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Newly discovered Vigilante malware outs software pirates and blocks them

arstechnica.com

41–50 of 126 posts

Re: Newly discovered Vigilante malware outs software pirates and blocks them

#41
I’ve been sailing the high seas of illegal downloading since I can remember. Back in the days simply because I couldn’t afford it or wasn’t allowed to buy it. Nowadays it’s only TV shows.

Anyway, writing something to a HOST file is not that incredible… regarding the motive, that might as well be a troll, or an attempt to drive traffic to private trackers.

Re: Newly discovered Vigilante malware outs software pirates and blocks them

#43
When developers complain about the walled garden, something that they often forget to factor in is how hard piracy is on iOS and other locked down devices. If iOS was open, how much of a revenue drop would developers receive? I don’t know what it is, but it is not like the devs are going to get 25% more money by bypassing Apple’s commission.

If you open the iPhone, yay, you don’t pay the Apple tax, but now you’ve got piracy that wasn’t there. You replaced Apple tax with Pirate tax.

For the record, I still support unlocking iPhones and other such devices. I’m just in doubt that removing Apple 30% cut = 25% more money after credit card fees. Maybe 5-10% more money if any?

If I was a smaller developer making less than a million a year and only paying the 15% commission (or 10% after credit cards) I might find myself wanting Epic and other unlock attempts to fail, for fear the pirates will be worse than Apple’s cut.

Re: Newly discovered Vigilante malware outs software pirates and blocks them

#44
post #28

Its bamboozling that in this new age of 'deplatforming', that video and game entertainment companies have not pushed ISPs, nations, or tech companies harder to deplatform torrent sites. It would yield pretty major benefits for minor effort. Its also strange that people are willing to spend $thousands on a gaming PC, and then risk their entire device to malware just to save a couple bucks on games.

Saving money is not the only reason to pirate content. Some things aren’t available in my region and never will be (as they are 20+ years old). Some things are presented via a crap app, in dubious formats or with truely horrible DRM. I pirate plenty of shows that I have legal access to or own.

The way I see it piracy is mostly a UX problem.

Often the UX of pirating a thing is easier than legally acquiring it.

Maybe not true for AAA games, but def true for most movies/series.

If your outside of the US, often a lot of content isn’t even available because of shitty geo licensing

Re: Newly discovered Vigilante malware outs software pirates and blocks them

#46
post #38

I am against piracy on principle. All of my employers know how hard I work to protect their IP.

What principle might that be?

IP is incredibly important and we must all protect it at all cost. My wage and health are nothing compared to the employers' properties and wealth. I would die for them.

Re: Newly discovered Vigilante malware outs software pirates and blocks them

#47
post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What principle might that be?

IP is incredibly important and we must all protect it at all cost. My wage and health are nothing compared to the employers' properties and wealth. I would die for them.

Then don't buy media. But don't pirate it either.

Media takes money and lots of man-hours of people working in order to produce things. They, too, need to get paid, regardless of whatever principles you hold personally.

edit: kindly stop shadow-editing comments. Your comment is completely different now from the one that I replied to.

Re: Newly discovered Vigilante malware outs software pirates and blocks them

#48
post #10

Are people still pirating software? Apart from kids trying out software, people from countries where the product is not officially available or is exhorbitantly priced as compared to their purchasing power, I doubt there is a reason to pirate. Most tools have alternatives available or an easy on the pocket subscription plan (Adobe is an exception, subscription plans should not come with a lock-in, no matter how you j…

Adobe products are really the only software I advocate pirating. There’s a lot of great software out there and we should pay for it, but some companies have just turned to greed and screwing over customers.

Just the other day, I was talking about the difficulty of monetizing an app I wanted to build with my partner. We agreed that the app had an extremely small target audience - university types for whom the app would provide hundreds of dollars of value a year (paid out of their grants, not their salary). The problem is that absolutely no one pays >= $100 for a phone app.

Adobe was in the same situation years ago. It provided products generating thousands of dollars in value a year for professionals and the corporate world. Photoshop CS6 cost $700, the version of it for "students" $250. This put it well out of the budget range of most ordinary people. Photoshop was built for a relatively small target audience. You might argue that piracy was the normal, expected solution to this. The "real" customers were supposed to pay for it. Either way, this generated a lot of ill will toward Adobe and turned pirating Photoshop into a bit of a meme.

That changed when Adobe realized you could nickle and dime people out of the same amount of money in the long run. The photography subscription (Photoshop + Lightroom) costs $720 over six years. Given that Adobe offered upgrade promotions (e.g. CS5 to CS6) for about half off, it's roughly the same price as it was before. This approach makes it much more palatable to the average consumer (for the same reason that people are willing to buy sofas on payment plans). The only people this pisses off are a handful of hardcore users who expect to "own" all the software they use, but probably not the corporate world which is used to paying subscriptions. It almost certainly makes them far more money through making the software available to those who can't (or won't) pay the one-time price.

Re: Newly discovered Vigilante malware outs software pirates and blocks them

#49
post #30
post #10

Are people still pirating software? Apart from kids trying out software, people from countries where the product is not officially available or is exhorbitantly priced as compared to their purchasing power, I doubt there is a reason to pirate. Most tools have alternatives available or an easy on the pocket subscription plan (Adobe is an exception, subscription plans should not come with a lock-in, no matter how you j…

I pirate everything. Honestly, the only things I don't pirate are like 1-2 games a year that me and some friends end up playing together. For software I generally just run whatever FOSS thing I can find, and in the case of movies and music I have never spent a cent on them in my life. I've been pirating since I started using a computer. The same rich people trying to sell predatory subscriptions and vendor lock-in ar…

You realize that actual people work on those things that you pirate, right? That those people also need to get paid so they can have food on the table? It's one thing to not buy any media at all, but it's contradictory to enjoy media produced by people and then not want to pay them. Their work isn't less valuable because it's related to media production instead of engineering or whatever.

Re: Newly discovered Vigilante malware outs software pirates and blocks them

#50
post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What principle might that be?

IP is incredibly important and we must all protect it at all cost. My wage and health are nothing compared to the employers' properties and wealth. I would die for them.

I will die with a smug grin on my face that I did not waste time watching ads on TV since I was 22 or so.
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