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My college sent warning email regarding pirated software use by students. (programming.dev)

submitted 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 14 points 2 months ago (5 children)

How did they detect it? Did these people install the pirated software on devices owned and managed by the college, or did they use their personal devices and only connect to the network? Anyway, they definitely should have used a VPN.

[–] [email protected] 24 points 2 months ago (4 children)

These softwares use your pc's network connections to send data to the servers which then checks whether you paid a license or not. When they can't use your internet connection, they also add personal information to any file you generate with the softwares such that if you send the file to someone else who has a license they will unknowingly rat on you through their connection.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

Ok then use a firewall like https://github.com/henrypp/simplewall (I assume that this was on Windows) to block these apps' internet access. There are other good options like the Safing Portmaster (which also works on Linux), OpenSnitch (Linux) and LuLu or Little Snitch on macOS. There are many more options for Linux, iptables, nftables, firewalld, or ufw with a GUI like gufw.

they also add personal information to any file you generate with the softwares

In that case, I'm using a VM where there is absolutely no information about me

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 months ago (1 children)

I would absolutely use a VM with no internet connection for these, but then all bets are off if those softwares need direct access to GPU, for example. GPU passthrough is a thing, but I haven't had much luck personally.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

I have a w11 KVM with a 4080 passed through it wasn't as hard as I thought it would be

I highly recommend you try, it's sweet

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