it's suddenly all McDonalds and Coca-Cola (wasn't this bad during my first trip here four years ago). Ukrainian traditional culture is being eroded before one's eyes. This isn't the normal pace of globalisation, this is Ukraine rapidly getting the life sucked out of it by a new administration that doesn't care about its own country. Of course, the other choice would have been a Russian puppet, who would be almost as bad (but at least the Russians are fellow Orthodox). The best turn of events would be an isolationist Ukraine, but no one stepped forward asking to turn the country in that direction.
Piracy hasn't changed much in Kyiv. There are a few new places to buy media legally (in touristy locals where foreigners hangout), but most markets sell bootlegs.
...And we have a new piracy-related industry here since the USSR broke down: so-called "Computer Clubs"... It's interesting to see how it evolves.
Imagine an Internet-Café without the Internet. A bunch of computers set up specifically to play games on, connected to a LAN with servers filled with pr0n, muzak and warez. Basically, this is it. You may come to play some games, bring your HDD / iPod / pack of DVD-R's or amuse yourself with the most interesting feature: the pirated Windows that says it is not Windows.
The clubs' owner usually cooperate in order hire several cracker who RES-EDIT an MSWin distribution - change the interface, icons, text and sometimes rewrite the EXPLORER.EXE to look entirely different - it is almost a tradition to use Borland Dephi for this.
Here are the screenshots: http://tinyurl.com/9ddgo
One of the popular "pre-modified" distributions in "BedOS 2 [Tanya]" - a heavily hacked Win98. Yet the computer illiteracy of the "copyright protectors" lets people who run the "Computer Clubs" to get past the law by claiming that what they are using _is not actually Windows_ (!). See http://winbeos98.km.ru/ for further deteil