Elmy said:
Luckily I live in Europe, so quite far away from these evil corporate types 🙂
As do I, but didn't stop me getting caught.
I (stupidly) downloaded Norton Firewall from Suprnova. Not for me ironically enough, I've got a hardware router/firewall at home, my brother phoned me in a panic, weird popups were appearing on his computer, he'd just got ADSL and wanted a firewall. I was in my office at University (I'm a PhD student), took all of 10 minutes to download Norton Firewall off Suprnova, got a crack for it of an IRC DCC server, threw it on a CD and dropped it off to him on the way home.
A few weeks later the IT folk (and my supervisor) came through to confiscate my machine for investigation because the University had been contacted by Symantec who claimed I was illegally distributing pirated versions of their software. The thing is, to all intents and purposes I had, since Bit Torrent uploads while it downloads, so in escence I had been distributing it. I put my hands up and admitted it, stupid mistake, but explained how it worked and that I wasn't running a warez server.
If i had done it at home I'd have been fine, but the fact I was at a University (with an .ac.uk address), made it easily traceable, and the University is responsible for everything that happens on their network, so it's an easy place to target.
In the end, it was dealt with internally by our department, they accepted I had no malicious intent, it was a stupid mistake and no actions other than a verbal warning were taken, and I was told that if anything like this ever happens again, it will be dealt with at a University level, and I'll probably be kicked out.
Bit of a wake up call I tell you, so from now on, no downloading anything non-legit from a University computer.
So don't assume that because you're outside of the US you're safe.
