I wish there was a centralized database of e.g. movies where you could legally buy any movie ever filmed, with subtitles in any language and get a DRM-free copy in a common format you could play anywhere. Sadly this is hardly possible given today laws.
Curiously enough some (or many?) countries have implemented a law requiring blank CD-R disks and USB thumb drives sellers to pay fixed royalty to a local copyright association (an MPAA-like entity) for every blank disk they sell because people can potentially use the disks to pirate copyrighted works.
It seems to me this should logically make disk-based piracy legal as we are already paying for it and the same principle could be used to legalize pirate websites (just charge ISPs who would include a "pirate subscription fee" in the connection cost) as the most user-friendly distribution channels.
Nevertheless piracy still is illegal although we pay for it while paying for the disks.
Another fun fact about how wacky the actual intellectual property system is is you can get sued even for doing what you could never suspect might be wrong from any point of view. Even when it's about hardware, not software. A friend of mine once bought a new iPhone (from an official distributor) and mailed it to his daughter living in another country (where iPhones also are widely available officially and are sold at approximately the same price) as a birthday gift - as a result the customs sued him for Apple intellectual property infringement.
Here people BUY pirated stuff, sometimes more expensive than the original.
The reason is convenience and good service.
When you buy pirated software and games from the street dealer, you get:
often, better support than the publisher (specially for popular software, you ask him what is bothering you, he probably memorized the solution and tells you, while publisher support often is completely null, Google-style)
easier to install (custom installers are popular in pirated stuff).
sometimes have better patches, for example games with custom patches to run in older versions of Windows, or that fix popular issues (like Dark Souls at launch had tons of problems on PC, pirated versions fixed it, or Final Fantasy XV, the pirated version runs faster than the legitimate one, some people speculate that is because Denuvo, or because the lack of Denuvo allowed better optimization settings during compile time).
Translated to portuguese.
Has manual! Yes, sometimes the original software is lacking manual, while because during ancient times pirated software had no printed manual, people would add short manuals as a read-me file, some pirates still do that, even for software that has no manual at all.
Regarding games, Valve realized all that and Steam helped a lot, but before Steam it was common here to people buy even stuff that was free (many piracy dealers sold linux distros and other FOSS stuff) because of the convenience.
EDIT: forgot a big one... pirated stuff you can pay for it.
Yes... as weird it sounds, sometimes people wanted to buy a something, but it wasn't available here, often due to a stupid combination of region restrictions + exclusive publishing deals, since we are in South America, sometimes stuff would get into a legal limbo, whoever had "America" rights would focus in publishing in the US, and would block whoever had Europe or JP rights from publishing here.
This sadly is still common, specially with books, Barnes & Noble is a company that greatly aggravated me on that, I bought, legally, a lot of books that were only available in my country on the store "Fictionwise", BN bought them and demand me to be physically in USA to download the books I bought...
Or Electronic Arts, that only allowed officially USA players on Ultima Online, leading to a vibrant pirated server community in Brazil, since you couldn't play legally here.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pFS3p0emftw - "Security awareness: Filmmaker explores RAT malware, buys access to random PCs for just 15 cents a piece - made short film about his experience"
Movies and other media files that don't run any scripts are ok if you're careful and know what you're doing, but installing pirated software is an invitation to get blackmailed and extored by darknet hackers.
Which is why you shouldn't believe everything you read.
By the way, this last sentence:
>Movies and other media files that don't run any scripts are ok if you're careful and know what you're doing, but installing pirated software is an invitation to get blackmailed and extored by darknet hackers.
Is entirely wrong. If you're worried about malware, you already know that it can come via video files as well as binary programs.
The rest of what you wrote is just spreading fear for notoriety's sake. Pirated software isn't an "invitation" to anything provided you have good anti-malware defenses and good security practices.
There is no such thing as good anti-malware defenses. Most of the antiviruses are 80% bullshit + 20% obsolete, yet asking for money and full-time administrator privileges and unrestricted Internet connection (doesn't that sound suspicious?). Besides patching vulnerabilities regularly, being very careful of what files&websites do you open is the only real protection… as long as you don't come in contact with a fresh exploit which doesn't need you to let them.
You prove my point for me. Good defenses doesn't consist of solely antimalware software. Defense in depth is needed, along with education and awareness of new vulnerabilities.
The sum total of things you do to keep your systems uninfected are your anti-malware defenses.
Like I get swapping dylibs, but not why that'd be best done by poking around in /System rather than the binary.
macappdownload dot com slash fix-damaged-app-message
macappdownload dot com slash how-to-disable-system-integrity-protection-in-macos
These guides are all over their websites, especially at the download stage, where there is a short list of 'download instructions' with a link to these guides.
A while back I read someone saying that these websites are owned by a Russian hacker network. Touch at your own risk.
These guides I linked to are there because when the software is being installed, it asks for these guides to be applied, to make the apps work. The modifications added to the cracked applications by the crackers take them off Apple's trusted developers list. So the only way to get some of them to work is to disable SIP and GateKeeper. This move then makes the user's computer vulnerable to all malware, because most forget to turn them back on. They also often don't know about the importance of these security features in the first place.
I am not concerned for your safety - I trust you will be safe. I am scared for the user I described above.
I hope this make it clearer.
I won't bother replying to more of your messages until you can show that you've actually tried this all out on a VM, because otherwise we just won't be talking about the same thing.
You could run the application in a VM without networking capabilities.
I also don't have a daughter, but I am Brazilian. Just adding a data point.
"What is a RAT (remote access Trojan)?
A remote access Trojan (RAT) is a malware program that includes a back door for administrative control over the target computer. RATs are usually downloaded invisibly with a user-requested program -- such as a game -- or sent as an email attachment. Once the host system is compromised, the intruder may use it to distribute RATs to other vulnerable computers and establish a botnet.
Because a RAT enables administrative control, it makes it possible for the intruder to do just about anything on the targeted computer, including:
- Deleting, downloading or altering files and file systems.
- Monitoring user behavior through keyloggers or other spyware.
- Accessing confidential information, such as credit card and social security numbers.
- Taking screenshots.
- Distributing viruses and other malware.
- Formatting drives."
Source: https://searchsecurity.techtarget.com/definition/RAT-remote-...
The video is unpirated in The Netherlands (VPRO is Dutch too).
For some reason they blocked it in the Netherlands. But if you're trying to watch it from outside of the Netherlands, it works great. I tried with a VPN.
Back when broadband was uncommon there were shops where you could just order anything that could be found on the Internet and they would burn a CD-R for you. They would keep the most popular files cached locally, and for the really popular stuff they would have pre-burned CDs in small kits with a xeroxed manual and maybe a colored cover and the like. Support was a big thing too, and community: it was a place where people would hang out a bit and talk to other people, share recommendations, meet people who could fix equipment, etc.
So if you ordered a Linux distro they would prepare it for you just like any software, VCD, disk full of MP3s, etc. I know of people who were introduced to Linux via these shops.
There used to be an earlier version of this sort of shop where you could bring floppy disks and they would copy them for you. As far as I know all of this has just about disappeared. Piracy exists but it is nowhere near as popular as it used to be.
What those shops basically sold was bandwidth: it was a physical version of pirate BBSs and w4r3z websites, from a time when phone and Internet access was harder to have.
The fucked up part is that these fees still exist today when it is generally not possible to easily create private copies due to DRM. I can only assume that politicians who signed of and keep supporting on these laws are either bribed or brain dead.
E.g. CopySwede(https://www.copyswede.se/in-english/undersida-in-english/the...) is the Swedish lobbying organization which collects and lobbies for the fees in Sweden.
that is exactly what brought me back to piracy. I am not a heavy downloader, and I would welcome a legal way of accessing films paying a reasonable fee. I thought Netflix had (partially) fixed it, but I happen to live abroad and I can't access films in my native language. Not even subtitles, and sometimes not even in English. This is so stupid and frustrating, and it's entirely the fault of the film industry. Torrents here I come.
We have that over here. Said taxes also apply to hard drives, iPhones internal storage, etc
BUT it isn't meant to compensate for illegal downloads (the music & film industry tried, but I believe it was the EU that told them that was illegal). It's supposed to compensate for the supposed loss occurred from people's right to make private copies of legally obtained copyrighted materials.
It's whacked and non-sensical, but still. We are after all the country where you have to pay artists copyright associations for playing copyleft music in your shop.
The idea is that the private copy exemption is lowering sales, and this tax balance these sales. Doesn’t make a lot of sense (who was buying several copies of the same vinyl or book?) but that’s the letter of the law.
Of course it’s at the same time illegal to break DRM so you are entitled to rip DVDs /bluray to your computer for convenience but it’s illegal to do it with most disc because you would need to break the DRM.
So, the tax officially doesn’t aim at compensating piracy. It’s a legal technicality because yes, the initial spirit was to levy a tax on illegal copying, but without encouraging it (“I already paid!”) or creating a global licence.
Why are you meant to compensate anybody for your rights? Why not compensate potential robbers for outlawing robberies then? They could be more rich and happy if the law didn't acknowledge your right for physical safety and private property protection.
Then there are a number of exceptions where blanket permission to copy is granted in return for some financial compensation for the creators.
Where all of this goes wrong is that there is not a clear legal framework how creators should receive money and especially how much they should get.
As somebody buying blank media, how the creators are compensated is not really an issue, but the total amount of money that gets collected is.
In particular, the money is meant to compensate for legal copies under the relavant section of the copyright law.
For example, essentially nobody makes legal copies of copyrighted material to DVD-R. You cannot legally copy DVDs, so the money should compensate for music files, analog video tapes, televsion, scans of paper books, etc. That happens so little that there should not be an additional tax in DVD-R
Depends on the country. In some places downloading is legal, only uploading is illegal. Also, the disk-based fee you mention does allow you to give away copies to friends and family for free in some countries.
In theory this would be a major win for the content creator. 100% revenue going directly to them with no overhead for distribution, infinitely scalable (to stress: _in theory_, I am aware that this would play out differently in practice).
As for efficiency (no overhead for distribution etc) I don't really understand why do companies waste resources on technical measures of copyright protection in the first place. Almost every program which is even slightly popular has a crack/keygen anyway, almost every movie is ripped anyway, business users (pirating is more dangerous for them + they often need support) pay anyway (even if the activation form would accept any random string for serial), most of the users who download pirate copies would not buy a legal one (usually because it's hard for them to afford it) anyway (and that's how software like MS Windows and Office monopolize markets in developing countries where everybody just uses a pirate copy). So why to invest so much resources in DRMs, activation, genuine disks etc?
It's not about making sure its never cracked, it's about delaying the crack long enough to make money. Most video games and home movies make the majority of their profits in the weeks to months of release.
There are plenty of people who aren't opposed to paying for software, but they don't have any issues with using a cracked copy either. They just want to play the latest game in their favorite series as quickly and easily as possible. If you can delay the release of pirated copies and make using them inconvenient to use these people are more likely to buy a legit copy.
Are you really fulfilling your duty if you just buy content with a poor user experience without letting those who you pay know how bad it is? Would they know or have any incentive to fix the system if everybody bought things and still pirated them?
This baffles me, especially for Netflix original content. Is it because they think the UI would get cluttered?
I used sci-hub during my last year in school, but it was only just starting. It was far easier to use, plus I didn't have to compile a list of papers to fetch and wait until the next day to retrieve them.
And editorship is highly variable, even at the highest end. I remember catching an article in Nature where two curves in separate panes were clearly copy-pasted yet claimed to be different conditions in the legend.
I don't know how well funded your university is—some are so much so as to make the caveat I'm about to mention a bit silly—but, for many reasonably funded universities, a statement like yours has to be qualified with "I have access for now …". Publishers can, and do, up their prices unreasonably at any time, and, at my university, I always have to assume that the access I've got today might disappear with a greedy price grab by the publisher tomorrow.
(I can sort of see the idea of making a price grab and then not having access to future articles, but having _no_ access even to past articles is a horror scenario)
javascript:window.location='https://sci-hub.tw/'+window.location
I'm trying to understand what you disagree with in the article. If anything, it complements sci-hub's "alleged seamlessness."
Sci-Hub, more so than RG, therefore seems to have a greater potential for disrupting the current order of things and poses a significant threat to publishers and librarians, who cling to the mistaken belief that the key to Sci-Hub’s success is its alleged seamlessness (a single sign-on), which if they can replicate will go away.
The author is arguing that seamlessness is not Sci-Hub's only advantage versus traditional channels, but that "Much of the growth of Sci-Hub is therefore ideological", "publishers are seen as the enemy, whose greediness erects unnecessary barriers, thereby obstructing the advancement of science" and that "Sci-Hub is seen as a ‘Robin Hood’ figure"
That seemed to agree with the bulk of the article, even if they also liked the UX better. The article doesn't say it isn't better, it just says that the UX isn't the primary reason most researchers are using it. That seems to jive with OP.
Complement means when two things go well together.
Nevertheless, I prefer this platform because I disagree with the publishing model of most publishers. Let's not get into the details here, but there is all kinds of shoddy editorship happening all over the place---I have seen at least one blatant case of plagiarism in an Elsevier journal: no one cares. I have experienced very strange 'reformatting' queries; my highlight being a journal that forces you to convert your lovingly-crafted vector graphs into JPG just 'because'.
On top of all that, add the fact that the interface of many publishers is egregiously bad to use. It takes a lot of clicks to download a single PDF, often opening multiple windows for that purpose or redirecting you a few times. Sci-Hub streamlined this process: you put in a DOI, and you get a PDF. Not an ePDF that is super laggy (looking at you, Wiley!), but a normal PDF that I can download, annotate, print, decorate my wall with.
Thus, I disagree with the article: the single minimalist interface is definitely something that contributes to Sci-Hub's popularity.