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.
Totally stupid story where a reporter took a minute to grab titles for the Pope from Wikipedia knowing full well that the two people using the illegal copy were in Vatican City, not necessarily even an employee of the Vatican. But for reporters everything seems to be one degree of separation from the Pope.
Though if somebody working in the Vatican was using pirated software I think the greater shock is that they have access to a computer in the first place. Considering the lack of people in the Vatican who don’t seem to even Google something before making an announcement and that some according to some reports some Prefects don’t even have a computer. Though there are of course tech savvy people in the Vatican such as Sister Judith who manages the Vatican website and the servers named after Archangels.
3 comments
A few decades ago, this would have left Jack Webb without a story for Christmas on Dragnet.
It could have been a case of the Holy Father reading a file without his knowing said file was being tagged. The followers did say they wanted to see just how far their software had gone.
I admit to liking the rakish title of “Pirate Pope”, and to the RedHat software.
More likely, it was a couple of people visiting Vatican City with their laptops.