My college sent warning email regarding pirated software use by students.

Gotta love the use of quotes here:

it should be treated with "utmost importance."

In other words, ignore this message from our lawyers.

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

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- 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.
  
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- that such infringements do not occur on the campus
  
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- I often tell my students “whatever you do, don’t go to libgen dot rs to download our textbook illegally. You’re gonna want to avoid Anna’s archive as well. You really want to steer clear from these malicious websites.”
  
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Some people use quotes for emphasis, though. So, not sure if this faculty's on our side.

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- https://youtu.be/4DqoQq1zME8
  
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If the uni has a license what's the issue lol

Also kinda shitty of those companies to charge educational instutions

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

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- 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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- Ehh even when I was in school I used foss like blender and gimp. I've never had an actual copy of 3dsmax, Maya or photosoup. Been plenty productive with that my entire life.
  
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On my uni we also had licenses, their ratio per students were somethibg like 1:10.

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The uni doesnt care. The software vendor does and is threatening the uni for not being compliant.

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- Ik
  
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Also kinda shitty of those companies to charge educational instutions

It really is, but what can do? Capitalism exploits everything for profit.

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- Well obviously, seize the means of production?
  
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Some software uses license servers where each client is supposed to request a seat temporarily. If more people use it at once than seats were licenses they detect that with phone home features. We had that with Matlab I believe, if you tried using it in the most popular time you might not be able to.

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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.

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I'd like to know more

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- I am not French, but tried to look it up. I couldn't find anything except him being a billionaire which should be enough.
  
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- Sorry to answer a little late,
  
  Dassault is a group which covers multiple company, the most notorious is "Dassault Aviation" which sells warplanes like the "Rafale". But it is also implicated in a lot of other activities like infrastructures and road work, press, informatics, etc. The company is very close to the government because it need public contracts to work, it can't sell planes without it being a contract between France and the country who buys it. Which is very problematic because Dassault has interest in influencing exterior politics of my country to sell it's planes. The head of Dassault company in the last few decades is Serge Dassault, Billionaire and French Politician. S. Dassault has used his influence and power as a media owner and elected regional politician to promote his business.
  
  On the politic side he was a right wing politician, leaning to the far right. He made some homophobic statements during the discussion about same-sex marriage stating that homosexuality in ancient Greece was "one of the reasons for its decadence" and that "there is no renewing of the population. We're going to have a country of Homos. There will be nobody left in 10 years. That's stupid." He was also publicly anti-union (which is honestly pretty rare to be claimed publicly in France) and against the right to go on strikes. He said that he admire the Chinese work organization.
  
  He was brought to the court several times :
  
  For concealing during 15 years millions in other countries.
  
  For rigging elections by buying votes in 2008. His election was canceled and he was sentenced to 1 year of ineligibility. He went around it by making one of his partner, Jean-Pierre Bechter, elected. In 2013, Mediapart (a french independent newspaper of investigation) released an audio of S. Dassault claiming he spent 1,7 million of euros to elect Bechter.
  
  I am not an expert on this and a lot of what I am saying here is documented on his French wikipedia page about his politics view and his legal problems Much more can be said but it is a beginning to understand what I meant.
  
  Serge Dasault is now dead but his children are all at different responsibility positions in the Dassault group. Here is a map of who owns the medias in France (last updated in December 2023) where you can see what Dassault owns, it seems to be less than when S. Dassault was still alive, for exemple until 2006 they also owned "L'express"
  
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I pirated solid works because my university’s engineering program required what we PAY for it to complete our courses that absolutely required it.

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SW was great to use back in uni but holy hell is it full of phone home stuff and really annoying these days, I scrapped my license, they straight up wouldn't let me cancel within 30 days of renewal so I yanked my cc and "cancelled" that way.

Use FreeCAD, mentioned in a few posts, it's got some clunk but it's 100% useable, has more than enough features for prosumer/hobbyist use, personally I'd make an argument it's fine for enterprise use too, Ondsel seems to think so considering that's the market they're targeting with their releases. I'd recommend the Ondsel release or Realthunder's (what I currently use) which has features/fixes that will be merged back, and 100% look at mainline freecad when the 1.0 release drops

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

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- I know one for mine crafting...
  
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Dassault absolutely deserves to rot in hell right next to Adobe

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Storytime, please?

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

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Yup, this is why I didn't pay for REAPER until the check for my first audiobook came through!

I'm still waiting for that check from the author, but you best believe $60 of it is going to the software that made that job possible!

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Preach

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

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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

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

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- 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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Tinywall is great and free.

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

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These mods have gotten ridiculous!

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

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Then you will be barred ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Your system, your rules but their network and also their rules.

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- MAC randomization to the rescue!
  
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- You just have to make sure you don't get caught...
  
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- It says debarred. So, they will undo the barring?!
  
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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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I like to imagine you piggyback on their wifi just to pirate movies every weekend now, for old times sake.

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Adobe did the same in my friend's animation college

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Imagine using pirated software and allowing it to go online. Loco 🤯

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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.

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I would hope they're not using static IPs and MAC address spoofing is a thing.

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usually college networks have a Mac address whitelist, so you need to turn off Mac spoofing in order to connect

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It should be treated with "utmost importance", not with utmost importance. That ending is quite subversive!

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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.

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Shucks... Maybe if the college didn't rob the students blind on tuition, and the publishers not rob the students blind on books, maybe they could afford to pay for software licenses. 🤷‍♂️

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they should have put dorm numbers on there so you could meet some cool people. sharing is caring.

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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.

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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.

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- 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.
  
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- 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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Seems like you have to buy... a VPN so that they won't see you using pirated software.

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Pretty much every software crack says 'Block this application in your firewall'. I guarantee most people don't. Following these instructions would have prevented this entirely.

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

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Mine and mine related accessories

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I’ll tell ya hwhat.

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Some people never learn. My Academy requires students to log in with their university account, so they know who does what.

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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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As a mechanical engineer who spent multiple thousands of hours using SolidWorks, trying to use FreeCAD felt like flying a Cessna 172 after getting used to a Citation jet.

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- I'm not well versed in planes, is the cessna better or worse?
  
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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

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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

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- 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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It looks like you pirated the image too, gives me a headache just trying to read it

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