Inevitably though, quality is sometimes a little lacking. A copy iPhone might look all good on the surface (until you use the OS), and a copied TAG watch might tell the correct time (twice a day at least), but sometimes buyers get a product that exceeds all expectations.

Over in Russia a computer engineer located near the Chinese border had quite a surprise when a customer brought a 500GB hard drive in for repair.

According to the casing it was a very nice Samsung product, but somehow it had ceased functioning. Indeed, it hadn’t functioned properly since the beginning.

The drive itself reported its full capacity and initially seemed to behave correctly when files were transferred to it. The owner had apparently copied a 1.5GB movie to the drive, but somehow only the last few minutes of the movie were being stored.

Time to open up the case and have a little look inside.

What you’re looking at there is a couple of large metal nuts (presumably for some authentic ‘weighting’) which are together caressing a 128Mb flash drive.

But here’s the clever bit. The drive cleverly sucks data in from the host computer until it’s full and then starts dumping data until all it’s left with is the last part of the file. All other files on the drive stay intact and the file size of the now incomplete file is reported correctly.

File-sharers are apparently buying these drives in good faith and are getting ripped off and left with nowhere to put their stuff. If we can find out the name of the domain selling these devices we’ll send it over to ICE so they can have it seized….

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

“ISPs often advertise music as a benefit of signing up to their service, but facilitate the illegal swapping on copyright infringing music on a grand scale.”

It’s kind of a strange statement, what is copyright infringing music anyway? As far as I know music in itself cannot infringe copyright. Apart from this (and other speling errors), their point just doesn’t make any sense. Sure, ISPs advertise their high speed connection with phrases like “download as much music as you want”, but they never say “download as much copyrighted music as you want”. I guess the IFPI doesn’t know that there are plenty of legal services available where you can download music for free, such as Jamendo.

To make it even more funny, the IFPI also takes on The Pirate Bay by stating:

“Pirate Bay, one of the flagships of the anti-copyright movement, makes thousands of euros from advertising on its site, while maintaining its anti-establishment “free music” rhetoric.”

First of all, they probably mean advertisements, but even then their statement doesn’t make sense. Sure, The Pirate Bay generates revenue from the ads on their site, but most of it is used to pay the 20+ servers they need to keep the site up and running and the bandwidth bills. And even if they were millionaires, that doesn’t make the music less free does it?.

Those are not the only “inconvenient truths” that don’t make sense, there are a whole bunch of them. The “truth” that piracy doesn’t create jobs, tax revenues and economic growth for example, as far as I know it does. What about all the high speed internet connections pirates use, those are not free. Or iPods, harddrives, CDs and DVDs pirates use to store all their pirated stuff? There are plenty examples I can come up with that show that piracy is creating a lot of Jobs, tax revenues, and even economic growth.

The only thing that’s inconvenient about the inconvenient truths summed up by the IFPI is the fact that they’re not true.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.