Today I encountered a commenter on Cerulean Studios’ blog, named John, who stated the following:

I’ll be honest and say that I’m one of many who have pirated an alpha build of Astra without an Astra account. I do realize that I’m missing a number of features but… I don’t feel like I’ve lost out. I upgraded to Windows Vista when it launched and wanted a pretty new IM client… and Astra was the top choice.

John also went on to state a caveat to all other pirates who would dare steal Cerulean Studios’ next flagship product, Trillian Astra, that in its essence said that the alpha build had a lot of bugs and the user pirates at his or her own risk. He also stated that there is no reason for anyone to want to get in on an alpha program to quickly. To his statements, I must ask: When is piracy okay?

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It was a dark and stormy night. Jason Rappaport, headache medicine by his side, puts the DVD disc into the burner at 2am. He has planned this since the day before, although his headache has made him do it all a bit earlier than he wanted to. Despite this, he will overcome the pain of looking at a flickering screen in order to try out Microsoft’s latest public stable release of their new OS, Windows Vista.

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It’s not a recent discovery. Songbird’s proof-of-concept build has been around for a while. Maybe you use it. Maybe you even use it to listen to stuff on TJE. Maybe you don’t know what it is, and would like some info on what I’m talking about. If you’d like to know more, read on, reader, read on.

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