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^ might be worth sending skrommel a PM-tomos (April 24, 2015, 09:36 AM)
Why did Sony not respond then?-Tuxman (April 20, 2015, 02:25 AM)
There is a story going around this week that Sony was pirating a couple books on hacking, but the evidence doesn't support that claim.
The Daily Dot reported on Friday that they had found two "pirated" ebooks when they were searching Wikileaks' archive of the files and emails stolen in the Sony hack last year.
That archive has proven to be a treasure trove of insider secrets like the fact that Mississippi Attorney General Jim Hood was and is a puppet of the MPAA, and The Daily Dot would have you believe that the archive also revealed that Sony was a pirate.
Unfortunately, the evidence presented so far doesn't support that claim. I took a few hours this evening to confirm the report, and I reached an entirely different conclusion.
While I can confirm that the ebooks were and are available in the archive, I cannot say with any certainty that they were pirated.
hackingThe books in question, Inside Cyber Warfare and Hacking the Next Generation, were published by O'Reilly Media. As anyone who buys programming books can tell you, O'Reilly sells its books in multiple formats - without DRM.
You can indeed buy these ebooks as PDFs, which means that before we accuse Sony of piracy we first have to make sure that these ebooks were actually pirated and not legally purchased.
Sony did have copies of Inside Cyber Warfare and Hacking the Next Generation on its servers. Both books were posted as PDF and as text files, yes, but certain details suggest that the ebooks might have been legally purchased.
For example, the PDFs look nothing like the versions hosted by Safari Books Online (the text, formatting, and organization is different), nor do they look like they were scanned from the original paper copy.
Instead, the two PDFs look like they were sold as PDFs. What's more, at least one of the supposedly pirated titles looks like the copy I just bought.
For the sake of thoroughness, I went to the O'Reilly website and tried to buy Inside Cyber Warfare and Hacking the Next Generation. I bought Hacking, but passed on Carr's Inside Cyber Warfare because Sony's copy was the first edition, and I could only buy the second edition.
After an hour of eyeballing the two versions of Hacking, I can't find any evidence that would show that Sony's copy was any less legal than my copy. Sony's copy was slightly larger (7MB vs 6.47MB) and had not been modified since it was produced in 2009. My copy had been modified in 2013.
I can't tell you why the file sizes are different ( I don't have access to a comparison tool which would work on PDFs) or exactly how they differ but I don't think that is a critical issue.
What I can report is that there is insufficient evidence to prove that Sony pirated these two ebooks. For all I know someone at Sony legitimately bought its copies before uploading them to its servers.
One could argue that Sony is pirating the ebook simply by hosting a copy of the ebook, but I would remind you that O'Reilly also does corporate sales. There's no way for us to determine, based on the evidence so far, that Sony did not buy the correct license from O'Reilly.
Folks, you are welcome to reach whatever conclusion you like, but I remain unconvinced that Sony pirated these PDFs.
I plan to go dig through the archive tomorrow and look for other pirated ebooks, but at this point I don't know that I will find anything which I will be able to prove was pirated and not acquired legitimately. Stay tuned.
Oh, ep 4 of Daredevil - the "date night" one - great late show to ending.
-Renegade (April 18, 2015, 10:42 AM)
That's one thing that's always befuddled me... people are happy to get back a lot of money. It's your own money that you gave the government interest free for a year. My perfect world is when I'm at $0 owed or returned.-wraith808 (April 16, 2015, 09:44 AM)
There's a couple of very "lateral thinking rational" reasons this could make someone happy.
Let's get the Elephant in the room away first:
Earned Income Credit.
It's the biggest chunk of found-cash anyone's ever gonna get. It's *supposed* to vanish into caring for the kid, but... well ...
But back to "regular savings" refunds. People can sometimes really have trouble making themselves save, and fairly well known cases are when the initial self-savings accounts began so strong for New Years resolutions and even into Easter ... begin to get chipped at for summer! But if it's stuck into withholdings, it's a lot harder for them to get at.
Then the final reason. ... if you have an abusive household situation, if your savings are jammed into withholdings, the abusive half of the family unit can't bully you as easily into giving them up!
-TaoPhoenix (April 16, 2015, 05:16 PM)
Was that intentional?Nope, didn't have to open my wallet for him. In fact, we got back more than twice as much as we did last year.-app103 (April 16, 2015, 12:46 AM)
>> Or, change to the "United States - international" map, and press altgr+shift+4.
this sounds a good solution, is it a setting in Windows 8.1?
and what you mean by altgr?-kalos (April 15, 2015, 12:23 PM)
Been watching Daredevil on Netflix. Best superhero tv show I've seen. If you have Netflix, try it. All of the episodes are up at the same time. I'm through 8 out of 13, and wish there were more.-wraith808 (April 15, 2015, 08:28 AM)
Really?
I skipped watching it as I've found too many of the comic book shows/movies are just... not for me. I used to love comics, but the shows & movies have turned me off entirely.
But you and I share quite a few similar tastes... I'll give it a shot when I have a chance. Another friend introduced me to a few shows that I'd dismissed as "probably really stupid" and they turned out to be darn good.-Renegade (April 15, 2015, 09:56 AM)
Wow firace, that is a cool find
Amazing.-David.P (April 14, 2015, 12:39 PM)
Based on the angle of the walls at what appears to be the entrance to the stairs, I'd say the cat is going up.-Stoic Joker (April 12, 2015, 04:37 PM)
I read lately about the name Hitler being used for a child in the States, I think it might even have been the middle name for a girl - but cant find it now - not worth finding really...-tomos (April 08, 2015, 03:31 PM)
If you're talking about the same story I'm thinking about, it was a boy, and his name was "Adolf Hitler [Surname]" and the part that made it notable or newsworthy (as I recall) was that Child Protective Services threatened to take him away from his parents. But I can't remember the details of why or what eventually happened.
But none of this is really on topic for this thread. :-D-Deozaan (April 10, 2015, 12:25 PM)
it's worth noting that VirtualBox will not work if you have a modified version of uxtheme.dll (which has to be modified if you want to use non-windows themes for the OS).Damn, that's arrogant!
https://www.virtualbox.org/ticket/13767-tomos (April 07, 2015, 04:21 AM)-f0dder (April 08, 2015, 03:26 AM)
Apparently all based on Mark Russinovich saying at a conference that “It’s definitely possible”.
http://www.forbes.co...e-microsoft-windows/-Jibz (April 06, 2015, 01:36 AM)
