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Flight Sim Company Embeds Malware To Steal Pirates' Passwords (torrentfreak.com)
TorrentFreak: Flight sim company FlightSimLabs has found itself in trouble after installing malware onto users' machines as an anti-piracy measure. Code embedded in its A320-X module contained a mechanism for detecting 'pirate' serial numbers distributed on The Pirate Bay, which then triggered a process through which the company stole usernames and passwords from users' web browsers.
That's probably naughty, but hilarious.
virus
I hope they get finger-cuff banged by simultaneous lawsuits and hacking.
WTF idiot company
> You copy some electrons harmlessly therefor you deserve your real world information stolen, potentially to real harm.
News flash, but piracy doesn't harm anyone. It's either people that wouldn't have paid anyway, and thus not a loss, or people that use piracy as a demo and end up paying BECAUSE of it.
Ages ago, when serial port dongles were a thing, there was a vertical market package that actually required a special PCI card that, if it detected tampering or a bad serial number, would dump current from some on-board capacitors and a voltage multiplier and fry the computer.
Same thing. Problem is when the DRM measure goes off on a legitimate user. That's when the lawsuits fly, maybe even CFAA criminal cases here in the US if a DA cares enough.
lol yea
Plus the mindshare a company gets from rampant piracy often translates into a lot of sales. Look at how MS exploited this in China. They allowed piracy for the better part of a decade while the country was poor, got people addicted and used to their platform, and now it dominates sales as the country gentrifies and actually buys sw now
And don't purchase legally, either. Spoilers in case you eventually RTFA.
You cant "EULA out of" felony crimes. This one will land when in serious criminal trouble, it will be worth watching
The malware is included in all versions. But allegedly only activated in identified copyright infringing cases. Or maybe, you know, when the government or some hacker groups that broke their mechanisms also wants access to your data.
I want to reiterate and reaffirm that we ... would never do anything to knowingly violate the trust that you have placed in us
You mean like knowingly distributing sketchy-ass binaries completely unrelated to your game or "DRM" in any way, designed for the sole purpose of scraping sensitive information from users' computers, and only coming clean about it when you're called out on the behavior? Yeah, consider said trust officially violated. Enjoy the lawsuits.... I hope somebody gets you on a HIPAA violation or something for scraping the wrong fucking system.
Protip: talk to your fucking lawyers in the future before going all vigilante on pirates; that's what you pay them for.
Except they put risk on every valid purchase as well, not just the pirated ones.
That's what I do with everything. Pirate it, install on a box I don't care about. If I like it, I buy it since it's easier than trying to patch a pirated copy and I don't need to worry about security.
I remember many years ago I purchased The Sims for my wife. The install wouldn't work. I called tech support and they told me that it sounded like what happens when someone removed a pirated version and tried to install the official copy. I just said Yeah, that's what I did. They seemed to appreciate my honesty and willingness to pay for it and helped me clear the registry of the offending entries that let me install the legit copy.
The company isn't entitled to do something illegal just because you did something illegal first. Besides, they foisted this executable on everyone who installed their product, paying and non-paying users alike. So really you're taking those risks even if you deserve them or not.
Two wrongs don't make a right.
But cross me, and I'll CUT you!
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Exactly. That's why I install bombs in all the cars I sell. If the car is started without the original key, it blows up! What could POSSIBLY go wrong?
There's nothing illegal in what they have done. So far. Are they hacking? No, it was part of the software. It would be no different if they wrote the code and included it. Are they causing damage? no, afaik. Is it unethical yes. But it's not illegal. It's like that sony root kit, may be there will be a lawsuit, but I am guessing no lawyer is going to take it up because it's not worth their time.
I used to pirate VST audio plugins like everybody else. Then I got a decent salary, went 100% legit and only used legitimately purchased audio plugins. Now I have a new PC and have to update >100 plugins manually, looking up serial numbers and good knows what. It takes weeks of my spare time. :(
One of the things you discover when implementing a scheme like this is that there is a significant number of people who end up running a pirated version of the game without knowing it -- their relative may have installed it for them, or they may have bought a used copy from an unscrupulous seller. For these reasons, it's important not to treat people harshly when their software status is revealed in an open forum. This is also one reason that putting in retaliatory measures in software is incredibly stupid -- it may turn out that the original user had no intent and did nothing wrong.
Attempting to combat piracy with stupidity probably won't work, but ya never know so, hey! Let's try it!!
Just got to wonder how much of this is happening and has not been discovered as yet?
Talk to Microsoft about that one, back in the mid to late 90's a rumor went out about MS doing mass delete on illegal installs. To the point where sales in China started to hit new high's. Personally, I don't see an issue with the mass delete, crash the system with a bad dll but taking passwords, that seems wrong.
if you see me, smile and say hello.
Or worse, the activation process is so cumbersome that you pirate as a workaround, despite having paid for it.
This is a situation where corporations are conveniently not people. So no one person will truly be held accountable.
"âoe[T]here are no tools used to reveal any sensitive information of any customer who has legitimately purchased our products."
All others gave us explicit permission to all usernames and passwords entered in the the computer. It's in our EULA your honor, we committed no crime.
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B - D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0 45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
FBI/CIA job as real pilots pay for sims.
So it's some punk kid who thinks it's fun to crash planes or it's the people who don't need to learn how to land.
Let's see which distribution of the game fixes the bug (i.e. eliminates or disables the malware) the fastest: the next pirate version of the game, or the one that you buy from the lawful publishers?
I predict that pirates will perform the maintenance faster. And then the lesson being taught to this game's players will be: remember to pirate instead of buying.
But maybe my prediction is wrong. The game publisher is going to need to be amazingly fast in order to prevent sending the "you should pirate" message.
All this aside, does is strike anyone as weird that people pirate software? I'm fine with pirating media (e.g. every single movie and TV show that I watch; what's gonna happen, maybe someone will exploit a buffer overflow in a popular player?) but I would be terrified to download and execute binaries from random strangers. Yes, I did that back in the 1980s, but that's because about all I was risking was the contents of a single floppy. Once we got hard disks (and shitty OSes that don't sandbox processes very well) it seems like malware would have totally killed off software privacy. I'm amazed we're having this conversation in 2018 rather than, say, 1988.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Bullshit. Most gamers I know only buy a game if they can't get a pirated version.
And that's why any good pirate has, at the very least, a firewall that ask them if they want to give internet access to a software or not. Only a moron let a software/game they've pirated call home/access some web server.
Adobe and Microsoft. Full stop.
I'm pretty sure the whole purpose of things like that, is to teach users that they ought to be pirating.
I know the movie companies do this on a massive scale: they add DRM so that their movies don't play right unless you pirate them. (The idea being that users need to become more habituated to pirating so that eventually they'll stop purchasing.)
True. Just knowing it's there makes that computer a lot more vulnerable to getting nailed
Or the DRM is screwing with your system so you get the pirate patch to kill the DRM so things go back to normal.
Fuck with my company IP ... lower my fair profit and I fuck with yo azzwhole. Any questions byteboi ??
I seem to recall that was just a myth. Though for a long time Microsoft didn't raise a fuss about pirate copies of their OS because that meant people were running their stuff instead of somebody elses. That did eventually change, but it sure as heck helped them penetrate the market to record levels.
I finally paid for a legit DAW (at the cost of a few hundred pounds) last year after 20 years of using a copy of it only to find that the legit version is every bit as buggy as the torrented version. Wish I hadn't bothered.
> You copy some electrons harmlessly therefor you deserve your real world information stolen, potentially to real harm.
News flash, but piracy doesn't harm anyone. It's either people that wouldn't have paid anyway, and thus not a loss, or people that use piracy as a demo and end up paying BECAUSE of it.
That's true for some people but clearly not true for everyone; clearly not true for the majority of people either. I know lots of people who pirate material to avoid having to pay. Not many people PAY for something they have already. And, even if that were to occur isn't it up to the owner of that intellectual property to decide?
If you stole a TV set from Walmart and told the cops you were going to go back and pay for it later if you liked it you wouldn't get much sympathy. Or if you snuck into a cinema and went into a room and watched a movie you wouldn't get much sympathy if you told the cops you were going to pay for the movie if you liked it.
If you can't afford to buy a game, movie, or album... go without. Don't steal. There is actually lots of free content out there that is legitimately free and legally available for you to consume. Seek that out instead.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
Your gain is my loss. Better you commit suicide and I fuck your grieving sister than you spanging stolen smiles.
EA's DRM is so screwed up and invasive, it's been known to cause hardware such as optical drives to quit working.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
Just install APK's host engine with it and you'll be safe for ever because, uh, ring 0! Kernel space! No ram!
Surely he knows how to hack the hackers.
My 10 year old spent some of his money on a download of Cuphead from the Windows store a few months ago when it came out (so paid full price). After a Windows update it stopped working completely, crashing out shortly after the splash screen. After an hour or two of trying to debug this, I found the torrented repack worked just fine, and he has been using that since. Not sure what the lesson there is.
Don't steal.
I agree with everything you said... minus that. I don't like seeing copyright infringement described as stealing. It is certainly depriving a copyright holder of revenue you may or may not have given them... But you have stolen nothing from them. You have breached their statutory rights to control copies of something they made. There was no theft.
I admire your honesty. Hell, I like you. You can come over to my house and fuck my sister.
I had to crack a legitimately bought copy of GTA IV because of the steam+windows live+social club idiocy.
I was about to say that it looks like you aren't even vaguely aware of what the story was about, since you said something so nonsensical. But keep reading.
If someone doesn't pirate, they still get the malware installed. It just doesn't get automatically called by the game.
So, basically, your "solution" is a total failure. OTOH, two hours after this story, the new pirate version doesn't have the malware. So your solution wasn't merely wrong: it was exactly wrong (the best solution actually being that everyone should pirate this game) and there's no way you could have done that unless you actually understood the problem perfectly, So you knew the actual solution, and simply lied to everyone about what it was. i.e. you're a merry prankster!
It's like if someone hammers their head and says "this hurts" and you provided "hit yourself harder" as the solution. Ha ha, what a comedian!
some pirates are upset that somebody tried to hack them? By their own admission, the module was only installed on every machine but only EXECUTED on systems running stolen software. Therefore, the sim company was only running the dubious code on systems run by slimes running stolen software.
Pot, meet kettle.
Do not run to the police for somebody trespassing on your lawn when you are a serial killer/robber.
There's something very twisted in the minds of psychopaths and narcissists that causes them to freely do evil to others but then become OUTRAGED when somebody does something even moderately underhanded to THEM. This is like the habitual liar, who after lying to everybody he knows for decades is shocked and outraged to discover somebody has lied to HIM.
Simple solution: STOP PIRATING OTHER PEOPLE'S STUFF. Become a civilized human being.
The only reason normal users of tech are continually facing DRM and other garbage is that people like these whining crybaby jerks are stealing stuff. If you think a piece of software is not worth the price, then do not use it. Find a free alternative, or write one. There's no excuse for spending enormous amouts of time and energy cracking software and hacking passwords and then distributing the hacks/passwords. Most of the people doing this can easily afford to buy the software they are stealing, but they just prefer to spend a thousand dollars on a new iPhone. As a rule of thumb: if you can afford a gaming rig, you can afford to buy your games.
That is a MAJOR felony under the CFAA. So, who's going to jail for 20 years?
But you have stolen nothing from them.
Using this argument, the flight sim company has not stolen any usernames or passwords. No problem?
This is a case of software "engineers" doing bad things. Real engineers would lose their license over this, at the very least.
Software "engineers" on the other hand, can hide behind their lack of licensing, credentials, professional body, professional ethics watchdog, etc.
It's just "simple programmers" trying to protect their "valuable" intellectual property.
Picture a structural engineering modifying blueprints such that anyone who copies the bridge produces a design that kills everyone as it collapses.
I'd pirate this on a secure computer and overload it with fake credentials.
Keep telling yourself that. These are the stupid arguments made over and over and over for decades by people who only want to pirate software.
"I wasn't going to pay for it anyways"
"I don't like that company"
"I should get to use anything"
"All I'm doing is moving some data around"
The truth is, once you get started, you get into the mindset that you can copy whatever you want and then you stop paying for legit copies because you don't see the point if you can copy it. Pretty soon, thousands of people just like you who have lost their moral compass do the same thing and companies lose revenue from people who otherwise might have bought a copy.
Then you go on forums and complain about how DRM is ruining games. Well, guess what? The problem was you to begin with.
I bought Battlefield 1942.
The DRM cut my framerate in half.
So even though I had a 100% legal game, I applied a crack. At that point I questioned why I even bothered buying it in the first place.
Well, from what I do recall, it was a specific Chinese language pack that got the thumping. But you might be right it was about 20 years or so ago. I guess you can say MS gave away the drugs for free to establish market share.
if you see me, smile and say hello.
Breached? That's an asshole word for theft. No, you cunt, it's not a breach.
These people should go to prison for criminal hacking. In many penal codes what they did is at least one order of magnitude worse than piracy.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
No. It was because 300 million unpatched systems could bring down the Internet. They didn't want infected zombie armies. Such things happened on smaller scale and this is a big reason why Win 10 is forcing updates. Way more machines, more horsepower and bandwidth would be an Internet apocalypse if a sizable portion was infected or running known exploitable windows.
I got Rocksmith 2014 with the cable as a gift. Activated and installed on Steam. Works great on my desktop.
My laptop can't handle it with all the updates and Steam running. So I got the crack for my laptop.
If I mention this on Steam forums I am banned. Fucking weirdos, it clearly says next to my name on every post that I own the game but they still wanna yell "u dirty pirate" at me.
And don't tell me I got the crack to play illegal custom songs. There is no such thing, I own the CDs. If I add songs to my copy of the game myself that is my business and nobody else's. And it works on the official version too.
I told you it was a bad idea to name that puppy Sister.
Yep, that stupid statement of "pirates weren't going to pay for that anyway" is such bullshit. They obviously have a habit of using software and playing games, they have the hardware for it, and if no pirated games were available at all, then they would have paid for something, eventually.
Exactly. That's why I install bombs in all the cars I sell. If the car is started without the original key, it blows up! What could POSSIBLY go wrong?
There is a difference between blowing up virtual software and a physical object. Just saying.
The lesson is you and your son have been had, taken advantage of by a system intent on deceiving you.
The chief underlying problem here is proprietary (non-free, user-subjugating) software. Software you're not allowed to run, inspect, modify, or share (also known as 'software freedom'). Proprietary software is licensed and distributed to keep you from running the program despite doing normal maintenance, software meant to keep you from treating your friends as friends by sharing a copy, inspecting the program to see what it does, and distributed to prevent you from modifying your copy the program should you wish to for any reason.
I experienced something quite similar with the Commodore 64: A video game called Elite on the C-64 had an anti-copying scheme so clumsy and prone to problems it drove me to understand what was really going on. Today we'd properly call this DRM—digital restrictions management (expanded that way because I take the side of the user class, not the publisher class) which was only visited upon those who obtained their copy of the program in a way the publisher found acceptable. Typically this meant buying a copy, but I later came to understand some copies were distributed gratis. The packaged game came with media, a manual, and a flat plastic device with a see-through window. The device could be bent so it resembled a table like an inverted letter "U". On starting the game, the user was shown some blocky image that looked incomprehensible. When the plastic device was folded, placed on the monitor at the proper distance (via the "legs" of the device), and peered through one could see the blocky image turn into something readable. If I recall correctly, the readable image was a page number reference in the manual one was expected to look up and type in the proper word to get past this stage of the loading program.
After I did this a couple of times it dawned on me that those who engage in filesharing and treating friends like friends (sometimes propagandistically called "pirates") never have to put up with this. Only the people who used the publisher-distributed copy did. And most of those users had paid for this treatment.
Those who shared copies were doing us all a favor: they let us try programs before buying a copy, they let us run copies that didn't have what we now call DRM; the anti-copying code had been stripped away. They let us have copies that one could copy in an ordinary fashion, no need for special copiers (such as "nibblers", or any copier that knew how to get past the errors which were deliberately added to the disk to defeat the standard file and disk copiers). There was no need to work around the issue by using audio tapes instead of disks (since audio tapes didn't have copy-prevention added to the media). These so-called "pirates" were doing us a service, a service I might have paid for if offered the opportunity to pay a publisher for a headache-free copy of the program.
Later I obtained a memory snapshotting cartridge called "Isepic" which let me make my own copy of the RAM-resident portion of the game. Isepic produced a copy which loaded faster, never prompted me for the manual lookup, and played identically to the other copy loaded from the distributor's media (no surprise there, it was the same code being loaded into memory). I never loaded the distributor's media again. But this got me to thinking about all the other programs (not just games) that treated the users this way across all the computers I had used. And I began to realize that this was a scam perpetrated on the people who treated the publishers the best. We were literally exchanging our money for being treated badly. And this harm pushed on the users was indiscriminate, just like the flight simulator company did here.
There was one more issue to wrestle with: proprietary software. This was an issue even the filesha
Digital Citizen
spread the word bros! flightgear is free, libre and open source flight simulator.
They should be sued for damages on this one. They intentionally embedded malware into an installer and stole paying customers' data.
So in summary: 1) FlightSimLabs just destroyed their company by intentionally inserting malware into a product they were charging for. 2) FSL was asked on their forums about it when various antivirus programs identified their product as malware. They responded by saying "turn off your AV software." 3) FSL transmitted the material over an open HTTP stream. 4) The server that they have stored this stolen information on is itself secured in a very piss-poor manner. (RDP is open for God's sake.) 5) As this was intentional, and not a mere "bug," it can theoretically be prosecuted in the U.S. as a felony. (Read: Quality time in Federal pound-me-in-the-ass prtison.) 6) Even if merely incompetent, their failure to secure the data they stole is itself criminal in the EU. 7) I guarantee you that they cannot prove that at no time was any of their unencrypted HTTP steams intercepted, NOR can they prove that their obviously insecure server was not comproimised, meaning: 8) How do we know that this wasn't intentional to steal information and go sell to identity thieves? They charge $100 by identity theft. https://www.fidusinfosec.com/f... Oh, where did I get #8? That's the only logical reason they would have stolen the data in the first place. It doesn't do shit for piracy. I hope these assclowns have a good lawyer.
By naughty I did mean illegal.
Too many possible jokes.
Clearly you have never been to Europe, where the prisons are basically baby day care institutions where most residents have the latest gaming console in their rooms and get quality food three times a day.
I hope they don't have a good lawyer and are utterly destroyed.
"Oh my God. This is terrible. This is the end of my Presidency. I'm fucked."; ~ Donald J. Trump
Break criminal law because your notcustomers are breaking civil law. GOGO
Upset I got the best of you again today proving botnets share C&C servers & my hosts file https://hardware.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=11761710&cid=56153412/ already has data to block BOTH threats involved? Yes, obviously (lmao @U).
* ... That's vs. BOTH the botnet/malware today AND back then in the past too (double bonus, lol - for me, not you).
(LMAO - YOU TRIED TO "DOWNMOD HIDE" THIS when I posted it before https://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=11766098&cid=56154404/ (thanks for showing it "got to you" UNIDENTIFIABLE anonymous chump - you did it to yourself!)).
APK
P.S.=> If you want to keep making ME look GOOD & yourself a dumb stooge, that's FINE BY ME by all means (lol - thanks again as usual)... apk
How about identity theft? You still have an identity so therefore it's merely "identity breach"?
Code embedded in its A320-X module contained a mechanism for detecting 'pirate' serial numbers distributed on The Pirate Bay, which then triggered a process through which the company stole usernames and passwords from users' web browsers.
If any individual was found to be installing this kind of malware on remote computers, they would be charged with all kinds of computer hacking crimes, just as a start.
Where's the criminal charges? This company needs to be made example of, this kind of behavior is utterly unacceptable.
I harmlessly move a few atoms from one place to another, dragging a knife across your neck.
See? Totally harmless.
You know, the AV companies should sue these idiots for responding to reports that the AV software identified their stuff as a trojan by implying that there was something wrong with the AV software.
If they'd just fix their installer, people who bought the game wouldn't have to call tech support and waste their time. So many software companies don't understand scale.
Naw calling it theft is a straw man.
Nothing is stolen.
All your theft analogies are weak straw men.
you grab a priated key and use it...
stop right there.
This is like the guy who says "I had some money and I lost it, so I went over to the Fed and grabbed a bunch of their currency. It did not hurt them, because the Fed prints all the paper money in the first place and they'll just print replacement bills. I did not gain at all since I only replaced the bills I lost. Honestly, I had a right to those bills and I did not even take a single extra dollar"
That would not fly. The theft is still theft and still takes you to jail.
If you lose something you bought, you do not get the right to grab and use a stolen replacement; doing so makse you not only the recipient of stolen goods but in the case of you going to a pirate site to get them, you become an accessory after the fact to the computer crime. Your acyion is not the equivalent of just stumbling across something that fell off the back of a truck; you asked for the stolen goods and in doing so encouraged the thieves to continue stealing and distributing.
There's nothing more amusing than thieves complaining that somebody else done them wrong.
If you stole a TV set from Walmart
...then Walmart no longer have the TV, which will tend to impede their ability to sell it to paying customers.
If you snuck into a cinema and went into a room and watched a movie
...Then a person buying a ticket to the seat you're occupying would not be able to sit in that seat.
Copying is not theft.
I know lots of people who pirate material to avoid having to pay
If you haven't reported them then you're clearly an accessory to this heinous crime.
We don't know who struck first, us or them, but we know that it was us that scorched the sky.
>>some pirates are upset that somebody tried to hack them?
>Sounds to me like actual paying customers are upset, not Somalis trying to eke a living.
You can prove these pirates were poor Somalis? Thought not. Most are not poverty-stricken people desperate for food; they're young people with expensive computers, expensive internet connections, sufficiently educated and with comfortable enough lives that they have both the ability and the time to hack other peoples' code. Incidentally, being poor is no excuse to do illegal acts that violate the rights of others, particularly when there are so many productive things a person can do for a living.
>>only EXECUTED on systems running stolen software
>That would explain all the AV flags it caused.
So, now you think every automated DMCA notice is valid? Thought not. Antivirus flagging is not that reliable and in this case would have only seen a non executing program doing nothing wrong on a system where only legal software was in use. Again, by the thieves' own admission, the code was installed on all systems but only did its nasty work on systems running with pirated keys. I am not fond of any of this junk, but this is the most benign form of fighting back against pirates I can recall, and would not have even been though necessary by its creators were it not for the massive piracy culture.
>>Do not run to the police for somebody trespassing on your lawn when you are a serial killer/robber.
>But do run to the police if, while trespassing, you see a murder.
Not analagous. In the scenario under discussion, thieves are upset that somebody installed a tawdry bit of code to catch them. The persons doing the worst bit were the thieves and not the people trying to stop the thieves.
>>STOP PIRATING OTHER PEOPLE'S STUFF. Become a civilized human being.
>These are not connected.
They are absolutely connected. A society where people feel free to steal anything they want (and in this case something as un-critical as a GAME), simply because they want it and do not want to pay for it (not because they are in extreme poverty and need it to live, like food water or medicine) and who then help an unlimited number of others to the ill-gotten goods is a society that is in danger of crumbling. Civilization requires that most people play by a set of rules for commerce, and if some will flout those rules and get away with it long enough that the masses start to see no reason why they too should not steal everything they want, civilization is put at hazard.
>>The only reason normal users of tech are continually facing DRM and other garbage is that people like these whining crybaby jerks are stealing stuff.
>That's not the case. If nothing else, normal users of tech historically paid a certain amount for software and used a certain amount of software and those amounts were never the same.
>But apart from that, software copyright infringement does not justify rootkits, system damaging DRM or indeed, hacking peoples passwords.
Your answer is meaningless. There was a time in the computing world where people were not passing out tens of thousands of stolen copies of a program. The floppy disk era made it easier to pass hacked programs around, and software vendors started to realize how much money they were losing to "sneaker net" piracy, so they added in various disk-based protections. Fast forward to the internet era and we see all sorts of schemes to protect revenues from piracy, each adding another annoyance to legitimate honest users. If a piece of code is not worth buying then do not prove it has value to you by going to the effort to steal it. You don't get to have it both ways - either it's not valuable it or it is. You do not get to go to Elon Musk and say "golly, I love that Tesla, but it's only worth $5 so stand back and let me steal it" (oh, and then fail to even pay the lower price you claimed it might be worth).
I hate DRM and rootkits, but in a world full of amoral j
If that's why they are forcing W10 down people's throats it's a stupid idea. Internet is more resilient to mass infection when it is made up of a mix of operating systems and versions. If everyone is running W10 then one little email worm could bring down the whole shit show.
Correct. They didn't steal shit. They exfiltrated it. Illegally.
No sympathy here. Some of these flightsim developers have some of the most absurd anti-piracy practices and forum rule requirements which would make privacy advocates head spin *cough* PMDG *cough*. Complain and they ban you. It's almost as bad as some of these HAM software tool developers who ban you from ever using their software again for saying anything bad about them.
Don't steal.
I agree with everything you said... minus that. I don't like seeing copyright infringement described as stealing.
But you see copying passwords as stealing? Odd.
Of course news about a fake are Fake News.
I'm not sure about your baby day care institutions. Even if these institutions accomplish lower recidivism levels in former inmates that yours do, they're still prisons. And Greece is the Florida of Europe anyway. They won't be as progressive as you might think. They were running notorious prison islands as late as in the 1970s.
Ezekiel 23:20
Anti-piracy measures work to turn the last category into sales, but don't help your bottom line for any of the other things. These people are the only ones where piracy hurts sales, but they're a minority (at least according to the academic studies that I've read). The big problem for most companies in these markets is that they regard reducing piracy as a goal, when their aim should be to increase sales. Would you rather sell 1,000 copies and have no pirates, or sell a million copies and have ten million pirated versions in circulation? The music industry finally learned this, and saw a big increase in sales once they allowed Apple and Amazon to sell DRM-free downloads.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
I'm not sure about software, but a Harvard study a few years ago found a strong correlation between music purchase and music piracy: i.e. the people that pirated the most music also bought the most music.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Putting words in peoples' mouths? Odd.
Of course that isn't theft. The name is catchy and a lot easier to say than what it technically is. Catchy names stick. Theft has a legal meaning, and to call copyright infringement theft just further muddies up the conversation.
They haven't stolen any passwords. They have most certainly committed some form of fraud. You will not see them charged with theft. Just like a copyright infringement case isn't brought as theft.
Just because my argument is simply insisting on using the correct words doesn't mean it's no problem. That's disingenuous of you to claim.
Only to the illiterate. Please go educate yourself. We've got enough of you dragging down our average IQ.
specifically harvest bank info and use it to transfer funds equal to the purchase price to my company. Plus any applicable taxes. Then I'd send them an email telling them not to worry, we corrected the accounting oversight that resulted in them ending up with a bad serial number. Oh, and that as a courtesy we waived the service fee. What service fee you ask? It doesn't matter, we waived it. Stop worrying so much.
If you stole a TV set from Walmart and told the cops you were going to go back and pay for it later if you liked it you wouldn't get much sympathy... Don't steal.
Except in this case walmart still have their TV and when they do sell it (a copy of it at least) they can still spin off and sell essentially infinitely more copies with next to no additional production cost.
I don't really disagree with what you're saying but don't label illegal copying as stealing because while similar on the surface they really aren't the same thing.
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Breached isn't an anything word for theft.
Wanna buy a shirt?
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(though the most recent one by the EU found that cinema sales in the first week of a summer blockbuster release were the exception).
You mean the things that make hundreds of millions in a weekend? Cry me a river.
Wanna buy a shirt?
https://www.redbubble.com/people/stealthfinger/shop?asc=u
Putting words in peoples' mouths? Odd.
I wasn't commenting on your words, but on what you deliberately omitted to say. Even.
Of course news about a fake are Fake News.
There were two hypotheses regarding this that I remember. The first was that pirated copies make it easier for people to determine that the film is actually crap and so not worth paying money to see: if you know someone who has pirated it and they tell you to avoid it, you might. The second was that a load of people much prefer watching films at home, but will go to the cinema for a hyped thing if that's the only way of seeing it. I don't have much sympathy with either: depending on limited knowledge to sell a crappy product and imposing artificial scarcity on a particular distribution chain are not things that should be encouraged.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
There have been a bunch of studies that show that piracy doesn't harm sales
That's really an impossible thing to prove. I think there has been a lot of coincidental evidence with music that that might be the case but not with other formats unless I've missed it.
Music is different than movies or games though as you tend to listen to it many times over many years. A movie you may only watch once or twice, games, you'll probably play a lot to begin with, but once you've completed it, most won't go back to it. Music is probably re-consumed more than any other digital media and may be the exception. Fewer people are going to buy for a game they've played through- but music, due to the nature of how we consume it, someone might go back and buy.
Nonetheless, even if piracy HELPED sales- that doesn't change the fact that the rights of the owner of that digital media were violated. Someone illegally took their content without paying (without their consent).
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
I don't really disagree with what you're saying but don't label illegal copying as stealing because while similar on the surface they really aren't the same thing.
I won't disagree that there are subtle differences between the two; but it is still theft in my (and many people's) mind. You are "stealing" potential revenue from the company. The difference is the theft is intangible rather than tangible.
Whether you call it theft or not is semantics really; language interpretation.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
QAnon? Does the Q stand for quack?
I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.
Oh NO. Think of the REVENUE. gtfo corporate shill
I deliberately omitted saying that I see copying passwords as stealing? I think you over-thought that one, chief.
Right, identity "theft" is not theft at all, it is identity "fraud" but we love to mix up the words for things that hurt us. It's how some people got to label some speech "violent". By taking it up a notch with the wrong word we get people's attention.
If you have the ability to determine that a copy of your software is running under a false key, why not just render that copy of the software inoperable?
Oh, that's right. The company is run by a bunch of really smart, young, disruptive brogrammers who just had to prove that they swing the bigger dick.
This little bit of ego trip is going to cost them a lot, possibly even jail time for someone. Was it worth it? What did they achieve?
This is one reason why tech companies might want to rethink their hire-only-the-young mantras. Sometimes it's good to have mature adults around.
I deliberately omitted saying that I see copying passwords as stealing? I think you over-thought that one, chief.
And you didn't think at all, heh? Yeah, easier that way.
Of course news about a fake are Fake News.
Note to FlightSimLabs management: Just because you broke the law does not make it legal for your prison cellmate to assrape you.
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- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
That's disingenuous of you to claim.
I replied to your argument that you disagreed with the OP. If the only argument you had was with the word "stolen", then it was specious. I assume you intended something more substantial, and that's why I ASKED (see the question mark?) if you thought it was "no problem".
Didn't disagree with OP, just objected to incorrect word use.
I assumed your question mark was rhetorical. That's my bad. I apologize for assuming you were just being an ass.
You operate a lot off of assumption. Your poor life must be fraught with constant mistakes.
It's not semantics to say they are different. Words have meanings, and the underlying ideas are different.
You are only depriving them of potential profits if you would have purchased it
The logical conclusion of your argument is that borrowing a DVD from a friend to watch is stealing from the movie company.
Recording HBO films to your DVR unit is theft.
Renting a game from redbox is theft
That's just semantics. To those of us that really understand the issue know that you're depriving them of possible things, so it's still the same
Acting like they're different things just means you're playing word games
Gee, all tha talk and you still haven't said that copying passwords isn't stealing. Which is all it takes to prove me wrong. But I'm not because you can't do that, right?
Of course news about a fake are Fake News.
I thought that was implicit. Copying passwords is not stealing. You could call it hacking, unlawful access of a omputer system, invasion of privacy, hell- maybe even copyright infringement. Any use of said password would certainly be fraud. But no, copying a password is not stealing. You have deprived them of nothing. If the word stealing can be so malleable as to include the copying of something that someone owns, we may as well go all out and call it burglary. Password burglary. Even worse sounding.
In case I wasn't clear, I'll repeat it- copying a password is not stealing, any more than plagiarism is.
One thing is certain, getting raped in the asshole by other men in prison is an American thing, and it just doesn't happen in Europe.
There's something about the US prison industrial complex that turns men into flaming homosexuals who can't stop trying to ejaculate inside other men's assholes. There's also some dudes who actively seek it out and let everyone know their asshole is available, which is where "sagging" originated.
Sorry, saying it's actually burglary but stealing is the opposite of proving me wrong, it's going deeper in.
Of course news about a fake are Fake News.
No, it was demonstrating the absurdity of the argument to begin with.