Where does it mention a "federal official"? It looks to me like it makes lying in general a federal crime. It doesn't even seem to grant an exception for law enforcement officials.

They accomplish the same goal, but they aren't the same.

Not always. I was offered a deal that allowed for a sort of guilty but not officially guilty plea. I had to confess to crimes that I didn't commit to the judge, but officially the plea was not considered an admission of guilt, just an admission that the state had sufficient evidence to convince a jury that I was guilty. This is something of a technicality since the official record records agreement to every bullshit charge I was accused of, but I don't have an actual guilty conviction on my record and more importantly didn't spend a day in jail.

Not a good analogy. For a car analogy maybe a fuel gauge based on the weight of the car above the absolute minimum and assuming one or two passengers of a standard weight. People can sweat for a variety of reasons so that has to be taken into account. A car can get heavier for a variety of reasons only one of which is a full tank.

Clearly you have no idea what a pirate bay skull actually means. Your scheme would not get you a skull. It also wouldn't work even if your idea of what a skull was were accurate. The crackers would realize the problem within a week and fix it. You really think it's that easy to defeat the crackers? Do you really think all of the software developers in the world are stupid and you are the only coder in the world who is smart? If it were really that easy to make DRM work everyone would be doing it and all piracy would have ended long ago. It's only very stupid people who think all of their adversaries are stupid. Intelligent people always assume that whoever will try to defeat their system will be more clever than they are. Want to try again? There have been clever DRM systems. Yours is not.

And then these people will post on forums about how buggy the game is which will put off legitimate buyers who will wait for these pseudo-bugs to be fixed. Or would you be expecting the legitimate buyers to know that you are just playing a prank that you cannot tell them about because then the crackers could remove it?

You really think a pirate is going to pay anything to a developer that treats him like that? He's going to say, "Fuck me? Well fuck you!" and then download the genuinely cracked version that he should have known to download in the first place because it was uploaded by someone with a skull and has 2500 seeders instead of just 3.

If they are that stupid then they won't be able crack his software even with his jokey instructions about using Wine to run Notepad in Linux. He would have to provide exact instructions and he simply does not do that. When it comes to the criticial part of exactly what lines of code to modify and an example of something to modify it to he gets all vague. This is just a publicity stunt from a coward. If he had any balls he would have posted exactly how to crack the software as simply and easily as possible with as few lines of code as possible. I'm not sure why anyone would bother to actually follow his instructions anyway when his software has already been cracked by a reputable organization.

Do you run Windows? Ever? At all? Then WAKE UP! You are also part of the botnet. Welcome. Come on in. The water's fine. There is nothing you can do about it because none of the detection software will detect the really good stuff. If' it's detectable then it's avoidable. I would guess that non-pirates make up a larger percentage of the botnet than pirates. It's that false sense of security that does you in.

Do you run an executable whitelisting application? Sandboxie? Do you ever allow javascript or flash to run in your browser? Daily virus scans from more than one of the better rated apps? Do you routinely run sysinternals process explorer and stay intimately familiar with every process that should normally be there so that you can detect suspicious ones? Do you run an open source firewall that will detect every outbound connection attempt no matter how subtle and clever? Even if you do all of this you are probably still part of the botnet if you run Windows. A false sense of security will not keep you safe.

With one or two small/inexpensive exceptions the last time I paid for software was in the 90s and I possess quite a bit of the stuff. Gotta fill up my 23 TB of hard drive space with something after all.

If we are relying on virus scans as you do then I have only been infected with viruses maybe once in the past 15-20 years IIRC from USB keys and internet cafes. The negative results from these viruses have been exactly zero. Nothing bad happened to me. Despite what you think torrenting software does not mean you will be infected with malware, at least not malware obvious enough to be picked up by a virus scanner.

But don't take my word for it. Go ahead and download 100 cracked applications from TPB and use some common sense. That is act like a technical person who actually wants to avoid being infected. Scan everything at virustotal and run any keygens within sandboxie if you can. Download from the most popular torrents ideally from uploaders with skulls at TPB. Do this from within a virtual machine if you are concerned about the risk which really is minimal. Again, assuming we are talking about stuff that will be picked up by the corporate scanners.

Whenever I run windows I pretty much assume I have undetectable malware running. If you run windows and you don't assume that you are naive. At the very least I assume that a quality keylogger is running at all times hoping for CC numbers and passwords actually useful for identity theft.

Anything with outbound connections may be picked up because like any non-idiot running windows I monitor those. However there may be subtle outbound communications that even the best commercial firewalls won't see. No doubt all of non-free firewalls are backdoored by the NSA and may allow certain types of communications to be ignored. Unless it's using up a lot of my bandwidth I don't really care because I don't enter any senstive information on a super-insecure OS like Windows and most of the actually harmful apps are just looking for information, not trying to format your hardrive or delete a bunch of files. That sort of stuff is so 1980s.

So how is it that I manage to live with all of this scary and yet undetectable malware? I don't enter any information while running windows that I would not want professional thieves to have. I don't type passwords that I care about, that is ones intended to actually protect something from anyone. I don't enter credit card numbers. Ever. For any reason. I assume everything I type is being monitored by a very clever app that thieves pay thousands for as a way to make a living.

Nowadays the vast majority of malware is either adware whose authors are generally kind enough to make you well aware of almost immediately or financially motivated network software whose sole aim in life is to steal credit card numbers and passwords.

This idea of yours that routinely using cracked/keygenned software virtually guarantees infection with obvious, detectable with virus scanners, malware is naive and ignorant. It's Fantasyland.

And BTW if you think that entering sensitive data in Windows is secure just because you don't pirate software let me laugh at you for a while. That is a false sense of security you are feeling.

As you may have surmised I run Linux when I want to do things like make online purchases or check email or use online banking or log into sites that I feel are worth protecting with secure passphrases or long random passwords. Windows is mainly useful for games and apps with no decent Linux equivalent. It's not useful for doing anything that requires privacy.

Linux isn't immune to attack of course, but it's in a different league from Windows even when you don't pirate apps and use all of the best security software. I also do my best to avoid installing any Linux apps that allow remote connections to my machine and I do run a firewall that monitors for any such connections nonetheless. I still run my browser with noscript, adblock, betterprivacy, ghostery, and secret agent. It would be nice if it were completely sandboxed as well. Just in case.

No, but it would definitely help the case for war if a positive outcome, at least a temporary one, were possible.

We were kind of hoping that you, Stan, would solve this problem for us. Why is this our problem? We have nothing to do with Syria. Why not let a local country deal with the problem? There are nearly 200 sovereign countries in the world at least half of which could probably kick the Syrian government's ass. Why do we always have to be the world's sole policeman? Sorry, but that is just bullshit. You want to go to war with Syria for fucking humanitarian reasons (haha!) then you go do that. I don't want my own country getting involved at this point and the last time I checked the majority of Americans agreed with me.

I'll tell you what, when the Syrians overthrow our government for us and release us from our own chains then we can return the favor. We don't owe the world or any particular country in it a damn thing. And the vast majority of them don't want our help anyway. Let's get a poll of the Syrians who want us to bomb them in order to save them. You really think the majority will be in favor of it?

Even if we succeed with our plan for regime change and manage to install a puppet leader and puppet government how long before that government gets overthrown by the people? And it's not like our govenment is really all that much better anymore even from the POV of someone who wants more freedom, which most Syrians probably don't anyway.

Maybe the best thing to do is something along the lines of what Sweden is doing. Let the few Syrians who are pro-liberty and would support a US puppet government just come here instead. And let the rest fend for themselves. They don't want to be rescued. They don't want our "help".

Of what? A war on toner? If all of the bad stuff is redacted it only serves to make it look like they are being open and responding to a FOI request when they are not. This doesn't mean anything yet. Until we actually see how redacted the documents are. I"m sure 99% of the information will be missing.

I think at this point it is safe to assume that all US or US ally based commercial software of any kind that is of some value to the NSA/GCHQ has been compromised. I would imagine that this will present a huge advantage to open source software in relevant fields. IMO any software company that allowed such backdoors deserves to go out of business. It also means that commercial anti-virus, firewall, and other security software has to be assumed to be backdoored for the NSA/GCHQ. This also gives Linux a huge advantage because it is not so dependent on high quality security software.