I know that they mention BOTH hacked versions OR (XOR) invalid
licenses. But this is clearly falacious putting these two issue
together, don't they know from the beginning how an original
(unhacked) version is going to behaves? We, users, may not need to
know the executable internals, but Stata Corp. shoud know, shouldn't
they?
I don't regard that A POSTERIORI reply in the user list is a valid
legal warning. And again such a reply is not CLEAR: why aren't they
explicit about what is going on? Is this really clear and, therefore,
fair?!
I agree (never said the contrary) that any vendor can protect their
copyrights established in the legislation, BUT precisely respecting
the legislation. It is not necesary that a big warning is always
displayed (as honest users do not need to know), but many many other
vendors just inform when an invalid license is entered and quit. I
don't think that "pirates DO get away with it" in this case, right?
My point is that Stata Corp. MUST also respect legislation and
introducing Malware is not right. Malware is (according to the law)
any dishonest, malicious and unwanted software, even (Dear Nick Cox)
if this only affects pirates. Not any action against pirates is
neither legal not valid, and in this case the obscure, intrusive
behaviours by Stata Corp. are not.
--- El vie, 6/11/09, Kit Baum <[email protected]> escribió:
De: Kit Baum <[email protected]> Asunto: st: re: Stata 10 is Malware
(also version 11?) Para: [email protected] Fecha:
viernes, 6 de noviembre, 2009 12:34 <> DemoCrazy said
I tried to install my *legal* copy of Stata 10 with one of those
serials available on the web. I found the same behaviour: random
dropping of variables.
Therefore the original Stata itself (not version modified by others
as gus from Stata suggest) includes undocumented functions: this is
definition of MALWARE.
This person quotes a Statalist posting from Alan Riley. If you read
that posting:
"The only time we have ever seen a problem like this has been with
(certain corrupt or modified executables) or (licenses which are
sometimes available from unofficial sources on the internet)"
punctuation added for clarity. If you apply the normal rules of
English grammar to the OR conditional, it suggests that a StataCorp
official is saying that either one of these circumstances could be
associated with this behavior. It does not claim that the
executable has to be hacked to provoke such behavior.
I have no inside knowledge on the workings of Stata's internals
when presented with a license code known to be bogus, but the
statement above IMHO is fair warning that those who use such
licenses should expect a less than satisfactory experience.
Should software vendors put up a big warning dialog and say "We
know you're a pirate: this program will now quit"? Or perhaps just
shell format C:? I suppose different vendors have different
strategies to deal with software piracy. But it doesn't surprise me
that any software vendor tries to ensure that the pirates don't get
away with it.
Kit
Kit Baum | Boston College Economics & DIW Berlin |
http://ideas.repec.org/e/pba1.html
An Introduction to Stata Programming |
http://www.stata-press.com/books/isp.html An Introduction to Modern
Econometrics Using Stata |
http://www.stata-press.com/books/imeus.html
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