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Microsoft Blocking Wine Users From Downloads Site
IamTheRealMike writes "In January, Microsoft announced a new anti-piracy initiative called
Genuine Advantage. From this summer onwards all users of Microsoft Downloads will be required to validate using either an ActiveX control or a standalone tool. Yesterday Ivan Leo Puoti, a Wine developer, discovered that the validation tool checks directly for Wine and bails out with a generic error when found. This is significant as it's not only the first time Microsoft has actively discriminated against users running their programs via Wine, but it's also the first time they've broken radio silence on the project."
Newsflash: Microsoft restricts Windows downloads to people that actually purchase their product!
Let's all get together on Slashdot and WINE about it...
"When the president does it, that means it's not illegal." - Richard M. Nixon
It isn't like there is anything particularly ugly about what Microsoft is doing. I mean, they really don't have an obligation to provide downloads of wine users, who are using a (somewhat) compatible competing system rather than theirs.
I use wine to run some things, and I have not paid a dime to microsoft, so I don't exactly expect them to provide me with any services.
Windows 3.1 deliberately refused to run under DR-DOS, the competitor to MS-DOS at the time. The deliberately vague error was caused by a block of obfuscated code--google for DR-DOS AARD.
One CPU cycle wasted on digital restrictions management is ONE TOO MANY.
If it's checking to see if you have genuine windows, and it bails out because you're running WINE under Linux, then it is doing it's job correctly.
Wouldn't we be complaining if it *wasn't* working right?
Blocking suspected software pirates from downloading security patches and their new anti-spyware software is bad enough.
Now they're blocking competing software applications from downloading them as well? They're fortunate that there isn't an outcry to make them pay to ship billions of CDs to registered users of Windows. They should be thrilled that people are willing to take the time to download their patches, regardless of whether they can prove their licensing or what other software they run.
This is just incredibly idiotic. Secure and spyware-free Windows boxes mean less spam and other nuisances for everyone on the Internet. I thought Microsoft has supposedly declared war on such things - I guess not.
I'm a big tall mofo.
While I disagree with the action, Microsoft does have the right to not allow "service" to whomever it wants as a business.
Will Wine fight back? Hmm...
Unless you can prove you have a license, they dont have to give you squat.
Having wine installed inst a license to use their DLL's. And in some
cases, even Microsoft applications you have *purchased*. Read your EULA's closely people.
Sure, its irritating as hell, and will make updating to run newer applicatinos a pain, but well within their legal rights.
Best solution is not to have to run wine if at all possible.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
It's just the same idea of 'compatibility' for Microsoft - changes are intended to break competitor's products.
Microsoft is committing one anti-trust violation after the other and continues to ignore any of the court decision that have been made regarding Microsoft's criminal practices. I simply can't understand how any company can get away with such violations over and over again, especially illegaly forcing vendors to bundle Microsoft's Windows with any sold computer system. This is a clear violation of existing law and previous court decisions in the Microsoft case.
"DOS ain't done until Lotus won't run!"
Well for what ever reason Microsoft did this, I am guessing it is alittle late to try to stop wine. I am sure the guys at Codeweavers have already started thinking how they will either trick Microsoft (in the case where you own the software) or replace Microsoft. Hell Codeweavers could just tell people the names of the Windows files they need and I am sure people will be trading them on a p2p somewhere.
just because your a schizophrenic doesn't mean people arn't really out to get you
Wouldn't (shouldn't?) this violate some sort of anti-whatever judgement they've been slapped with somewhere?
If your panties are in that much of a twist, why don't you just have a friend dl and burn to a cd? Or, go to your nearest windows machine, then share out the file? It's not the end of the world.
I haven't lost my mind. It's backed up on disk somewhere.
...to support his childish claims about OSS software having poor interoperability.
For me it's just another good reason to stay well clear from a software company with such business tactics.
---- MISSING MISCELLANEOUS DATA SEGMENT --- [sigdash] trolololol
Reminds me of this...
How MS played the incompatibility card against DR-DOS
If only MS had released a suite for Linux about 2 years ago, they'd be sailing pretty by now.
No they wouldn't. Linux people don't want to pay US$400 to use MS Office.
It's bad because they, under the guise of anti-piracy, (which some may compare to anti-terrorism initiatives) blocked WINE, and made it seem as though it was a pirated product.
To my knowledge WINE is an emulator for windows, so that windows programs may be run without purchasing windows. It is NOT some sort of cracked version of windows. We all know Microsoft hates losing the bling bling, but few linux users are likely to front said bling on top of the cost for the windows program. It comes out to probably 100-2000$ depending on the program, and the cost of Windows Xp Home(which i use because it only costs 100 bucks for easy typing).
That said, WINE shouldn't be reliant on Microsoft for updates. The WINE community should fix it(if it is a bug), no handout thank-you. And Microsoft is not responsible for WINE, they should just plainly state "WINE is not a supported Microsoft product and therefore does not get updates"
Putting this under some cover is bad, and shows microsofts(already known) business tendancies, to be sneaky and mean.
Sneaky-snake!
Check journal for info on Anti-TextBook, an idea by me.
Who wants to download something from Microsoft using Wine?
I don't get the point of doing that.
ajf
Realistically, Microsoft isn't going to put themselves out of business, with this stupid trick or any other. They'll be around, and be a damn big company, for a veeery long time.
What I do hope and halfway expect will happen is that they'll find themselves "in trouble" by Wall Street standards -- steadily declining profits turning into steady losses, with a corresponding implosion in stock proce -- and that this will force them to become a good company making a good product at a good price in order to gain their customers' trust and support. It's happened before; if someone had told me 20 years, hell, 10 years, ago that IBM in the 21st c. would be considered one of the good guys, I'd have laughed my ass off.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
If it is Microsoft downloads doing this, then does this apply to Office? I have a licensed version of Office 2000 Pro. It is not on my Windows box, which has a licensed copy of Office 2003. I have the Office 2000 Pro installed on my Linux box, running under Crossover Office/Wine. Does this mean that I cannot get updates for a licensed copy that is only used on one PC, as per the license? That seems to be a violation of my rights as a consumer - I purchased one license and am only using it on one PC, so give me my updates!
A lot of people are saying MS has the right to restrict downloads to people who own their software. I agree that they are liable to their customers, but some of their customers run wine.
I have a legal copy of Windows which is currently unused. I don't like dual booting. I don't like running under an x86 emulator. I like using Wine (or commercial variants of it) if I absolutely need to run win32 software. At the very least, my license to Windows should entitle me to downloads from MS--not whether or not I am using Windows to download them. They should at least give you the opportunity to enter in your product key. I'd still feel like this was obnoxious & be pissed at them, but at least people in a similar situation would be able to download programs from them.
I think what many object to is that they're being vague, at best, about what is the source of the "problem". If a message came up saying something like "Windows emulators are not supported for this operation", then there would be little room to complain. However, this is not the case, and many, myself included, suspect that MS is deliberately being vague about it, rather than having the courage (and smarts) to just be upfront about it.
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
Circumventing the check might fall under the DMCA, and get Codeweavers in a legal bind.
Even if it doesnt, expect a crushing lawsuit that will put them out of business.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
They've realised that other crackers (not employed by MS) were using it too much, so they are now making it so only they can take over your machine with ActiveX. Makes perfect sense to me.
BTW, I'm being totally serious.
Joe Llywelyn Griffith Blakesley
[This post is in the public domain (copyright-free) unless otherwise stated]
You know, the thing that caught my eye the most in the summary was that they use an Active X control to check.
My biggest problem with the way that Microsoft does a lot of things is this damned Active X stuff. In order to secure your system, everyone says turn this crap off because it's a huge gaping hole.
In order to do anything with Microsoft's site, you need to set your security settings to abysmal in order to use the damned site. I'm sure a more Windows-savvy user can set it up to have these settings off and still use this stuff.
I find it annoying and most people probably end up leaving themselves with insecure settings so they can get their security updates.
Silly.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Sure, I know that you can do without Genuine Microsoft binaries for much of Mono, but being blocked from having updates sure hurts the compatibility argument to Mono. (ie. updates to the .Net project can easily be withheld and apps written on the MS platform can be forced to link against them)
.Net project"? Changes to the CLI/CLR specification? Well OK but new Microsoft libraries for that won't help Mono until it's implemented the changes itself. So what are you worried about?
What? What do you mean "updates to the
Better to ensure our users don't need anything from that website.
Well spoken. The same goes for microsoft as well: think about all that effort they put in to all that code over the years to break other software and twist standards and spy on you and keep you from doing anything they don't want... and then think of how much better windows could possibly be if they had spent all that time making the product more functional and fixing all the damned bugs.
Boy can we learn from this... oh wait, we allready have.
I sure as hell don't use windows or windows based apps so news like this is just funny to me when I look at the triple digit uptime on most of the 5000 web servers we run from my own gentoo workstation.
You are about to give someone a piece of your mind, something which you can ill afford...
You don't have to run Windows to be an MS customer... Our corporate Macs all run Office 2004, but not windows. We're considered customers, though.... And I hope this article is merely incomplete, since we don't run Windows and as far as I know ActiveX controls are dodgy at best on IE for the Mac... If we can't patch our machines, we'll likely be in the market for other office suites.
A more likely explanation is that MS offers a (sort of) competing product: Virtual PC. While its true VPC has recently been made useless by intentionally limiting you to only running virtual Windows computers, it is still in the same market. If MS doesn't get "bad PRed" out of doing this, look for VMWare to be similarly targetted in the future.
Who did what now?
In a corporate environment where they _wanted_ you to be using an IM client, they'd have the correct ports open.
Except that MS already has a history of not allowing their programs to run on other operating systems and throwing generic error messages. You remember DR-DOS/win3.1 right?
Wasn't that judged illegal?
Now if they're doing the same thing with office or their games, and they're refusing to run on wine...
DMCA, you mean that little law that *specifially* allows reverse engineering for interoperability?
Enron was a short-lived conglomeration built on financial smoke and mirrors from the beginning, and AT&T made not a few but an unbelievable string of incredibly dumb decisions over the course of decades; I don't see either of those as being true of Microsoft. I will also note that AT&T, as of now, still exists, and is still huge. However, I'll admit the possibility of Microsoft's stock falling to the point where it could realistically be bought out by another giant -- but I rather suspect that if that happened with anyone but IBM, the new company would then call itself "Microsoft," to capitalize on the name.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
And I bet that same list was on the outside of the box when you bought it. So if you are running Office 2000 on Wine, you knew from the very beginning that it was an unsupported configuration.
Si vis pacem, para bellum
The only thing more annoying than a Libertarian is an (un|mis)informed Libertarian
Now, with MS restricting updates to only legitimate copies, I would venture to guess that this will cause a decrease in the number of machines running Windows. Which means that there will be less machines running Longhorn than there are machines running XP, and hence more machines running alternate OSes. This is somewhat analogous to Apple restricting their software to their own hardware, and suffering as a result (in the PC business, of course).
Just a thought.
This may be proof that Bill Gates is a liar...
From interview:
JENNINGS: Everybody I talked to seems to, particularly if they are young, seems to think that open sourcing is important and that among the reasons it is important is that it enables them to run more secure systems. Is that true from your point of view?
GATES: Actually no, but that is the kind of competition that we have. Is that they will innovate in that space, we will innovate in our space. And in fact, we do a lot of work to make sure that these things can inter-operate so that a company can have a mix of Microsoft products, Unix products, Mainframe products, and then each time they do a project they can look and say - is the Microsoft solution best? Is the other solution best? And so there will just be a lot of choices there, no one approach is going to replace the other. (emphasis above added)
Now compare the above with this:
" If you visit the download center with IE you get an activex control, but if you try with Firefox, you'll have to download a little program, that returns a code you have to copy into the download page, to get access to the download you selected. By quickly looking at the program, I noticed it looks for a registry key, this key is... SOFTWARE\Wine\Wine\Config the wine configuration key. the Windows Genuine Advantage program press release says that in the second half of 2005, all users connecting to the Microsoft download center or to windows update will have to validate their copy of windows. Interestingly if you run the validation program on wine, and the version of windows you're emulating is prior to 2000 or is windows server 20003, you get a message saying a validation code couldn't be found, because of technical difficulties or because you're running an unsupported operating system."
If Microsoft is getting so worried that people might be running their applications under Wine, then Wine must be getting pretty good. It's been a while that I have checked it out--I'll install the latest version and play around with it.
The message: Microsoft cannot compete unless they have an unfair advantage.
Just like HP. Without the crazy, temporary, situation of being able to sell ink, that is mostly cheap solvent, for thousands of dollars more than the cost of the raw material, HP would be much smaller and poorer.
These people are not real business people. They survive only by being adversarial toward the world.
When I run the validation program on my genuine Win2k system, I get the message saying a validation code couldn't be found because of technical difficulties or because I'm running an unsupported operating system. When using IE and thus the ActiveX control there is no problem and my Windows is recognized as genuine. Looks to me the standalone validation program is seriously broken....
"You see, you have this mat, with different CONCLUSIONS written on it that you could JUMP TO."
But please flame me if I'm wrong;)
"Unsupported configuration" merely means "I'm not going out of my way to make it work for this configuration. If it happens to work, it works, if it happens to fail, it fails. Too bad. I'm not going out of my way to do anything about it." But what Microsoft actually does when they misuse the word "unsupported" is to deliberately cripple the configuration, adding EXTRA code to look for that configuration and deliberately fail on it. (As they did in this case) They go out of their way to ensure it fails.
That means "unsupported" is not telling the whole story. It's deliberate deception.
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
Now where the true stupidity sets in is setting this information as 'news'. Note that nowhere in the article does it say MS is preventing people from directly downloading the update files themselves- MS is only preventing people from using the automatic updater. So don't be lazy- when there is a new update, go to http://www.microsoft.com/downloads and look up the files you need. WOW! Problem solved...
I'll guess that the next round of spyware will likely also include a thing to make all Windows boxes "wine compliant".
I'm sure that there are a bunch of malware writers thinking "thanks billg"! (Well, I guess they already were, but now they have another reason.)
The two are not mutually exclusive, and I suspect most Linux users who also use Wine have a valid Windows 95, 98, etc., license around somewhere.
The EULA says I must have a Windows license, but it doesn't say I must use that licensed copy of Windows to run the software.
Mainframe/UNIX Bit Twiddler and long time Windows/Linux Hobbyist.
The Theorem Theorem: If If, Then Then.