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Pirates bring down ORBX

Quick question for any veterans...
How many of you guys did a lot of push-ups in boot camp because someone else screwed up? I know I did a lot!

Negative Reinforcement. Frankly I have no problem with what they are doing, but in terms of the big picture consider this...

I am willing to bet that there is nobody here that can honestly claim that they absolutely obey the speed limit while driving. Why? Because the odds are in your favor!

I submit to you that this issue will never go away. If you think it can be beat then you should also get rid of all the locks on your house, car, and anything else that is important to you and assume that everyone out there is honest.

This topic comes up with the regularity of someones work getting pirated. I apologize to those that will view me as pessimistic, but I call 'em like I see 'em.

If you really want to make a statement I say get all developers to do what Orbx is doing...all at the same time, but for a month.
 
I think if ORBX had announced of being down for 24 hours for maintenance, nobody would have even shrugged. But now that they are down to protest piracy....:pop4:


Nice going there Francois:applause:
 
Francois said:
A different approach, but suffering much the same or more...... (we're smaller)....

http://simflight.com/2009/08/06/fsaddon-welcomes-software-thieves/
Click to expand...

That's actually a great idea. It brings the issue into the spotlight without slapping your legitimate customers in the face as hard as you can.

One other thing. The FTX-banner states that "... being stolen at a rate of hundreds per second". Is there anything to proof that claim? Hardly think so. And that rate would indicate that during the lock-down alone at least 8.640.000 copies would have been pirated (if you take "hundreds" as the smalles possible - 100). I hardly believe ORBX has even sold 1% of that with all their products combined. So what's about that? ORBX goeing well over the top - with their wording as well as with their action. And naturally every single illegally downloaded copy is a lost sale ...

I'm against piracy as anybody else around her but sometimes I think ORBX should take a cup of coffee and think for a minute before acting. I don't see any sense in that lock-down. It was a neat marketing gag though for sure. But it might as well alienate future customers - because you might never know with what they come up next.
 
Very likely triggered by the same frustration that gets all of us developers, but 'marketing gag' is the proper expression here I think ;-)

Now why didn't I think of it.....
 
That statement was based on the amount of leechers at the time of the creation of the banner which at that stage was 157. Anyway, here is our official statement written by John 'Koorby' Venema :)

First things first - to our dedicated and faithful customers; we apologise for taking away your purchased rights to access the support forums. It was something which I agonised over and you deserve an explanation. For anyone who has had support issues unresolved in the past day, we will bend over backwards to work through them now. Again, please understand the action I took was not to punish you, our much appreciated customers who through your investment in our products allow us to continue to develop more.
So why did I close our sites for a day?
Contrary to many comments on various sites, we were not throwing a dummy spit or tantrum, nor pulling a clever stunt. That suggestion is offensive to us. We're not into gimmicks for gimmicks' sake.
We made a statement, pure and simple.
Cessnock and Hervey Bay airports were our most recent releases. They were both made by a large team of people, most of whom get paid for their work. We pay license fees for the aerial imagery. We lease PC equipment, pay rent, pay every single cent of our taxes, bank fees, reseller commissions, other royalties - the list goes on. And I can emphatically say we used licensed, purchased legitimate software and hardware tools to make those products. Hervey Bay was a long and hard project for us to complete, for a bunch of reasons I don't need to elaborate here. We had a slight delay with its launch due to last minute bugs, and we worked long into the night to honour our commitments to our very loyal customers who had such confidence in Orbx they pre-paid for it. So YHBA was a labour of love, and we sweated blood to make it. And it cost Orbx a LOT of money to make.
So imagine my utter disgust to be emailed and PM'd by half a dozen people the URL of torrent site location hosting a cracked version of YHBA, only a day or so after release. Imagine my absolute dismay to find the person uploading YCNK, YHBA and other products was actually asking for donations to be given to HIM, so HE could upgrade his PC.
Yes, piracy happens. I'm a big enough boy to understand the modern internet-connected world. I've worked in I.T. for 27 years. I don't live under a rock and pretend all human beings are honest and do the right thing. But this was I guess the straw that broke the camel's back. And to those who say they cannot afford to purchase an AU$40 airport I say "bull****!" - look past your nose at your clothes on your back, your PC in front of your face, the food you or your parents purchase, and all the other tech items you've invested in over the year. Claiming poverty is the most appallingly pathetic excuse I have heard, and I cannot believe it is actually being discussed on FS forums as some sort of justification. To quote young Alex, a 17-yo Orbx customer; "Just for the record you have my support 100% over. Im only 17 earning a small $12 an hour or $16 today (sunday) and even I can manage to pay the small cents Orbx asks." - thanks Alex!
Can't afford FS addons? Change hobbies. Enough said.

Why does stealing Orbx software not make sense to us?
- We price our products at the cheap to mid level of the FS market
- We provide (and have proven) the best vendor support in the entire FS industry, bar none
- We give away a complete region (Tasmania, as large as Northern Ireland) for FREE. It comes with a payware quality airport. It has no limits. Want us to seed it to a torrent site? Happy to do so if it provides a perception you're getting something for free (which you are.....)
- We give away about as much freeware as payware (please, please compare that to other FS vendors)
- We founded the team which became OZx. 400 free airfields and now what I believe to be one of the fastest growing FS addon portals in the world.
- We patch, hotfix, service pack and continually improve our software. There is not a single product from Orbx which won't get a free update this year, and that includes our freeware
- We listen to our customers. We try to learn from our mistakes. We sometimes bristle at your critique but we never stop learning and never claim to to perfect.
- We value our customers
- We give away lots of prizes, heck, even a AU$10,000 PC!
I ask you this question - What does Orbx do to deserve to be stolen from? Why is there a perception that it's ok to steal and share the products we have worked so hard to make?
I tell you this fact: We are not making an profit. We have debts to pay. We have 20+ people on various forms of contract and payroll. It costs a lot of money to run this small company.

[size=14pt]Please don't steal from us.[/size]

We've made our statement, our silent protest today - and I hope, even in vain, that it has made some impact on the FS community, particularly those on the 'fringe' who we hope and pray might change their habits from today.
We offer to you our customers an apology for the outage, and hope no trust has been lost. For those who beg to differ, we'll respect your opinion too.
Click to expand...
 
Well, personally I think it is a good "statement" from the Orbx-team. To force down piracy there are some things needed. One is new legislation that reflects current technologies. You can slowly see the legislators "waking up", but since the piracy-problem is an international phenomenon, it ideally needs an international approach.

But the other (IMHO more important thing) is we need to bring back a sense of moral responsibility. The ideas of "good" and "bad" and the consequences if you "go bad":violent:.

For example: what do we really teach our kids? That you have to be "succesful" in society. And how do we measure "success"? Basically by how much stuff you can amass, how many times a year you can go on holidays and if your car is bigger than your neighbours'. And all the ads and TV-programmes only fuel this "more is better"-attitude.
Is it any wonder that kids crumble under such pressures and start looking for the easy way to obtain what they can't afford?

And slighty OT, but what really annoys me is that people are now "having" children (like they're having breakfast) and then burden society with looking after them, because mom and dad both have to work to pay off all the stuff they're buying:a1451:.

@Nonno: there is no such thing as the "right" to get an addon. A developer could tease you with screenshots of the most beautiful addon you've ever seen, and at the end say "I'm not releasing it". That's his or her prerogative. As a matter of fact, you kinda proved my point that our society is based on just three words: "Want, want, want".
 
Oli-TUB said:
That's actually a great idea. It brings the issue into the spotlight without slapping your legitimate customers in the face as hard as you can.

One other thing. The FTX-banner states that "... being stolen at a rate of hundreds per second". Is there anything to proof that claim? Hardly think so. And that rate would indicate that during the lock-down alone at least 8.640.000 copies would have been pirated (if you take "hundreds" as the smalles possible - 100). I hardly believe ORBX has even sold 1% of that with all their products combined. So what's about that? ORBX goeing well over the top - with their wording as well as with their action. And naturally every single illegally downloaded copy is a lost sale ...

I'm against piracy as anybody else around her but sometimes I think ORBX should take a cup of coffee and think for a minute before acting. I don't see any sense in that lock-down. It was a neat marketing gag though for sure. But it might as well alienate future customers - because you might never know with what they come up next.
Click to expand...

As a 3D developer that has been there in a commercial sense outside of FS, I feel their pain and frustration and support them making a statement and trying to make a point. That is the key problem I see, those that have no idea what it's like to have this happen to them and their work comdeming any act that inconveniences them ("customers") and those that do the work and are so incredibly frustrated that there is no clear course of action that will fix this problem (developers) doing things like this to "try" and get others to see what is going on and try to help.

I have no ORBx products, but now I plan to support them with my wallet

Lawman, excellent post and so true!!
 
Well that's the point that I don't really understand. With that action you're hurting the ones, that do support you the most. The pirates sure don't care if a forum is closed or not. And they sure don't care for the signal. And I don't think that the "black market" in unaware of the damage they do. They're simply accepting it and continue on because they can - lack of law enforcement and such.

The problem is that whatever you do (forum shutdown, restrictive activation schemes and the likes) are hurting the legitimate people the most. I don't have an alternative to offer and it's sad to see that so many small teams suffer from that issue.

But what can you do? If you'd implement a scheme that would only allow a single installation/activation and more only on personal request after proven legitimate you'd scare a lot of buyers away because they are not willing to put up with that. And I can understand that very well. Even if you'd make addons that cheap that pirating them would pretty senseless it would still happen.

I don't have a solution at all. You could see the legitimate owners as your base (not or making up or counting pirated copies as lost sales). After all, the ones pirating the addons aren't really the ones living the hobby are they? It's a nasty side effect that you can only hope to endure with some dignity.
 
When I first got FS9 and discovered the addon-market, I must have bought virtually everything left and right and couldn't wait for a new release. However, with FSX I started to buy less. One of the reasons was that I didn't want another copy of an airplane I already owned in FS9 (there are a few exceptions to this rule). More important however is that I've learned how to "wait", meaning I don't have the urge to immediately buy any great looking addon. I thus got more selective in what I buy.

So you have to wait another 24 hours to get an addon. Big deal. As for scaring off customers: if I'm that convinced by the quality of the product that I want to spend money on it, that "conviction" is most likely gonna last another 24 hours. I have addons that I pondered months over before finally taking the plunge.
 
What I would like to know is, do anti-piracy measures actually work? Because if they do work, I might be less inclined to be “put off” by them. Do any of these “features” that make installing, and especially re-installing, these planes such a hassle actually help reduce piracy? I’d like to see some evidence, one way or the other. One side of the argument seems to be that it just simply has no effect whatsoever, and simply annoys and inconveniences the legal customer. The other side of the argument seems to be “you should be thankful to be unconvinced, since we’re helping stamp out piracy.” But these two arguments are about two different things! If these annoying and frustrating anti-piracy measures do not deter or reduce piracy, then what is the argument for continuing their use? I’d like to be convinced that they do work, but so far I’m skeptical…
 
Not really. What they do is delaying the pirated version. Every protection will be cracked sooner or later. Game developers even go that far to take out the protection in a patch later in the lifecycle of a game - I had that happen a few times. The thing is that the major 'damage' is done shortly after a product is released. So those ugly protection schemes work rather well because people who really want the product will go an buy it. People who don't care can download an illegal version months later.

No scheme was so far able to prevent that from happening. The good ones were able to delay a cracked copy for several months though and that's were the most money is earned anyway. So in a way it works.

However it's practically impossible to implement the "best" (or ugliest, depending on where you stand) protection schemes into a package that's "just" a few textures and landclass files. There is no executable or dll there that would call those schemes. With planes it works better like with the Level-D for example.

A major concern about those schemes is another. What happens when the company fades away or "goes into the sunset"? I've read from quite a few people that this is the ultimate concern, not the direct inconvenience. What happens then? You got a legitimate product that you can no longer use because the auth-servers are gone. Stuff like that. And that development teams can vanish rather quickly and silently can be seen with FlightScenery. So with so schemes it's basically a life-long (the life of the company) rental and that's a problem for a few (myself included) in these fast paced days.
 
Two months or so ago I posted my frustration here regarding this guy going by this alias "FSGAMER" who posted my software at piratebay and other torrent sites. I lost what could have been over 2000 (and still counting) customers to this thief. My second product amassed over 3000 leaches at these sites, again thanks to this guy. Well, now we have a name and face to go with his alias. Alain Robert, developer at Alro Creation was able to track him down.<?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:eek:ffice:eek:ffice" /><o:p></o:p>
<o:p></o:p>
Here is FSGAMER's email addresses:<o:p></o:p>
<o:p></o:p>
imrankhanhassan@yahoo.com
imrankhanhassan@gmail.com

Verified here by comparing the profils (photos):

http://www.flickr.com/photos/32325274@N02/
http://www.flickr.com/people/32325274@N02/
http://suprbay.org/member.php?u=91860
http://www.forum.aerosoft.com/index.php?showuser=24346<o:p></o:p>
<o:p> </o:p>
He is either living in <?xml:namespace prefix = st1 ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:eek:ffice:smarttags" /><st1:country-region><st1:place>Sri Lanka</st1:place></st1:country-region> or merely using a host career (domain link) there for his piracy work.<o:p></o:p>
<o:p></o:p>
Admin/mods take note as he sometimes logs in as Hassan Imran Khan at various sites.<o:p></o:p>
<o:p></o:p>
Graham<o:p></o:p>
 
Why bother

wantok said:
Two months or so ago I posted my frustration here regarding this guy going by this alias "FSGAMER" who posted my software at piratebay and other torrent sites. I lost what could have been over 2000 (and still counting) customers to this thief. My second product amassed over 3000 leaches at these sites, again thanks to this guy. Well, now we have a name and face to go with his alias. Alain Robert, developer at Alro Creation was able to track him down.<o:p></o:p>
<o:p></o:p>
Here is FSGAMER's email addresses:<o:p></o:p>
<o:p></o:p>
imrankhanhassan@yahoo.com
imrankhanhassan@gmail.com

Verified here by comparing the profils (photos):

http://www.flickr.com/photos/32325274@N02/
http://www.flickr.com/people/32325274@N02/
http://suprbay.org/member.php?u=91860
http://www.forum.aerosoft.com/index.php?showuser=24346<o:p></o:p>
<o:p> </o:p>
He is either living in <st1:country-region><st1:place>Sri Lanka</st1:place></st1:country-region> or merely using a host career (domain link) there for his piracy work.<o:p></o:p>
<o:p></o:p>
Admin/mods take note as he sometimes logs in as Hassan Imran Khan at various sites.<o:p></o:p>
<o:p></o:p>
Graham<o:p></o:p>
Click to expand...

Hey Wantok,

Why bother reporting pirates on SOH when nothing is done about it? Meshman and myself reported on this very thread that there is a pirate among us, and nothing happens... And this is not just anybody, it's the leader of WoS...

It's beyond me, it really is....
 
PurpleBubble, note that I am very carefull in what I write here and I am sure Admin amd Mod staff are as well. Unless I have anything concrete (my own conclusive verifiable investigation) to go by to accuse Ferguson, I'd refrain from becoming slanderous. Note that the same guy you guys keep touting about signed my logbook at my site here:

http://islandsim.com/19157.html?cc=0.6963971705412284&jump=2

I could have simply jumped the bandwagon with suspicion but just signing the log doesn't make him a thief of my products. Ferguson lives in Philedelphia for all I know as well as yourself, so if you have definite proof, pls call the FBI. The guy I exposed in my post above is. He's been thoroughly investigated (compared notes, followed links, checked whois via domain name, and more) by those of us in the background.

FSGAMER evidently stole my products so I am rightfully exposing him here.

Graham
 
wantok said:
PurpleBubble, note that I am very carefull in what I write here and I am sure Admin amd Mod staff are as well. Unless I have anything concrete (my own conclusive verifiable investigation) to go by to accuse Ferguson, I'd refrain from becoming slanderous. Note that the same guy you guys keep touting about signed my logbook at my site here:

http://islandsim.com/19157.html?cc=0.6963971705412284&jump=2

I could have simply jumped the bandwagon with suspicion but just signing the log doesn't make him a thief of my products. Ferguson lives in Philedelphia for all I know as well as yourself, so if you have definite proof, pls call the FBI. The guy I exposed in my post above is. He's been thoroughly investigated (compared notes, followed links, checked whois via domain name, and more) by those of us in the background.

FSGAMER evidently stole my products so I am rightfully exposing him here.

Graham
Click to expand...
Thank you
yes we do watch and if someone wants to give me concrete evidence
please do, the last thing i want is a witch hunt
we could ban everyone with a name similar or resides in the same area
if anyone has a concrete ip let me have it
H
 
I like the nay-sayers here, isn't it fact that if you do nothing, nothing will ever happen? If everyone just shrugs their shoulders and thinks 'Oh well' haven't we lost already?

This is one of my favourite sayings of my grandfather (I know he got it from someone but I cannot remember who):

'When they came for the feeble of mind, I did not say anything because I was not feeble of mind
When they came for the gypsies, I did not say anything, because I was not a gypsie
When they came for the Jews, I did not say anything because I wasn't a Jew
When they came for the Catholics, I did not say anything because I wasn't a Catholic
When they came for me, there was noone left to say anything'
Click to expand...

I think you can catch the drift of that saying :)
 
Henry said:
Thank you
yes we do watch and if someone wants to give me concrete evidence
please do, the last thing i want is a witch hunt
we could ban everyone with a name similar or resides in the same area
if anyone has a concrete ip let me have it
H
Click to expand...

The concrete evidence of Mr. Fergusson's presence on these forums was given to you with the links to the flightsim.com forum thread. You only have to look at the screenshots therein and compare the content. You don't need to be a genius in TCPIP, just look at the similarities in the text.

Bottom line is, that the ringleader of the biggest FS warez site of the us and the World is a member of these forums and nothing is being done about it. On the flightsim.com forums he even admits all of this.

You can call me dumb but I don't get it...
 
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