Vigilante helping the big corporation profits in the fight against poor people and just generally annoying
The villain we don't want or need
Newly discovered Vigilante malware outs software pirates and blocks them
111–120 of 126 posts
Re: Newly discovered Vigilante malware outs software pirates and blocks them
#112Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are cheaper alternatives, such as Affinity Designer, Sketch, etc, depending on your use case. As others have mentioned, even if you pirate adobe, by using their products you reinforce the influence adobe has. Now as far as I know, there aren't any -good- film editing alternatives that are free. I have tried a fair few open source alternatives and they are pitiful compared to adobe premiere. So while I can't rec…
> there aren't any -good- film editing alternatives that are free I've only used it for fairly basic work, but DaVinci Resolve[1] seems pretty good. Not open source, but the free version is licenced for commercial use and AFAICT it seems to have a fairly complete feature set. I suspect it would be sufficient for many use cases. [1] https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/uk/products/davinciresolve/...
Resolve is fantastic, the only thing absent in the free version that really affects me is the lack of GPU support, but I'd gladly pay if my usage increased to the point where it got in my way.
Re: Newly discovered Vigilante malware outs software pirates and blocks them
#113Earlier quoted context omitted.
A better analogy would be making yourself an exact duplicate of a Gibson guitar, at home with a 3D printer. I'm not sure that should be illegal, at least if you take the trademark off it.
Yeah, it wasn't a very good analogy. It's hard to compare duplication like this to real world things like theft. Regardless, merely desiring something is not a justification to pirate things.
> Regardless, merely desiring something is not a justification to pirate things.
People also use sci-hub do avoid paying to publishers. Where do you draw a line?
Re: Newly discovered Vigilante malware outs software pirates and blocks them
#114Earlier quoted context omitted.
It the people truly can't afford the games (and wouldn't buy them at all if they didn't have the option to pirate), is there really any harm from their piracy? Steam has it mostly figured out, though. Look at SteamDB at international prices and you'll discover that prices in Brazil or Russia are often a fraction of the US/EU price. Turns out selling the game for dirt cheap makes more money than not selling it.
"It the people truly can't afford the games (and wouldn't buy them at all if they didn't have the option to pirate), is there really any harm from their piracy?" I would say it's still unethical and wrong, regardless if we can't point to a specific entity being hurt. It is entitlement to want something for free when one can't afford it. There are -so- many games nowadays, and many of them are not even close to $60. A…
> And I would argue accepting or condoning pro-piracy attitudes is harmful in the long run versus accepting that one can't just take things that one wants, and paying for things when able.
Top AAA makers also get incredibly high profits while underpaying their employees. And the prices on their games go up simply because they can.
Re: Newly discovered Vigilante malware outs software pirates and blocks them
#115Magnet here to a sample, I think this will work -
magnet:?xt=urn:btih:55c4d5de85b8f4509f3fd99a1d32fc9d59688281 (Malware duh)
> “Padding it out with racist slurs told me all I needed to know about its creator.”
It was " nigger". I think there's a lot to tell, like it's not a company or a Western agency.
Others can look deeper, but maybe there's more to it than blocking pirate sites. That could be a red herring. Stopping people going back to the torrent sites, stops bad reviews and people reading comments.
Currently hundreds of new torrents are being created. Many seed dead, I assume to pollute results. One had the padding changed to rubbish instead. Could still be one person (who doesn't like Ali-TPB for instance)
Re: Newly discovered Vigilante malware outs software pirates and blocks them
#116Earlier 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…
> 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.
Very interesting analysis. I was inclined to doubt it so I checked and you are absolutely right: Adobe does indeed have a Photoshop + Lightroom bundle [0] that costs ~$10/month or $119.88/yr, such that it comes to $720 over a six-year period.
[0] https://www.adobe.com/products/photoshop-lightroom/pricing-i...
Re: Newly discovered Vigilante malware outs software pirates and blocks them
#117Earlier 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.
Pirating Adobe tools = training people in their usage. Their job will then pay for Adobe, as they already know it. If you want to hurt Adobe, advocate not pirating them and point users to alternatives
Yup. Never pirate. Use alternatives.
Re: Newly discovered Vigilante malware outs software pirates and blocks them
#118Earlier quoted context omitted.
> there aren't any -good- film editing alternatives that are free I've only used it for fairly basic work, but DaVinci Resolve[1] seems pretty good. Not open source, but the free version is licenced for commercial use and AFAICT it seems to have a fairly complete feature set. I suspect it would be sufficient for many use cases. [1] https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/uk/products/davinciresolve/...
Resolve is fantastic, the only thing absent in the free version that really affects me is the lack of GPU support, but I'd gladly pay if my usage increased to the point where it got in my way.
I'm pretty sure the non-studio version uses the GPU for most things (in fact Resolve doesn't work at all without a GPU supporting one of the three compute APIs), it does not, however, support encoding or decoding on the GPU. This is rather noticeable when working with h.264 source material. "Real pros" wouldn't be bothered much by this, because they'd be using post production / intermediate codecs which are fast to decode, while also not needing to produce h.264 deliverables. "Real pros" might be bothered by the free version only doing Ultra HD and not (DCI) 4K.
Resolve is probably one of the software packages with the most intelligent free / paid feature split out there. The free version is really, really good and has almost no limitations, but professionals will want the paid version to get the last few percent out of it.
There's a little bit of a learning curve to Resolve for casual use, but since Resolve 16 has gotten the "cut" page the learning curve has been flattened quite a lot I'd say. Overall it's fantastic software.
Re: Newly discovered Vigilante malware outs software pirates and blocks them
#119Are 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…
Just to clarify, I am not advocating piracy. Never pirate. It is a shitty thing to do. Use alternatives or save up and buy the tool that will help your career.
Re: Newly discovered Vigilante malware outs software pirates and blocks them
#120Earlier quoted context omitted.
Apple is grooming high value consumers. If your product targets those consumers, piracy does not matter, because they are well behaved carefully selected to buy your product at a price point that makes your product profitable even with the apple cut. It's the living proof that you can pay for your product and still be the product and be happy about it.
I think this analysis is fairly shallow. A lot of people pirate things not because they cannot afford the actual thing, but because they can . Furthermore, over the years the percentage of paid apps on the App Store has decreased. What this means is that the opposite of what you claim is true: iOS users have been trained to prefer free things.
> Furthermore, over the years the percentage of paid apps on the App Store has decreased. What this means is that the opposite of what you claim is true: iOS users have been trained to prefer free things.
I'm not so sure that it is as clear-cut as you describe. Over the same time period, the total number of free and paid apps on the App Store has increased. To arrive at a reasonable understanding of the effects of free apps, we will need to plot the ratio of paid-to-free apps to see if the ratio has been steadily declining, has stayed roughly the same, or has been increasing, on a year-to-year basis.