With the recent changes software companies are being told they can’t produce software that would let consumers make copies of the DVD’s they’ve already purchased. You might think that makes sense, but have you ever copied a CD so you and your spouse, or kids could listen to the same CD in each of your cars or one for the car, one for the house?

If I had an easy way to do it, I’d make copies of all of my DVD’s and keep the originals stored on a bookshelf like I keep books. When the kids wanted to watch a DVD, they’d pull out the copy of the DVD to use. Then, when they forgot to put it back in the case and it got kicked under the entertainment center, I wouldn’t worry about it getting scratched.

My real dream would be to somewhat of a media jukebox distributed throughout my house. I’d love to burn all of our music and DVD’s into a single computer and storage network and be able to access the files from any TV, audio device or computer from anywhere in the house.

With these recent changes I’d be breaking the law. It seems to me that once I purchase a DVD or CD, that I should be able to do pretty much whatever I want with it except for distributing it outside of my own home or personal property. Nope. I’m a felon instead.

Post from: EveryJoe

Fair Use Just Isn’t Fair Anymore

Post from: EveryJoe

The Pirate Bay Trial Begins

Read the Symantec Report on the Underground Economy or listen to the corresponding Symantec podcast by Zulfikar Ramzan, the Security Technology & Response Technical Director.

Symantec estimates the value of total advertised goods on the underground servers as up to $276 Million and this figure is from only the underground they had access to. Mr. Ramzan said in the podcast how the actual size is extremely tough to estimate, what with the smartest of the criminals remaining in the underground of underground.

It is alarming and interesting to see how the underground economy functions, in ways similar to any other economy. The trends, I believe, will remain upward because cybercrime is still in its infancy even though there are already malicious but very smart people out there.

A person without any knowledge about cybercrime could start by getting access to any of the malicious tools like the Attack toolkits and Keystroke loggers. However, there are specialized roles within cybercrime each of which can’t be done by just about anybody.

Once goods or information are stolen, they are advertised, sold and resold.

Pirated softwares include desktop games, multimedia software, business software suites and OSs. Some of them could be offered for free to establish their credibility, but those with greater consumer demand are also often attached with malwares. The pricing of pirated goods is often proportional to identical trends in the genuine softwares.

However, according to the report, pirated softwares make only one-third of the underworld economy. Sensitive information is more popular. The above screenshot shows a table with the percentage-wise division of the top kinds of sensitive information that the cyber criminals are after. It sends a chill down my spine, especially with the 4th and 5th ranks.

An interesting tidbit: The United States hosted 41 percent of the total observed underground economy servers worldwide, while Romania had the second highest percentage at 13 percent of the total. Romania! Who would have guessed?

Image Source: Symantec.

Post from: EveryJoe

Symantec Report on the Underground Economy

Since then there has been a great buzz and its availability has soared thanks to the BitTorrents sites. I expect this buzz to increase tremendously in the coming few days once the New Year celebrations come to an end. The last time I checked, the DVD image was at the 18th position among the Top 100 downloads on The Pirate Bay, the top most among the Applications category. The image is about 2.44GB in size, for 32-bit systems, and is not fake. The comments on the torrent page shows a healthy interest on Windows 7 after the Windows Vista catastrophe. (I won’t share the links here because we are talking about piracy here.)

However. It is not a full release of the new OS but only a demo version with minimal features. A beta copy of this was given away by Microsoft to several developers in Nov 2008 for them to review it. The beta was expected to be made public by Microsoft in the near future anyway.

While there have been rumors that, naturally, Microsoft may have been behind this leak, it was probably distributed by one of the developers that received the beta.

Post from: EveryJoe

Microsoft Windows 7 Demo Leaked

Pirates of Amazon is a Firefox add-on. Whenever a user visits a media page in Amazon (movies, TV shows, games, music), the add-on gives alternate torrent links from where the same product can be illegally downloaded for free.

IMDB Pirate Version is another general script that crossreferences titles on IMDB allowing users to search directly from the imdb page for subtitles, torrents and http (rapidshare,megaupload, and other hosts) movie releases, and view the movie trailer directly. I don’t mind the subtitles and movie trailer really; they are useful functionalities.

A few years ago music industry lost billions to piracy and has recently limped back to apparent normalcy. There are many who don’t give a damn one way or the other about piracy and those who justify it do so by claiming that the stars get paid way too much for their work. As a writer who reads more publishing news than any other kind of news, I have been reading about thousands of people losing their jobs in the publishing industry. Behind the highly-paid stars are legions of faceless people whose livelihood is at stake in any industry. No part of the economy is immune to the current slowdown and this is a worse time for irresponsible cheating of one another than any other. Please show restraint.

Post from: EveryJoe

Two Bad Open Source Add-ons