Windows 7 'build' on BitTorrent is bogus
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Pranksters in recent days have begun posting what they say are leaked builds of Windows 7, the successor to Windows Vista. But the file, according to those who've downloaded it, is bogus.
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Aargh! Server outage turns customers into pirates Over the weekend, thousands of Microsoft customers who tried to download patches or updates for Windows were falsely accused of running a pirated version of Windows.â¦
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(InfoWorld) - The beta build of Mac OS X 10.5 "Leopard" that Apple handed out to developers June 11 at its Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) has leaked to the Internet and is being downloaded by users of PirateBay, the Swedish torrent tracker. Last Monday, CEO Steve Jobs spent most of this 90-minute WWDC keynote address touting the upcoming OS, which is set for release in October. Eight days later, the beta labeled build "9A466" was uploaded to PirateBay. The first upload on Tuesday didn't take -- there was only one "seeder," the term for a computer that has a complete copy of the torrent file -- but the second yesterday is being downloaded and assembled, according to comments left by numerous users. As of late yesterday, only four seeders were available, with 181 "leechers," or computers that have downloaded only part of the complete torrent. By 3 p.m. today EDT, however, the numbers had climbed to 44 seeders and more than 1,500 leechers. The beta was also posted to the private, invitation-only torrent tracker Oink yesterday, according to CrunchGear, a tech blog. But when CrunchGear exposed the leak, Oink pulled the beta. That sent downloaders into a verbal rage during which they vented their collective spleens at the blogger who outed Oink. "Go [expletive deleted] yourself you [expletive deleted] rat," ranted one. Based on the PirateBay listing, the Leopard 9A466 beta weighs in at a bit more than 6GB. But the exact byte count worried a user tagged as "konelli." "It's definitely not my intention to spoil the party, but how do we know that this is the real thing? Last time I checked, the WWDC version was supposed to be 6.94GB (or 7,450,640,384 bytes). This is, well, less. Has anybody finished downloading who could confirm that this is genuine?" Apple was asked if it planned to pursue the person or persons who leaked the build to BitTorrent, or what actions it might take against PirateBay. It did not immediately respond with comment, however. The first question is especially important in light of past history. The last time an under-development version of Mac OS X ended up on BitTorrent, the Cupertino, Calif.-based computer maker brought out its lawyers. In December 2004, Apple sued three men, as well as 25 others identified only as "Does," for releasing a developer preview of Tiger, Mac OS X 10.4, via the BitTorrent file-sharing network. All three were members of the company's own Developer Connection, Apple claimed, and had illegally leaked their copies of Tiger. But after several Apple notables, including co-founder Steve Wozniak, pleaded for leniency in blogs and other online postings, Apple backed off a bit. During a 10-month span from March to December 2005, Apple signed a settlement with the three named defendants: students Vivek Sambhara, David Schwartzstein, and David Steigerwald. Each promised to never again release information about the company or its products, while media accounts reported that Schwartzstein and Steigerwald also distributed repentant statements and paid damages to Apple. "We are pleased that Mr. Steigerwald has taken responsibility for his actions and that we can put this lawsuit behind us," Apple spokesman Steve Dowling told the Associated Press in March 2005 after the company settled with David Steigerwald, then a 22-year-old North Carolina college student.
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If it can boot off smut peddlers, it can boot off copyright infringers
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Oscar-contender Microsoft lawyers who believed they'd buried the most embarrassing collection of documents about the company's murky past for good, without any one noticing, were in for a surprise this weekend. The archive has become a mainstay of the Bittorrent P2P file sharing networks.â¦
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Update Slammed for touting unavailable but unlicensed content
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BitTorrent is a wonderful way to download files with greater reliability than other conventional means, but of course that means that it is used greatly for piracy... apparently.
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New version turns off security, attempts to download malicious programs from Net--but it's not likely to get far.
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Giving it a second shot, Edin Kadribasic has posted another build using the new compiler from Microsoft because of some issues with the first one.   Well the first build proved to be somewhat less that a full success. It worked only on one computer: the one that was build on. Since this limits PHP use on the Windows platform I went ahead and read about Microsoft manifest files, SxS (side by side) assemblies and other wonderful stuff that Microsoft has provided for us in version 2005 of their development package.   The new build should be installable without any libraries from Microsoft and you can grab both of them directly from his site:  php-5.2.1RC2-dev-Win32.zip pecl-5.2.1RC2-dev-Win32.zip
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A Gartner analyst finds a direct connection between Linux and piracy: many systems come preinstalled with Linux to keep prices down but then bogus copies of Windows get loaded.
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You can't cheat an honest person, they say. Like generations of scammers before them, some malware writers are taking that "advice" to heart, releasing their Trojan software and keyloggers as "cracked" versions of Vista oon peer-to-peer service. Who's going to turn them in, after all -- a would-be pirate?
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Windows XP Service Pack 2 promises to raise the security bar for the sometimes beleaguered operating system. Unfortunately, one of the new features could be spoofed so that it reports misleading information
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PCs running Linux are growing in popularity in part because they can be loaded with a pirated copy of Windows, according to a study from analyst Gartner.
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Q Some of my buddies' e-mails show up with an unopenable attachment called "winmail.dat." Am I at fault, or are my friends?
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By Anne Krishnan, The News & Observer, Raleigh, N.C.  Feb. 14--Q: I have discovered a Web site that allows free downloads of programs such as WinZip. How do I find out if sites like this are legitimate and if the software is safe?   T.W.
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More PCs run the alternative OS, but many will end up with a pirated version of Windows, report says.
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Over the weekend there were several reports that confirm that Comcast is interfering with their customers' use of BitTorrent. This raises several more questions and concerns. 1. There are infringing uses of BitTorrent, for sure, but why is Comcast taking the role of enforcer against the interest of their customers. Just a question, but not likely to get an answer, because Comcast officially denies they're doing anything, even though employees (apparently) are confirming, not for attribution, that they are. 2. What about non-infringing uses of BitTorrent? Can their algorithms tell if someone is using BitTorrent to share mamterial that they have the legal right to distribute? If not, how do they justify interfering with their customers' use of the Internet? 3. And perhaps most disturbing, what does this say for the future? Perhaps someday it will be deemed inappropriate for people to publish content to the Internet, if so, could Comcast take steps to block that activity? How different is this from interfering with BitTorrent?