this post was submitted on 23 Aug 2024
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Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ

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(page 2) 35 comments
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[–] [email protected] 47 points 3 months ago (1 children)

That is some next-level Minecraft you are playing over there

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[–] [email protected] 46 points 3 months ago (6 children)

If it's on a students personal device, they can suck my hullabaloo

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[–] [email protected] -3 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Are there any opensource alternatives to these things? Could they save themselves this whole hassle, just get the alternative and cut their budget in half with a yearly donation?

Anti Commercial-AI license

[–] [email protected] 14 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Can't speak for all of them, but for solidworks there is, but it is nowhere near the level of solidworks.

SolidWorks is probably the best CAD software in terms of capability and ease of use.

Either way, students learn SolidWorks because companies use solidworks

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Well, Solidworks is the industry standard, but I think NX wins on capabilities, and Fusion has a much better workflow. Both are still corporate though.

I hope we get a good open source option, because Freecad is so far behind the rest that it's basically unusable.

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[–] [email protected] 139 points 3 months ago (7 children)

If the uni has a license what's the issue lol

Also kinda shitty of those companies to charge educational instutions

[–] [email protected] 38 points 3 months ago

On my uni we also had licenses, their ratio per students were somethibg like 1:10.

[–] [email protected] 94 points 3 months ago (4 children)

Not only shitty, it's dumb. Even Adobe knows to give students hefty discounts. It's how they get new users on the hook.

[–] [email protected] 39 points 3 months ago

I've been using Jetbrains products for free in college and I can say that it is the best advertisement. I bought it the day after my student license expired.

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[–] [email protected] 116 points 3 months ago (6 children)

As a french, please don't give a penny worth of licence to Dassault Systèmes. They were founded by some of the worst ennemy of the people my country made.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 3 months ago (2 children)

yea I would like to second that. Not sure how many FOSS alternatives exist for mine design & planning though

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[–] [email protected] 31 points 3 months ago (3 children)
[–] [email protected] 60 points 3 months ago (2 children)

I am not French, but tried to look it up. I couldn't find anything except him being a billionaire which should be enough.

[–] [email protected] 20 points 3 months ago

Fair enough

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[–] [email protected] 21 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

We also had expensive engineering software at university. Oftentimes it's a major PITA for everyone. The PhD students have to get their work done and are met by the software refusing to start because all licenses are taken. Sometimes someone forgot to log off or the computer crashed and the software takes most of the day to recover that license. Or some people do like 5 simulations in parallel. Or lock the computer, go home and block a license. The IT department will get lots of calls and have to deal with it. Especially when the pool of licenses is small. And it takes additinal effort to coordinate practical courses and excercises where you teach a group of 24 people which then need half the license pool available at a fixed time each week, despite the daily routine of everyone else.

And I'm not even sure if the people responsible, care too much for pirated software. But they're liable. Of course they write strongly worded mails when talking to everyone. It's their IT infrastructure and they can't have people do illegal things with it. Especially not while having an expensive contract with some supplyer. They can't have anyone leak a mail where they endorse piracy. Or post screenshots or turn in assignments or papers with screenshots that say "unregistered copy" in the bottom corner. And once students do silly things and the piracy is on display publicly, they'll have to do something. Usually that's writing a strongly worded email first. Because that takes next to no effort. I think the usual IT department doesn't care as long as things go smoothly, people do their various things and no one complains. They usually have other stuff to do. That makes me think in this story something must have happened that warranted some form of public reaction or at least show they addressed it and they have it in writing.

And I think the rest of the mail fits such IT people. They said why they do it and that they can't have piracy connected to the institutes name. They say they need some incoming complaints to justify buying more licenses. And the punishment fits the crime. They just disconnect the computer from their network and it's not their problem anymore. I think that's fair.

[–] [email protected] 37 points 3 months ago (1 children)

That reminds me, I got a very threatening email from my college in 2000s about downloading movies and that they traced the IP to my laptop, and I could be paying $10k in fines, have this on my permanent record and/or expelled.

I loled and pirated a lot more safer.

Still waiting for them to follow up with that 20 years later.

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[–] [email protected] 14 points 3 months ago (1 children)

How did they detect it? Did these people install the pirated software on devices owned and managed by the college, or did they use their personal devices and only connect to the network? Anyway, they definitely should have used a VPN.

[–] [email protected] 24 points 3 months ago (2 children)

These softwares use your pc's network connections to send data to the servers which then checks whether you paid a license or not. When they can't use your internet connection, they also add personal information to any file you generate with the softwares such that if you send the file to someone else who has a license they will unknowingly rat on you through their connection.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (2 children)

Ok then use a firewall like https://github.com/henrypp/simplewall (I assume that this was on Windows) to block these apps' internet access. There are other good options like the Safing Portmaster (which also works on Linux), OpenSnitch (Linux) and LuLu or Little Snitch on macOS. There are many more options for Linux, iptables, nftables, firewalld, or ufw with a GUI like gufw.

they also add personal information to any file you generate with the softwares

In that case, I'm using a VM where there is absolutely no information about me

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[–] [email protected] 18 points 3 months ago

When they can’t use your internet connection, they also add personal information to any file you generate with the softwares such that if you send the file to someone else who has a license they will unknowingly rat on you through their connection.

This sounds evil, possibly violating some EU laws too.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (3 children)

not sure about the majority of the software but I'd recommend FreeCad as an alt to Solidworks

  • I've heard they're about to hit their 1.0 release sometime in the near future
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[–] [email protected] 18 points 3 months ago

So thry're saying they have plenty of licenses for the use case, but somehow people are still pirating?

Maybe their license management paradigm is just garbage. This could be the vendor, but also poor IT policy if the users can't requisition what they need.

As usual, service problem.

So much licensing fuckery-- dealing with floating or reissuing licenses, users needing to move to different machines-- could be solved via affordable site licensing. But that might leave dollars on the table if users don't overbuy.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 3 months ago

This mail screams "please ignore this BS some lawyer forced me to write, he doesn't even agree with it either!"

[–] [email protected] 49 points 3 months ago (2 children)

Pro tip: Always use a program like binisoft windows firewall control

Look at companies like this. The software KNOWS it has been cracked but instead of disabling itself it sends home your info so you can get sued for copyright infringement

Ps: I'm curious to know the price of the geovia suite. I'm guessing it's a subscription and I'm guessing it's more than 10k per year

[–] [email protected] 24 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Or a firewall that doesn't rely on windows firewall, since programs will just whitelist themselves from it during installation

[–] [email protected] 7 points 3 months ago (2 children)

I didn't encounter a single program that bypassed the block applied by windows firewall control - after setup they usually don't have the admin rights anymore to control it

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[–] [email protected] 70 points 3 months ago

PhD students as well as all students of all levels need to use pirated software to fully develop their abilities.Trash this warning.

[–] [email protected] 73 points 3 months ago (2 children)

Thumb of rule is, If you don't make enough to comfortably pay for some software; you simply don't pay for said software.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 3 months ago
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[–] [email protected] 171 points 3 months ago (2 children)

Gotta love the use of quotes here:

it should be treated with "utmost importance."

In other words, ignore this message from our lawyers.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Some people use quotes for emphasis, though. So, not sure if this faculty's on our side.

[–] [email protected] 114 points 3 months ago (4 children)

This whole message reads like “we don’t actually care but we have to say that we do 😉🙂‍↕️”

[–] [email protected] 37 points 3 months ago

Yep, the legal team advised a scare tactic akin to ISPs fishing for low-effort compliance. Reminds me of CAMP & the ATF busting farms in Mendicino until the '10s.

[–] [email protected] 24 points 3 months ago

that such infringements do not occur on the campus

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