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Corporations Suffer Microsoft Activation Bug
Uncle Bob writes "Trustworthy Computing, eat your heart out! As of the 2003-04-14 update, people are reporting that Office 2000 SR1a is now asking to be "registered" again. And again, and again. Very little information has been posted on the traditional news sites (the only link I could find was The Register. Note - The Register's story is not quite accurate, but the registration bug is real. Our company with approx 80,000 PCs has been hit...."
"You have successfully activated Microsoft Office 2000.
Your computer will resume crashing.
Trolling is a art,
The solutions microsoft has suggested to us thus far:
- Set the clock back two years. Means all our files have
bad datestamps, and interferes with our content management
system, so this is not an option.
- Go through a four page process to clean the registry.
This leaves you at a point where Office starts again,
but it is still complaining upon startup. IE you still only
have 50 times before you need to do this again.
- Install new site license key. They've promised we'll
get the opportunity to try that RSN. No idea if/when they'll
get us a key - they've been stalling on this one. It could
be that it's impossible without another patch first.
Are we happy? Oh noo....To OpenOffice.org(No Reg Required). Openoffice is now to the point where it is more than adequate for 90% of MS Office users, especially those who just use word and powerpoint. For the other 10%, just keep using MS Office.
If the Reg is false, then what's the true story?
The dude didn't say "false", he said "The Register's story is not quite accurate, but the registration bug is real.". What part of that did you not get? The article referenced doesn't get *EVERY TINY LITTLE DETAIL* right, but the fact still remains that this is something that I get to look forward to getting calls and e-mails about in the VERY near future (I'm the Admin...).
I'm not a prophet or a stone-age man,
I'm just a mortal with potential of a super man.
Nice bug. They really encourage people to pirate so-called corporate versions (no activation needed).
I'm looking forward to a day when BSA (and other above-law organisations) will enforce all win users to buy ms licences for everything they use. That'd be a happy day for Linux.
how long before someone sues microsoft for lost time/effort , 80000 pc's for a single company.. how many pc's total? Could it be in the millions?
The only thing I can think of protecting mircrosoft would be the EULA, but im no expert in that area.
Selling software wont make you money, selling a service will.
Yes, and imagine the hell (and cost) when all 80,000 users are confused about how to use their computer and half of their complex .doc and powerpoint documents don't work right.
I think Microsoft have gone a little overboard this time.. maybe they got the licence code crossed with the auto save..
"It has been fifteen minutes since you last entered your licence number, would you like to enter it again now? [Yes] [Yes] or [YES!]"
-- Jim.
-- If at first you don't succeed, lie!
Every time I hear that software price is only a small consideration in TCO, I wonder where licensing administration goes in that TCO. Be sure to file this one in there too.
I've also never seen acquisition costs for free software, "well I've got a meeting with the vendor this afternoon. we're gonna haggle over the price of 20 seats."
t
So far we've seen:
products which won't work after 30 days until you "activate them" (Win XP, Office XP, Autocad, etc),
games which install fully to your hard-drive but require the CD in to be played,
games which require a CD key to be played online (try playing a second-hand game online!),
games which won't work with certain CD drives thanks to the way the Safedisk copy protection system works,
programs which require you to enter a particular word or phrase from the manual every time you want to use it,
CDs which stop you from making a legal backup copy,
DVDs which only work if you are in a particular region, or use a particular OS, not to mention Macrovision problems
etc etc. Yet the people who pirate products rarely have any of the above mentioned problems. OK, so they have to keep up-to-date with keygens and no-CD patches, but my point is that ordinary consumers are penalised for the crimes of others.
Sorry, but my karma just ran over your dogma.
I'd say between 4 to 8 million dollars(probably over a 4 to 5 year year period given the lifetime of PCs in corporate environments), but only if Dell would only offer workstations with Linux preinstalled for less than those with windows.
Dell is the next windows gatekeeper.
With a company that large support costs would be substancial. We both know they are not shelling out a per computer licensing fee, but probably have site licenses that are actually rumored to be cost efficent. [we use SuSE on all our servers, and some of our desktops but we are also significantly smaller and did not change systems mid stride]
The main cost here would not be the licensing, but rather the training until the same level expertise is reached with the new system for the workstation user (lost man hours, actual cost of training etc.) and support costs.
I don't know what the acceptable standard is of system administrators to users, but lets say 100 users need a support staff of 3-5 people (depending on the field of expertise, shifts, back up personel, crisis management etc.) to gurantee uptime somewhere near 99.9% of the time. The avg. college kid can probably work as an intern in a lot of these when it comes to M$ based solutions, but when you go off into the world of Unices, where people actually need to have a basic understanding of what is happening support costs (and the avg. wage of the staff) would skyrocket. So grudgingly, I have to say that Open source would probably not be the answer for them, unless they phase it in through usual upgrade cycles and develop an efficent system for training (and that is very much an 'if')
"Nimis exaltatus rex sedet in vertice - caveat ruinam!"
this comment should never have been modded up. Rather than to Moderate it "overrated" as I believe it is, I chose to forgo my moderation privileges in this story to express my disgust.
/Grumble
This comment is not even close to being "insightful" its simply a whore's ploy to suck up to the slashdot mentality by offering a canned statement. For this opinion to be insightful, some sort of evidence would have had to be expressed.
Furtthermore, if this was in fact a satire of the slashdot community, as I must wonder if it is, then that should have been made far more apparent.
CollegeBlows.com: Because College Blows.
"Developers, developers, developers, developers.."
Modest doubt is called the beacon of the wise. - William Shakespeare
Micro$oft was looking for a way to force people to upgrade to the new licensing plan. Looks like they've found a way. Bastards.
I, however, am unaffected by this tragic event. I'm a happy Apple Macinotsh owner who uses Mac OS X and OpenOffice.
Really, there is no reason why corporations have to stay with M$; OpenOffice is good enough for the average business user.
This is one good reason why things like online registration and verification (like Windows XP has), and certain flavours of DRM, are flawed. There's the obvious privacy concerns as well, but this is a good example to show your friends, family and bosses why this stuff is bad. They might care less about privacy and rights, but they will care that, when a registration or DRM scheme will screw up, you will not get the benefit of the doubt!. Instead you will be locked out of your system and/or data.
This is a problem that PHBs, legislators and your dear old granny can understand, so spread the word.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
That outside of the register and slashdot there's no mention of this bug? Google turns up empty, nothing in the MSDN.
Apparently it's affecting few systems, and not every install of SR1a, else it would be major news and be covered by mainstream media, and there'd be a downloadable patch or something.
Could it be some sort of user error? Installing as an unprivelidged user, or using some automated registry cleaner? Or Gator? Gator wrecks a lot of stuff, ya know.
It isnt affecting anything in our office, or any of our clients.
Is it possible that linux zealots are making a mountain out of a molehill? Nah, that's unpossible.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
Dang, I thought you said gelded .
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
Well least it gets round the problem of any pirated software. No one can run anything now :)
rus
Cheap UK and US VPS
My mom used to work with a division of IBM and when I heard how large just their NC buildings were, I thought the same thing - wow, now I see where MS makes its money.
Then I wondered about switching to Linux and how much that would *save* them.
I mentioned that to my mom and she said that they discussed it many times, but they ran figures on how much money they spent/lost just switching from one *program* to another (training and help desk support), let alone to a whole new operating system.
She was in the department that hired temps and they used software that scanned in resumes and then fed them to a database and allowed searches on it and such. At the time, I worked for a company that had a superior product to what they had, it was cheaper, and had a better UI. She said in order for them to switch (after they looked into it), due mostly to training, it would add on over $2million in costs to the overall price - and their current system "worked" so they were going to change. And that was just her group which was "only" a few thousand people.
You could argue that were the software easy enough to work with, you wouldn't need to train the users... but if you think that way, you give the users WAY too much credit - something one learns quickly in the software industry - if you are writing software for end users, remember that your end users are fat dumber than you can ever estimate.
Essentially the only way you could switch (easily and cost effectively) over an office is if it were very small, and if the users were already relatively tech savvy.
for the most part, any savings in OS and program cost is lost in productivity lost during the switch and the increased support for people that are essentially all newbies at that point.
There are some odd things afoot now, in the Villa Straylight.
I think that will happen soon...
I work for the help desk of a company that supports 30,000 windows PC's, and while we have never officially deployed or distributed Office 2000, we do have a few users that have it installed. We got an advisory from our backline support that this problem is discussed in a technical article Microsoft provided to its partners. The partner-level article is 816642 - You Cannot Register Office 2000 After You Change the System Date. The link is https://premier.microsoft.com/premier/library/defa ult.aspx?path=/premier/kb/en-us/816/6/42.ASP?KBID= 816642 , but if you don't have premium support, you can't view it, and I can't find a mirror of it via Google.
The cause? Well, the issue appears related to the "End of life" code written into the product, which is what that article discusses. Apparently, Microsoft coded Office 2000 to 'expire' and to need to be reativated at some point, but apparently there's a glitch in that code that causes it to happen over and over again.
"Our company with approx 80,000 PCs has been hit...."
Maybe if your SysAdmin had spent some time testing the patch first, you wouldn't be in this situation now.
Here's the quick guide:
If your company needs some sysadmins with a clue, I'm sure you can find some over at Kuro5hin.
It's been proven time and time again but greedy software corps just don't get it. I've seen this time and time again since the old CP/M and Apple II days.
Repeat after me:
"Copy protection does NOT prevent piracy enough to make up for the inconvenience suffered by and resulting ill will of legitimate customers. Never has, never will."
All of these are excellent products and I can have them for nothing if I want. How do you explain how they got to be excellent products, given your "business model" argument?
Reality is defined by the maddest person in the room
Apparently it's affecting few systems, and not every install of SR1a, else it would be major news and be covered by mainstream media, and there'd be a downloadable patch or something.
... far better to have used
Or (much more likely) many of those same "news" organizations use the very product they cannot use today.
Though I say that somewhat tongue in cheeck, it is quite possible Microsoft is excersizing its economic and legal muscle (threat of lawsuits etc.) to keep a number of customers and news sites quiet.
Another factor is quite possibly that most people (rightfully) mistrust Microsoft and only upgrade when they are compelled to (e.g. purchasing new hardware, renewing a support contract with the Evil Empire, and so on). That being the case, most people who have stayed away from XP (the majority of Windows users), and those who are running old-enough versions to be unaffected, will not have been so crippled. This time.
Whatever the reason, this is akin to the lack of DMCA criticism seen in the mainstream media (which is a part of the very cartels benefiting from the DMCA), the lack of skepticism in the reporting of "trusted computing", "DRM", "Palladium", et. al. Clearly it has been reported in a couple of places, and very obviously it is affecting a fair number of people.
Silence doesn't mean nothing is going on. The fact that a few journalists have enough integrity to point out a story others either can't, or won't, report doesn't mean there is nothing going on. Did you really expect MSNBC to say something bad about Microsoft's core strategy ("trusted" computing)? They may hold their punches on bug reports and security alerts, but with something this important to their long-term monopolistic strategies you can bet they'll pull all the stops out to keep things as quiet as they can. We have seen such strong-arm tactics in the past WRT PC Magazine and others, back in the late 1980s and early 1990s when Microsoft was building its first monopoly. Expect to see such successful tactics used in a similair fashion as Microsoft seeks to encode its monopoly into every PC at the hardware level, and into every program at the software level through trusted key exchange and encryption protocols (Palladium, TCPA, DRM, etc.).
Whether or not this particular instance is an example of such strong-arm, corporate censorship and intimidation isn't really important (I merely point out that such things have come out of Redmond in the past, and can be expected to again), it is important to remember that, in a Palladium/TCPA/DRM/Microsoft world, the ability of anyone to report any kind of failure of this kind will be reduced to zero as more and more people adopt such crippled technologies. For purely technical, if not both technical and political/litigious, reasons.
The only real protection for people's data, freedom (including that of expression), and their ability to use the hardware and software they have purchased is to use uncrippled software. Right now those choices are limited to Apple and Free Software (on the consumer end), and to various non-Microsoft systems on the higher end (workstation/server). Of all those, only free software is guaranteed to remain uncrippled in perpetuity; all of the others can (and will, if it is deemed to be profitable) cripple their software at any time in the future whenever they so desire.
Which is why anyone taking a long term view toward protecting and preserving the integrity and accessiblity of their data must at least consider using free software, and deploying it wherever possible.
Open formats are good (and important), but open implimentations are really required for true safety. What good is an open format if only one company has adopted it, no free software to read it exists, and that company goes under? Not much, particularly if that format is difficult or cumbersome to impliment. Now you get to pay someone to reimpliment that open format in order to get at your data
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
The reason that they won't touch OSS is because they perceive risk to their careers in going with it. It's not that OSS is more or less buggy, it's a matter of them having to take the blame if it goes badly. If you buy from a proprietary software vendor, then you've got somebody that you are paying, that you can yell at if things go wrong. The decision to use their software won't ever be questioned, and either they'll be made to fix it, or another vendor will be chosen. The decision to pick that vendor will likely never be questioned as long as the manager can show some due diligence in making the decision.
On the other hand, if they choose an open source product, if there is a bug, there's nobody to pass the buck too. So the manager is taking on the burden of responsibility if that software does have bugs in it. He'll be perceived as exposing the company to unnecessary risk just to save a few bucks.
This is part of an overall attitude problem in corporate america. Managers, generally, suffer more for a mistake than they gain for a success. Success is expected, that's doing your job. Failure is incompetence. Of course failure caused by an effort to get the company ahead of the game is still failure, so why take the risk. Hire contractors, and pay for software vendors because if there is a mistake you just dump the blame onto them, cut ties, and your job is secure.
This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service
The main cost here would not be the licensing, but rather the training until the same level expertise is reached with the new system for the workstation user (lost man hours, actual cost of training etc.) and support costs.
Right (if the licencing costs are not REALLY high.) But the training is once and the support costs are ongoing. Support cost differences quickly dominate once you're over the hump.
[... assume] 100 users need a support staff of 3-5 people [...] The avg. college kid can probably work as an intern in a lot of these when it comes to M$ based solutions, but when you go off into the world of Unices, where people actually need to have a basic understanding of what is happening support costs (and the avg. wage of the staff) would skyrocket
I think you're off on using an intern for support. That misses the added costs incurred when he hits the problems he CAN'T handle correctly - both the added costs of worker/application/business-process downtime while he calls for more trained help and the added costs ditto.
But the BIG thing your analysis missed - which the TCO studies funded by others than Microsoft catch - is the effect of the higher reliability of open-source solutions. This reduces costs two ways:
First: Though you need people who know what they're doing, you need a MUCH SMALLER NUMBER of them, because they put in much less time per-machine.
Second: Because things don't fail as often, your business processes have LESS DOWNTIME. So you get back a LOT of productivity in those hundreds of workers who spend more of their time working and less of it waiting for the helpdesk.
That last factor is another component of why open-source has achieved penetration in servers first. Different functions have different costs of downtime. For a generic worker it varies a lot depending on your particular business and the workers function in it, while the costs accrue in one department and the benefits in another. For a server - especially a business-critical-function server - the costs of downtime are almost always very high, while the server is bought and administered by the same department that handles its maintenance, making all three components of its TCO visible to the same bosses.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
If sun knew what was good for them, they would fedex a copy of Star Office with a license allowing the company to use the current version forever for free to every major company that got nailed by this. If any of thouse compaiens took the StarOffice solution, then they would be making a killing on license fees with the next version or else they are out the cost of a fedex packet and a CD. Considering how much sun sends out anyway, it makes me wondering whats going on inside their marketing department... Oh never mind its a marketing department so nothing useful is going on.
I wondered about switching to Linux and how much that would *save* them.
I mentioned that [...] and she said that they discussed it many times, but they ran figures on how much money they spent/lost just switching from one *program* to another (training and help desk support), let alone to a whole new operating system [,,,]
Their concerns are genuine. But their experience has no doubt been largely with switching between one Microsoft- or Mainframe-based application and another. Things may have changed a lot.
It's a pity she's no longer with IBM. Since they're now spending billions on Linux support her department would have a well-funded in-house helper and upper-management buyin for an experiment the next time the issue came up. (And her department's management would get interdepartmental-cooperation brownie points for trying it, too.)
Such an experiment for IBM would be a benefit regardless of the outcome. If it failed, the Linux people could analyze why and help the open-source community fix it. If it succeeded they could trumpet it to the business world in their next press push. B-)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
That our company has switched over to OpenOffice exclusively. It's been a year since we switched over from Microsoft Office, and there have only had a handful of documents that have had MS Office/Open Office incompatibilities.
Plus, OpenOffice is totally free. Retraining was a non-issue. We told the employees when we switched over that they were welcome to use MS Office, but they would have to buy the software themselves and keep the licenses handy. There were no complaints about switching over after that.
So we can sit back smugly as all of our branches are unaffected and read stories like this without blanching :) If you haven't checked out OpenOffice, I highly recommend that you do.
We hang the petty thieves, but appoint the great ones to public office. - Aesop
Office 2000 came in Standard, Professional and Developer. No Access, with Access and Acces plus extra dev tools respectively.
These can be purchased under four licensing levels:
1. Individual Retail: High unit cost, includes CD, with single-use registration key.
2. Open: Lower unit cost, CD bought separately (C$30), multiple-use registration key.
3. Select: Even lower unit cost, CD included, no registration required.
4. Enterprise: Select with Software Assurance.
Note that it is only the latter two where registration should not be required that are being affected.
If you don't want to repeat the past, stop living in it.
Why attack the encryption algorithm directly? Instead reverse engineer and bypass the parts of the OS that invoke the license checks. Or fool the probes which try to determine your hardware signatures. "Borrow" a key. Or for that matter just be sure to run IIS, as it lets perfect strangers run any applications they want on your computer, it should just as easily let you use your own computer too without any security checks
I do have two important observations though:
Join Tor today!
Free != free
My Dads old employee used to have a really good CAD program for designing chips. It was developed inhouse. They could have sold it but management said: "We are a hardware company not a software company." Now they pay $10K per seat for similar software.
90% of developers don't produce software that is sold by the companies they work for. They produce software that the company uses. Anything that can lower development costs is a good thing.
That mindset has always been silly and now it's dangerous. What happens to a moron who keeps buying stuff that sucks when he could get stuff that works for much less? Hmmm? The test case implementations of Linux enterprise wide are out and enough people know about them that it's in Forbes and the Economist read by the big dogs. The folks mindlessly clinging to M$ are going to be reduced to very few and fired. They can then go home and practice with pirated XP junk till the BSA hauls them to jail.
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
People are often not busy with being right or wrong. First they need to feel secure before they can learn new things. Weird but true. If you say that they should use linux, you essentially say they've been wrong big time == insecure feeling.
It is their insecurity that hits you.
nosig today
The parade is to dust that older sign saying "Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM". Which also has exceptions but hush.
Get the management to contact IBM Services, a branch of Big Blue that make half the revenue of IBM these days. They would be very happy to discuss Linux solutions for the company and will do support as well -- for a price of course.
Then some PHB will notice that since this open source thingy is free and you only pay for service, Joe Schmoe in IT can install and use open source tools if that saves money.... And you win.
--
Mad science! Robots! Underwear! Cute girls! Full comic online! http://www.girlgeniusonline.com/
Except, of course, this WAS the enterprise addition.
"I drank what?" - Socrates
I use Office for a variety of data analysis tasks, and I rarely have a document more complicated than a letter that doesn't get corrupted in some way when making the transition. Even simple graphs lose their axes (or worse). More complicated plots get completely corrupted. I've never had a powerpoint presentation that opened correctly.
Additionally, openoffice's implementation of the spreadsheet is a certified joke. It is missing many of the statistical functions from excel, making life difficult. Also, it's not smart enough to determine what app goes with a certain file. For example, if I have an ASCII datafile, I have to tell it every time to open it as CSV, or it opens it in the word processor (and that gets really OLD quickly, especially when you're editing a lot of files and forget to keep doing it).
I do support wholeheartedly the idea of an open source office suite, but OpenOffice isn't yet ready. If you've had good fortune with file conversion, you are truly lucky. And I've found OO to be kludgey even outside of conversion, even missing features. I never thought I'd see a worse designed UI than MSOffice, but Star/Open Office nailed it.
Don't ever set your clock back. Some other copy protection schemes, such as Globetrotter/Macrovision's FLEXLM, interpret that as an attempt to extend an expired license and lock out the license. (FLEXLM returns an error code of -88) Worse, FLEXLM records, in some secret place, that this has happened. Setting the clock forward again may not fix it. One Softimage|3D manual said that the computer had to be discarded if this had happened.
The solution is rather obvious: when you propose an Open Source Software solution, you must also include the costs of paying someone else (such as IBM) to provide support.
Finding God in a Dog
Wouldn't it be more effective if the paperclip would only go away after you have registered? ;)
That would give them product registrations AND extended exposure for their mascot.
And as an additional bonus, users could be driven insane by the clip - less work for the tech hotlines (ohhh... blue and white colours... shiny...) and increased sales on M$ products (sure, give me more, *giggle* Word, Powerpoint, gotta catch them all *drool*)
+++ MELON MELON MELON +++ Out of Cheese Error +++ redo from start +++
Remember, it's not really a bug in the software, it's a liscensing feature!
Awk! Pieces of eight. Pieces of eight. Pieces of seven... ERROR: General Protection Fault. [Paroty Error.]
This error can occur in (AFAIK) the first version of Microsoft Office 2000, on at least Windows NT (SP6a) and Windows 2000 (original release).
/local administrator/ and then click 'No'. I suspect the reason is that when you submit your answer, Office tries to amend a file or registry key that is writable only by local administrator, and so it fails.
Within the first few seconds of running Office, users are prompted with the one line message:
"Do you wish to register Microsoft Office 2000 Professional?"
Whether the users click Yes or No, Office (whether it be Word|Excel|Access|Publisher|Powerpoint) just simply exits.
It had me confused for a bit, until I realised that you have to log on to the machine as
Once this has been done once per machine, Office 2000 has worked fine for us.
Presumably this simple fix no longer applies for Office 2000 SR1a, since it made a Slashdot post.
MS has effectively been able to disable an application suite that has been purchased, based on a date.
It won't take much more for them to figure out how to make it so that its part of an application service pack update.
And how much harder would this be to tie into an OS. Instead of a blue screen of death, you'd get nothing. Heck, imagine trying to boot your system and getting nothing.
Some say MS would never do this, that it would hurt the market too much.
But how many people don't rush out to get the new OS, who stay 2 or more versions behind, who really don't care about upgrading.
The next update you get from MS could render your system inoperable after a few years. ***wisecracks left out***
"Hmm... we need to disable Win2k systems so that we can drive market sales for our next OS we release in 2005."
You're typing it yourself and you're still missing it. SP != SR. You're correct that O2K is currently at Service Pack 3 (SP3), but there was a Service Release 1 (SR1 [and SR1a]) of O2K some time ago.
For instance, MOUS testing software is *extremely* picky, and must be installed onto a machine with Office 2K SR1 SP2. STAB @ that.
I'm against picketing, but I don't know how to show it.
I was asked today if I wanted to register my copy Word 2000 with Microsoft. I of course said no and went along with my business as it is not required for it to run. I do not have Office, just Word, actually have MS Works & Money too, it all came preinstalled, though I believe was sold as "Microsoft Works Suite 2000" or something like that. Yes, my computer is really old and slow for me to have this...I know that's what you're thinking.
That our company has switched over to OpenOffice exclusively.
Plus, OpenOffice is totally free.
Since you're using OpenOffice at your company, you might be interested to know that you could be in violation of the gpc (general polygon clipping library) license. gpc, which is often mistaken for a GNU item since it starts with a 'g', is required to build OpenOffice. However (and I've never seen this mentioned or reported anywhere), it comes with a very restrictive 'non-commercial-use' license. Presumably anything linked with it (like OpenOffice) should also be considered for 'non-commercial-use' only as well, right?
To me this is a major problem. I'm also not thrilled to see it require Java. We need a good free, open source office suite for free operating systems, but I don't think this is it.