When I was a student in engineer school in France, I had access to a lot of paper through our school subscription. I was still using Sci-Hub all the time because just copy-pasting a DOI or a paper title and getting the PDF was so much better than all the other website which had all clunky and broken login procedure, and god awful UI/UX (understanding how to download the PDF was sometimes more of a challenge than understanding the paper itself...).
That's a well-known issue: legal channels usually are ess convenient to use. That's why it often makes sense to download and use a pirated copy of a game/movie/ebook/whatever after you buy it: you both fulfill your duty and enjoy nice UX then. In case of movies, games and software sticking with a legal channel often also means you can't get it in a language you want because a particular company has an exclusive license to distribute it in your country and it would only distribute a 100% localized version (AFAIK even Netflix would only give you a choice of a small number of languages relevant to your country rather than all the languages they have actually translated a particular movie to) or offer an English version at a price higher than that of a localized version. Many old (yet still copyrighted) books also are only available as pirate scans.
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.
Ok you might want to watch this short documentary. Your fun 'pirated' games and software with 'better support' might cost you dearly when your daughter or your girlfriend/wife gets filmed by a hacker, using your own webcam.
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.
The Adwind Remote Access Trojan typically spreads by phishing e-mails.
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.
>There is no such thing as good anti-malware defenses.
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.
Dangerous for Windows maybe? Most cracked OS X apps make you disable Gatekeeper or System Integry Protection. Game over. So yes, to me that is an invititation.
Any examples of something that requires disabling SIP in cracked version and not original? Never heard of it, sounds implausible but then I'm hardly up to speed.
Like I get swapping dylibs, but not why that'd be best done by poking around in /System rather than the binary.
Both 'appked' and 'macbed' websites have guides for disabling both Gatekeepr and SIP (now they are derivative websites because the domains keep getting banned/confiscated):
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.
My question was "Any examples of something that requires disabling SIP in cracked version and not original?", this (while certainly possibly relevant) is not an answer to that.
To me this is an answer. I think somehow you're not understanding what I am implying.
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.
Off course gatekeeper needs to be off once something doesn't have a valid signature.
But SIP protects /System, NVRAM, kext loading and some additional stuff. Not user app signatures. Hence my question.
Even without disabling Gatekeeper and SIP it is possible to insert malicious code into the OS somewhere because of full read and write access to the home directory and what not.
You could run the application in a VM without networking capabilities.
Your keyboard is an input device. That is what I am talking about. I am saying that with a Remote Access Trojan, they can do much more than access your mic or webcam.
"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.
As long as I'm online, I'm sure any well-informed techie could, at any point, show me how my computer usage is insecure. At some point, I must stop securing stuff and start working. I'm just a regular user running Debian with firewall enabled on a desktop machine. That's enough for me. I won't use the internet via email like Richard Stallman.
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.
Just for the record, for the most part, it should be legal to sell CD's of most Linux distributions, assuming you honor the GPL and any other licenses for any software that's physically on the disk.
I'm a bit familiar with the sorts of commerce that the parent mentioned.
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 "copying fees" on storage (this includes harddrives/SSDs, phones, CD/DVD/BD or pretty much any storage medium in some countries) is actually a fee for "private copying" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_copying_levy) not pirate copying. Historically these fees were introduces with cassettes as it was possible to obtain private copies by recording radio broadcasts and by copying a cassette. I suppose it did make sense 40 year ago as private copies of e.g. songs wasn't usual before cassettes.
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.
> In case of movies, games and software sticking with a legal channel often also means you can't get it in a language you want because a particular company has an exclusive license to distribute it in your country
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.
> 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.
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.
In France the tax on storage media (Including SSD, DVD-R, smartphones themselves, SD cards, everything) is officially a way to compensate rights holders for the legal right to make private copies (usable only with close family and relatives).
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.
> In France the tax on storage media (Including SSD, DVD-R, smartphones themselves, SD cards, everything) is officially a way to compensate rights holders for the legal right to make private copies (usable only with close family and relatives).
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.
The way it works in Europe, is that copyright is implicit: you create something, you get copyright. With copyright you get to control who can copy your work. Copyright is more seen as a natural right then as a law that has an economic purpose.
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
> Nevertheless piracy still is illegal although we pay for it while paying for the disks.
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.
On a related note, I haven't seen any publisher or content producer sell "licence only" i.e. I pay them for the right to be able to own/view the content. This could either be a "buy direct, acquire elsewhere" or "pirate first, pay later".
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).
Microsoft (via a very respectable local retailer) used to sell Office keys which I could only use with Office OPK ISO I could only find available for download on ThePirateBay.
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?
I'm under the impression that massive investment in DRM is more of a way to satisfy tech and (pirate) culture-illiterate humans while making deals for content. Even Steam needed to nominally do something and Gaben's position on piracy/drm is very well-known.
>Almost every program which is even slightly popular has a crack/keygen anyway.
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.
> That's why it often makes sense to download and use a pirated copy of a game/movie/ebook/whatever after you buy it: you both fulfill your duty and enjoy nice UX then.
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?
If that's their concern, maybe they could free up space by not constantly recommending to me things that I've already watched and rated on their platform.
I'm constantly turning my Netflix profile language to Korean so that I can get Korean subtitles for my wife. It's an annoying workaround, but it often works.
When I was a student in physics, the campus network didn't extend to the student housing or off-site students, meaning you had to be on campus or in the library to access the portals to get papers.
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.
