No more Mister Nice Guy.

August 2, 2000 3:16 PM

No more Mister Nice Guy. They've built a web crawler looking for piracy sites. It should be interesting. I wonder how many computers and how much bandwidth they're assigning to the job?
posted by Steven Den Beste (6 comments total)

What good is identifying the warez really going to do? There's the well publicized case of the russian cracker that cracked all of Macromedia's stuff and most of Adobe's stuff, and how he bascially used the "hey, I'm in russia, you can't do anything to me" attitude and still seems to evade capture or punishment.

Recently on some web bulletin board, I saw people openly posting FTP sites where you could download unreleased internal Windows Whistler (2001) builds, and the links actually worked - how MS will chase down every instance of that is beyond me.

There's some point where chasing down piracy takes more effort than it's worth, I guess that's what the warez bot MS made is going to do, basically free up the human resources they aimed at finding and stopping it, but on the other hand, do they have a giant staff of lawyers to chase down every kid that offers win2kFull.zip files?
posted by mathowie at 3:55 PM on August 2, 2000

Look at the interview carefully, and you'll see Microsoft's longstanding two-prong approach:

* If you're just some guy or gal at a keyboard, we'll make a bunch of noises to lull the competition into thinking we don't encourage retail piracy, but we don't really care. You'll download it this time, then go for the cheap upgrade later, or maybe buy a Microsoft Press book, and we'll make our money from you eventually.

* If you're counterfeiting MS software, however, and making money from it... No power on earth can save you from our wrath.

This is one of the things a fact-based anti-trust suit against Microsoft would have brought up. Oh well.

posted by aurelian at 4:15 PM on August 2, 2000

Re the russian, what defense does he have against a cross-border ping flood or other DOS attack? You can't have it both ways. If he claims immunity from US law by being in Russia, he can't invoke those laws to cause a DOS attack to cease.
posted by Steven Den Beste at 6:27 PM on August 2, 2000

It would still be more trouble than it's worth... so you ping him... he changes ip, pings back. why taunt a known troublemaker to bring your site down?
posted by Neale at 9:37 PM on August 2, 2000

Anyone else catch MS's comment on how "109,000 jobs were lost" that wouldn't have been, save for piracy. And how "Federal and state governments lost just under $1 billion in tax revenue in 1998."

I'd love to see them prove that.

Oh, wait... you *can't* prove that. You can say, "if all the pirated copies were purchased instead, X, Y, and Z would(n't) have happened." But let's be honest...how many people who've pirated software would have actually bought it?

My guess is roughly none. No profits are lost due to piracy. Rather, profits aren't made...profits that probably wouldn't have been made anyway.

BTW: I'm not promoting w4r3zing the latest copy of Win2K or anything, I just think companies -- especially MS -- need to stop with the "We're losing money!" sob story and focus on the fact it's just plain illegal.
posted by CrayDrygu at 10:23 PM on August 2, 2000

Bollocks to that. Microsoft has been a de-facto shareware company for long enough. The point being that they can tolerate the home warez scene in the knowledge that it will ultimately earn them thousands in server licences at the workplace.
posted by holgate at 5:51 AM on August 3, 2000