On Mon, Feb 25, 2008 at 04:22:44PM -0800, Richard Man wrote:
> We *STILL* have people promoting stealing software on this list?
>
> This is ridiculous. There is a difference in freedom of speech and
> promoting thievery and piracy.
very late in on this one, sorry. Even putting the moral issues to one
side, a word of warning to anyone tempted to obtain software from these
'free download' sites is in order...
In the old days these sites were often supplied by people wanting to
'stick it to The Man'. Unfortuately money is now the object.
I maintain Internet routers & firewall appliances for a living. In a lot
of recent cases where virus/malware activity has been detected, wading
back through the logs to find the first machines to have been infected
shows infection to have been preceded by a visit to one of these
'downloadz' or 'warez' sites to obtain pirated software.
the infections that are being seen are more & more often 'botnet'
viruses, where your PC is made to be part of a large network of infected
devices, & the 'owners' of the botnet sell either the infection of your
PC with the client's malware (e.g. keyloggers, SPAM engines, DDOS
engines), or use of functions of the botnet to perform the same tasks.
http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,139056-c,hackers/article.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Botnet
scary stuff...
davidt
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