Slashdot Mirror
Financial Institutions Balk at MS Licensing
mmol_6453 writes "Now, not only are hospitals groaning under the combination of Microsoft and the HIPAA, but banks are having issues relating to federal privacy laws. Favorite line: 'Microsoft has told...that it plans eventually to eliminate users' ability to disable Microsoft's access to their systems.'"
The article says about SP1: Solely for the purpose of preventing unlicensed use of the applicable OS Software, the OS Components will include installation on your computer of technological measures that are designed to prevent unlicensed use, and Microsoft may use this technology to confirm that you have a licensed copy of the OS Software.
This is done through a product key that is sent to Microsoft over the Internet. That means Microsoft must send an authorization back to your system, says Warby, requiring it to have access to your system.
While I'm no Microsoft licensing fan, I would like to dispel some FUD presented here. The product activation has always been a part of XP, and your system sends the product key number to MS, and not MS going to your system first. After it's activated, MS is not contacted, unless your hardware changes significantly, or you use Windows Update (which does not enforce product key restructions, although the product key is being sent). But in any case, MS never initiates contact with any system.
For SP1 upgrade, the authorization merely checks to see if your product key is one of two that have been widely pirated. It doesn't contact any server at all for this step.
There's 10 types of people in this world, those who understand binary and those who don't.
Don't take offense to this, but your comment sounds like someone who doesn't know alot about businesses that require specific apps to stay in business.
Our office does a ton of work for medical centers and family practices that use software to manage their patient flow and medical records. These programs will ONLY run on Windows using SQL. Sure, there are 2 or 3 out there that run off SCO but the quality of program is inferior to the Windows versions.
NextGen, Alteer, Practice Partner, and Medical Manager our all Windows only apps. These 4 are the the most widely used systems in family practice offices around our area. They don't run on a *nix platform, and they never will.
It's not a case of having to replace workstations, hell that's the easy part. It's a case of the software only running on a specific platform and the server requires it.
My sig of choice is Marlboro
himm... there is something I can't understand here. a contract is void by default if it violates a law, so doesn't this invalidate the appropiate part of the EULA, if the purchaser makes it clear that the software will be used in an environment where privacy is mandated by the law?
i wonder if some sort of equal oppurtunity law would mandate microsoft to provide the software and updates with a licence and a method suitable for banks, hospitals etc.
ato
Sadly though, this is also in windows2000 sp3. So, you'd have to move back to NT 4.0 to be completely safe.
While you may be correct in their intentions, the EULA doesn't specifically state this. Going by just the wording of the EULA, they can do whatever they want, if you have auto-update enabled or not. This is where the problem is. If they specified a clause that would state something to the effect of "unless the user turns off auto-update" or have this EULA addendum pop up when they user enables auto-update with a yes/no box, it would be much, much better. This wording of the EULA in current form of not mentioning any change based on auto-updates being enabled is what is keeping SP3 off of our rdesktop Terminal Server.
Another interesting note is that the EULA for SP3 with the bad text is only there when you install the update, the original Win2k eula.txt is still left unchanged on your hard drive. Makes it kind of confusing, if you ever want to review what you actually agreed to at a later date.
The way it worked was to make something that tasted sufficiently bad, compared to the original, that when they "switched back" to the old formula (actually, the old formula, minus sugar, plus corn syrup), they were sufficiently close to the old formula that people didn't complain about the switch .
Of course, the minor problem with this theory is that Coke was all corn syrup before the switch.
http://www.snopes.com/cokelore/newcoke.asp
Not arguing with your conclusions, but just on a point of information: corn syrup replaced cane sugar in 1980-1. New Coke wasn't conceived until late 1984. (Source: Mark Pendergrast, For God, Country and Coca Cola, London: Orion 1993, pp. 331; 349.)
and Linux is knocking at the door of the MIS. That would mean rooms full of servers and thousands of NT desktops.
Tellers and staff run custom apps, don't have multi-media or ever web browsers on their machines and definitely aren't playing with their machines so M$ latest geegaws are of absolutely no interest.
A usage study has shown that only a small percentage of the features of the Office Suite are actually used and a great deal of the features that M$ wants to reverse engineer into their products (in direct violation of the DMCA they pushed for, which will come back and bite them some day) are already available in other products from vendors with better market focus.
In the second-rate, also-ran, pursuit of Apple's flash and style, M$ has lost focus of their customers, the same boring old desktops that didn't want a computer with a funny name back in 1980.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
An obvious solution - suggested in other comments - is to configure your firewall to prevent your computer from connecting to Microsoft. But Microsoft have a plan for that: UPnP. Universal Plug'n'Play is a protocol supported by an increasing number of "broadband routers" that allows applications to punch holes in your firewall by installing NAT rules. This is attractive for things like chat and video conferencing programs, but it will also allow Microsoft to override any rules you have to prevent unauthorized connections.
Though UPnP works by sending SOAP messages to a small web-server in the router (also used for user configuration), on my router (Alcatel ST510 v4) it bypasses the password protection that you can set for user access to the web server.
Alas, that's only in Excel 97. Don't work in 2K.
Fascism starts when the efficiency of the government becomes more important than the rights of the people.