The Vatican is a software pirate

[didymus]

The Inquirer:

**The Vatican is a software pirate **

HIS HOLINESS Pope Benedictus XVI, Pontifex Maximus and Dominus Apostolicus can now at the words “P2P Pirate” to his list of official titles.
The Pope was one of 774,651 people caught by the insecurity outfit Avast’s sweep of illegal use of its software.

Avast noticed that a license for its paid-for security software, sold to a 14-user firm in Arizona, was being distributed online. Rather than shut down the scam, the company decided to see how far the software would spread.
The Avast Pro licence showed up on filesharing websites, and a year and a half later it had topped three-quarters of a million active users. This includes two in the Vatican.

By “the Vatican” I suppose they mean someone resident in Vatican City State, as opposed to the Church which is still in the techno dark ages.

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[ChadS]

The Inquirer:

By “the Vatican” I suppose they mean someone resident in Vatican City State, as opposed to the Church which is still in the techno dark ages.

%between%

%between%

I’m sure the Vatican IP addresses were the most interesting one out of those 774,000. I wonder if the rest of the article mentioned numerous University students that were on that list or maybe the city government computers that accessed those files. But then if they listed the schools and cities they wouldn’t be so careless to make an assertion that the Chancellor of the school or the mayor of the city was downloading files.

ChadS

 

[Nine_Two]

I’m sure the Vatican IP addresses were the most interesting one out of those 774,000. I wonder if the rest of the article mentioned numerous University students that were on that list or maybe the city government computers that accessed those files. But then if they listed the schools and cities they wouldn’t be so careless to make an assertion that the Chancellor of the school or the mayor of the city was downloading files.

ChadS

I don’t think “they” did, the person who wrote the article did.

Opening themselves up to a bit of a libel lawsuit by doing that though. Even under the US’s easily dodged laws on the matter. I’m curious to see how the Vatican responds, forgiveness, or justice?

 

[markomalley]

The Inquirer:
By “the Vatican” I suppose they mean someone resident in Vatican City State, as opposed to the Church which is still in the techno dark ages.

The original release from Avast is considerably more professionally written than this diatribe:What started as a 14-user license for a small firm in Tucson, Arizona issued on June 30, 2009 quickly mushroomed to 774,651 active users by late 2010. The license has been used in over 200 countries ranging from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe – even the Vatican City. Phenomenal growth yes, but except for the original 14 users, all of the others are pirates.
…
Users of the pirated license have been tracked by their geographic IP address to over 200 countries. “The list contains about every country you have heard of – and some you haven’t,” quipped Mr. Steckler. Russia, the country with the largest number of pirated license users, still has less than 9% of the total. With no pirated licenses identified at the North Pole, the most unexpected location is for the two computers located within the Vatican.
…
The identified users were sent a pop-up notice that they had a pirated avast! license and that they would be cut off from virus database updates. They have also been given the option of converting to avast! Free Antivirus or buying avast! Pro Antivirus.
http://img441.imageshack.us/img441/7334/illegaluse.png

It sounds to me like they got the list of IP addresses not from monitoring all the Warez sites, but rather from people going in and getting virus definitions from their location using this license key to validate the download.

In light of that, it could feasibly be a pretty innocent thing. Not to say that somebody within the .va domain could not have gone to a warez site and downloaded it, but there are a couple of other possibilities that are just as likely (and, in some cases, even more likely):

• A person could have picked up a CD for 5 euros that had this software on it (I’ve seen disks for sale with a lot of “freeware” / “shareware” on them in the strangest places)
• Somebody could have sent their PC or laptop in for repair, tuning, or virus cleaning and the shop could have installed this software on it. There are a million and one little mom and pop computer shops out there – they could have done that as a “free” service.

 

[gilliam]

This sort of thing happens all the time in large (and not so large) institutions. That there were only 2 cases in an institution as large as the Vatican actually is quite remarkable. The people probably didn’t even know it wasn’t freeware.

 

[vz71]

Perhaps a tourist connecting via WiFi over the Vatican network?