Stupid Human Tricks
At Ars Technica Nate Anderson has a nice little article: Harry Potter and the Serial Number of Doom.
It would appear that an individual got their hands on an early copy of The Deathly Hallows and decided to spread it around by taking a digital photograph of every page and putting it out over BitTorrent. No doubt s/he will be asked about their motive when this gets to court, as the publisher, Scholastic, is seriously annoyed.
Nate explains why it was a incredibly stupid thing to do and provides the warning that all of your equipment will rat you out. Digital cameras include their make, model, and serial number in the file with the picture. The individual who did this is one subpoena to Canon away from a very major law suit.
If you didn’t know it, all Microsoft products include more information than anyone should know about you computer with every file you save. That’s how the contractor who was working at ATT when he spread the Melissa virus was found – the information was contained in the file.
Anonymity is not an easy thing to achieve these days. It takes work and knowledge.
16 comments
A bone-head stunt if I ever heard of one. Is there anyone on the planet who hasn’t already acquired a copy of Deathly Hallows? What would this nit hope to gain?
Even I, a hardcore paperback lover, buckled under the pressure and bought an HC copy rather than wait another year.
And Spoilers? Eh. I always read the last page of a book anyway — the journey is more important than the destination.
It was a good journey. 🙂
I haven’t bought it yet as I have too much to do right now, and if I get it, I will read it.
I prefer to re-read the whole series before starting the new book, but I have coding to do to earn my crust.
As always, you find gems in the Web. This was particularly interesting. Thanks.
There’s a lot of assumed knowledge among geeks. We assume people know about these things because we learned about them long ago, but most people don’t have the tools that we use every day.
The mystery poster has evidently not spent much time with Adobe, Corel or other photo manipulating software. It is like the people who send out an Adobe document or Word document and think that what you see on the page is all that there is and that unless you were very careful the document contains all of your revisions and deletions as well.
Harry-Poster and the Direly Callow? Isn’t that the successor to Harry-Poster and the Half-Wit Prints?
I suppose we all do stupid things, some from ignorance, some with full knowledge, things that may land us in jail someday… things like writing blogs regularly critical of the Bushist regime, right out in public.
I haven’t bought HP and the DH yet, in part because I have a birthday coming up and I don’t know what Stella has gotten for me, and in part because it will still be there when I am ready for it. The challenge is avoiding spoilers. The previous volume had an almost predictable ending anyway; spoilers would hardly have mattered.
Anya, I did the same with Half-Blood Prince… it was my first hardbound Potter book… but it was a gift.
hunh. my equipment is going to rat out a couple of my friends, a couple of my family members, and a couple of dead people.
You mean the wonderful new version control and collaboration feature, Fallenmonk, with its complete history of the document. Boy, I know a lot of people were clamoring for that along with the dozens of extra fonts no one uses. It pretty much paints a diagram of your hard disk in the meta data for most of the files.
Oh, yeah, Steve, the secret serial number that your printer puts on every page, I’d almost forgotten about that one. Hewlett-Packard and the Designated Hitter? Oh, yeah.
And they won’t give you up like a used Kleenex, right? I know what you mean, Hipparchia. I have software that was purchased by clients for my use on their projects. It is a multi-user license, and that gets confusing.
Now, what was the address to that site? I haven’t bought a copy of the book, yet, and I need to read:) Kidding.
I guess it’s hard to find a way to be anonymous. Best not to do anything that might come back on one.
That always works, OWL.
i’ve been given the website info, but i still prefer to read books as books [while soaking up rays at the beach if possible], so i’ll be waiting. i also want to re-read the series first, which means finding a copy of the book[s?] i’m missing.
and like anya, i’ll read the last page[s] first, then enjoy the journey.
Tsk, Tsk. Ms Rowling doesn’t approve of people who eat dessert before the meal is on the table.
Life is uncertain: Always eat dessert first.
Well, that’s a fact. There’s a report that some of the books are missing a block of pages in the middle – around page 400. That would be a major bummer, like finding the lobster didn’t die.
i saw scads of deathly hallows, hard cover, in tarzhay this evening when i was picking up cat food. i was sorely tempted to break down and buy a copy, but i was afraid they might be those with missing pages. for good or ill, you saved me $17.95+tax. for now.
That news is keeping me from ordering a copy over the ‘Net, although I have a B&N card from XMas I need to empty.