2nd update 7 September 2003: Since people are still trying to download the files, I've decided to put up an email address so you can flame me. That way, I can get direct "comment" from these people, and have some good laughs. Inspired by "Ask Jeff K"! s11 AT member D0T fsf D0T org (if you can't decipher the preceding address, you're out of luck)
Update: I'm extremely disappointed.
I'm referring to the warez d00ds actually downloading these huge junk files. At the rate of about 100 per hour.
What I thought would be a good way to protest the BSA has turned into a showcase of idiots. Read the page, people. THE DOWNLOADS ARE NOT REAL! THEY'RE A BUNCH OF ZEROES! Anyway, I want to see if turning these off will help my dist-upgrades. So that is all. Shame on all those who downloaded these files and destroyed a useful protest.
Next time, try dd bs=1048576 count=600 if=/dev/null
of=WindowsXP.zip. It works just as well, without wasting
bandwidth.
Everything below this paragraph was here the whole time.
"My Word, this version of Office really does Excel. Click here to Access it. Because I can't post it on the FrontPage. (My Publisher wouldn't allow it; still, the second level isn't exactly inVisioable.)" :-D
Note to real humans: The preceding files are not really what they say they are. In fact, they are each hard links to 629,145,601 bytes of zeroes. Don't waste our bandwidth, and yours, by downloading them.
I created this page in protest of the BSA's scare tactics. For the specific instance that inspired this (along with the comment suggesting it), see the original YRO story.
My hope is that the BSA wastes its time sending false threats to the University of Evansville, giving us something else to use in our arsenal against such vicious but common tactics used by proprietary software. UE may even be able to sue the BSA!
If you are BSA/other proprietary enforcer: at least you had the good sense to check this out yourself. With that uncommon level of foresight, perhaps we might convince you to join the Free Software side one day.
If you are looking for illegal copies of these products: First, let me say that I don't believe sharing useful software is wrong; their "moral argument" is a myth. They try to divide their users, maintain monopolies, and carve out public knowledge for their own "ownership", and call software sharing immoral! See Why Software Should Not Have Owners for more information.
However convenient it may seem, the answer is not to pretend like the law isn't there. It is, and it's getting stronger. They intend to be able to remotely control the next generation of computers--"your" computers. Complete control of all computer use is the only way they'll ever feel safe enough to stop, so there's no point in working with them. See Can you trust your computer? for more information about this initiative.
The only answer is to break away and form our own community where noone tells you that sharing is wrong; in fact, to take away the right to share is illegal. This community has been established; all you have to do is join. And the best way to start is to stop using software like this, and switch to the Free (as we call it, Free as in Freedom) operating system `GNU/Linux'. An overview of the community can be found in The GNU Project. The Debian project provides an excellent GNU/Linux distribution available through CD vendors listed on the site or at no charge for a download.
If you are a csserver admin: ls reports that each file is 625,149,601 bytes. This is a trick; in reality, they take up about 12 kilobytes. Here is an explanation from the GNU C Library manual:
You can set the file position past the current end of the file. This does not by itself make the file longer; `lseek' never changes the file. But subsequent output at that position will extend the file. Characters between the previous end of file and the new position are filled with zeros. Extending the file in this way can create a "hole": the blocks of zeros are not actually allocated on disk, so the file takes up less space than it appears to; it is then called a "sparse file".