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Newly discovered Vigilante malware outs software pirates and blocks them

arstechnica.com

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

#91

Post by sslalready »

vsareto wrote: post #5

lmfao. Imagine being good enough to code malware that does this and wasting your efforts on something like this. Look, if you have skills like these, you're special. Don't fucking waste it on building malware for corporate asshats.

I think GOBBLES pioneered this technique in like 1992 A.D. with their “Hydra”. Iirc it was claimed to exploit (jinglebellz.c) .mp3 players on behalf of the RIAA and to spread through file sharing networks. https://www.theregister.com/2003/01/14/is_the_riaa_hacking_y...

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

#92

Post by rossjudson »

bscphil wrote: post #48
underseacables wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 p…

I'm looking at Presonus Sphere, and at $15/month it doesn't seem like nickel-and-diming to me. What it seems like is a chance to make sure some pretty expensive software works for me, and to stay current with everything, for as long as I feel like using it.

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

#93

Post by akiselev »

judge2020 wrote: post #35
eric__cartman wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would take that as a list of 82 sites to avoid when looking for pirated software.

It's mainly a list of pirate bay sites and proxies. Why would their inclusion in this blocklist be a reason to avoid them?

That list of URLs is the torrent tracker equivalent of blog spam. It contains none of the big private trackers that are trivial to join or the big public ones like rutracker or rarbg

There's an entire wikipedia article listing them! [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_BitTorrent_sites

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

#94

Post by serf »

marcosdumay wrote: post #74
na85 wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Do you think this was backed by companies? Frankly I'd be shocked if it wasn't.

There are all kinds of crazy people out there. There could easily be somebody with a burning desire to fight IP piracy.

>There could easily be somebody with a burning desire to fight IP piracy.

It could be some kind of Robinhood vigilante figure, but that's a hard sell for me given the already-known abusive history and tactics of the game industry.

Here's another hard sell : it's the TPB people releasing it in an effort to reduce their hosting costs. (It's not, but since we're throwing everything at the wall to see what sticks, why not?)

Many of these video game groups write root-kit style DRM mechanisms for a living; given the (shady) history & experience at the task, it's not a far leap to assume that one of these groups would irresponsibly combine the efforts, if given enough legal ambiguity and a long enough paper-trail to make legal harassment separated from the major group.

Personal anecdote : it's often talked about within game-cheating circles that mega-game groups actually take part in the ownership and funding of groups that sell third-party 'cheating' software. This new virus-writing behavior wouldn't surprise me in the least.

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

#95

Post by Zababa »

andrewzah wrote: post #78
NikolaNovak wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"If I don't have to pay for it then their work was objectively unproductive. It's an inherent failure of market economics" I feel I'm reading Deepak Chopra - individual words are fine and you'd swear sentence should make sense... But it doesn't, no matter how many times you read it. Not paying for something makes it unproductive? And you don't feel there are easy trivial immediate counter-examples for your axiom with…

I'm not sure what you've quoted, because that is -not- what I said. People should be paid for their work. Pirating doesn't pay them for their work. Work includes art and media. I'm not sure how I can state this more simply. I'm not sure why this is even a complicated topic. With literally everything else, if you want something, you need to pay to acquire it because it took time and resources to make. That doesn't go…

> With literally everything else, if you want something, you need to pay to acquire it because it took time and resources to make. That doesn't go away just because the end product is digital.

The thing is that making a copy of something digital is really really cheap compared to something physical. The difference between the cost of producing one copy of a software or music and a million is way lower than for a physical object.

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

#96

Post by privacyking »

gjsman-1000 wrote: post #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 isn't hard on iOS devices though. You don't even need to root/jailbreak.

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

#98

Post by gjsman-1000 »

privacyking wrote: post #96
gjsman-1000 wrote: post #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 isn't hard on iOS devices though. You don't even need to root/jailbreak.

Ah... it doesn't allow installing apps outside of the App Store. If I named an app that is paid on the App Store, you will find it nearly impossible to run it on an iOS device without a jailbreak... or even with a jailbreak.

Also "root" is Android terminology.

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

#100

Post by kalium-xyz »

pault wrote: post #32
knz_ wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It's not as if you're obligated to buy their products, therefore need to find a less expensive workaround. If you don't like the people producing them and think they're overpriced, play dwarf fortress or watch TV. There are some obviously valid reasons for pirating, but I don't understand this sense of entitlement.

TV aint free. Worst yet if the Funimation and others fully got their way with the claims they do I would not be able to watch the shows I did in Japan here in Europe. Not because funimation is showing them here and I dont want to pay for them but cause they own the US rights and will take down any online source with no european broadcaster sending them out.
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