Google will stop indexing torrent sites?
When did this start happening? Will I have to start using mIRC again to figure out where to go for free stuff?
The vigilant folk at TorrentFreak think they've found something odd: among the hundreds of thousands of sites Microsoft has recently asked Google not to index are requests to remove references to sites that in no way infringe Microsoft's rights but instead mention the the free OpenOffice suite. TorrentFreak's report on the …
What, a piece of MS SW not working perfectly first time?
This can't be right.
No you've made a mistake, surely.
Reality can be wrong perhaps, but never MS. I'm sure you'll find that buried deep within the EULA somewhere you've sworn on the lives of all your nearest and dearest that MS are right under all circumstances.
"What, a piece of MS SW not working perfectly first time?"
Except that as pointed out in these very pages recently, we've learned that it's not Microsoft that generates these takedown requests, and the logic used is.. strange to say the least:
http://goo.gl/7jNWTE
As the AOL-inflicted once said; "Mee too!"
My two main machines are near enough identical apart from the operating systems. Apparently at least one distro has been putting a lot of effort into addressing the UEFI secure boot problem, to the benefit of most UEFI afflicted Linux users out there.
Not that we are likely to like Microsoft any better for putting us in that position in the first place, of course!
From Wikipedia
(quote) while the UEFI specifications do not require it, Microsoft has asserted that their contractual requirements do, and that it reserves the right to revoke any certificates used to sign code that can be used to compromise the security of the system (/quote)
How's that for a BIOS manufacturers standard ?
You're exactly right they, any competition right now is too much for Microsoft to handle. This type of piracy has been happening for over a decade, so bothering with it now only shows their open wounds.
From where I'm standing, their entire line of consumer software besides Office is going down in flames. So now they have to protect their last remaining piece on the board, or it really could be checkmate.
Well if Microsoft had actually done something innovative with Office since the 90s this maybe true but they just fiddle about with the UI and add new features that only 0.01% of users need then charge another small fortune for a new version.
I have yet to find something useful that office 2013 does that i couldn't do with office 97.
"If you need a cluster to run the calculations on your Excel sheets something has got horribly out of hand."
Or you happen to work in oil and gas, or pharmacology, or geology, or weather forecasting, or financial markets, or insurance or numerous other industries where crunching large sets of numbers is routine...
nb - many of these sectors also happen to be where the best paid jobs are. So my condolences that you are probably not very well paid....
The last (remarkably similar) claim round here was never substantiated, and the poster also didn't seem to realise that some of the allegedly affected products were already covered by bi-directional no-sue technology transfer agreements.
So, evidence please, or STFU.
Or I'll probably send the boys round if you post the same shot again.
Or maybe not. Who knows, in the absence of evidence.
>Or it could be that they just set their anti-piracy bot for 'torrent AND *office*' - no way to say clearly if this was malicious, or simply incompetence and arrogance.
Nope. They have a legal obligation to review every URL by human eye and ENSURE every single one is correct. Negligence, incompetence and arrogance are still all illegal in this context. That's probably why they've tendered out the dirty work to a scapegoat even though it's their responsibility... some sort of attempt at pre-emptive distancing.
"My Libre Office is better than your Open Office"
"No it isn't"
"Yes it is."
"No it isn't"
"Yes it is."
And on and on and on and on..............
Who cares? Use one or the other, or both if you want. But please stop the schoolyard jibes that only serve to make people who use open source look like whining brats.
They might actually be doing Openoffice / Libreoffice a favour.
The right way to get free software is to download it via the appropiate web-site (www.libreoffice.org, www.openoffice.org). If you don't know where that is, Google is your friend. If you're professionally paranoid, you check the sha256sums after you've fetched it.
The wrong way is to trust that www.dodgyfreedownloads.ru is your friend and that what you download has no added extra malware. And if a site is advertising a MS Office torrent, it's definitely very dodgy!
"But the perjury only covers that you swear you are the rights holder or acting on their behalf - it doesn't swear that the link actually infringes"
It sort of depends on who writes the DMCA - I've actually seen both. Here's the thing though - the *are not the rights holder* and are claiming to be under penalty of perjury so, yeah... It could also easily be argued that they're abusing the system because a) they are and b) they're bringing the court system into disrepute.
Loss has nothing to do with it. Frankly millions of people, companies and governments use OpenOffice and for people to go round claiming ownership of the IP when they don't *is* damaging - actually the point is that damages will be awarded for abuse of the system. In the Diebold case there was no actual monetary consequential loss but it didn't stop the court awarding 150k in damages. There's also a punitive damages option to make the people involved think about and check what they're sending out in future.
I've got a way of making sure these type of 'requests' are more accurate in future - jail the lawyer involved for 3 months for every inaccurate claim. You can bet they won't claim a hair's breadth more than they are allowed then.
Oh, and 3 wrong claims in a year and you lose the right to challenge for an entire year from the date of the last offence.
30,400,000 results - top 3 results are:
1 Welcome to new crack keygen resource KEYGENS.NL
2 office serial number, key - KeyGenGuru.Com serial numbers, keygen ...
3 KEYGENS.NL - office 2010 cracks and keygens generated to unlock ...
Perhaps they should sort their own search engine out before interfering with others.
Look at the blocklist itself. The OpenOffice torrents are filled with artifacts that somewhat suggest what's being offered is identifying itself with Microsoft's offering rather than Apache's (Open Office 2010 anyone?). It is more than feasable to suggest that this was a bot error
"Sue for what? Damages? And who would have grounds to sue?
These were third-party torrents for a freely redistributable open-source software.
Don't get me wrong, I would love to see Microsoft slapped silly, but it's not going to happen."
The hoster of the torrent, the person who put up the torrent, *and* the copyright holder all have a chance under DMCA to invoke the penalty clause for perjury in DMCA requests, which these are. I've NEVER heard of it being invoked, but I guarantee if any of my content was falsely DMCA'd, I'd invoke the penalty clause.