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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....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
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 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!!!!
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 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.
I am going to second this point, as it truly is one of my pet peeves.
The new Securom 4 is absolutely awful about this. I have many friends whose brand new games will not play because Securom tries to do things with their brand new CD-ROM drives that those drives just don't handle well.
What are these customers supposed to do? Buy a new CD-ROM drive? What if that one doesn't work either?
The one solid workaround that I have found is to use Daemon Tools in conjunction with a product like Alcohol 120% to create a perfect MDS image of the CD.
Let's face it. With names like "Daemon Tools" and "Alcohol" these products are clearly not targetting your casual software buyer, who is just as likely as a pirate to be locked out of a game he legally purchased. They won't know what's going on, they just know that their game doesn't work 90% of the time. Oh, and good luck returning that opened software if they simply can't get it to work at all.
The irony here is that anyone who makes an effort to play games illegally is probably familiar with these tools, which is to say precisely the people Safedisc, Securom and others are trying to stop.
Most asinine of all is that the games which have CD-keys and are more or less entirely multiplayer oriented -- Warcraft 3, Unreal Tournament 2003 -- have for some reason adopted the most bleeding edge versions of Securom. Anyone serious about the game is going to need a legitimate copy of the game in order to have a valid CD key! Why force them to have the real CD inserted as well?
So far Bioware, with Neverwinter Nights, gets my award for the most clued-in company in this regard. NWN shipped with Securom 4 support, which was almost immediately disabled by the first patch.
I only wish Blizzard would do the same for Warcraft 3, so I could stop explaining to my friends that everyone gets those "Please insert the game CD" messages, and that their options are: repeatedly click 'OK' until the stars align properly and the game decides you're not evil; or, use an MDS image with Daemon Tools and you won't have any more trouble.
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
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.
Except, of course, this WAS the enterprise addition.
"I drank what?" - Socrates