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Microsoft to Disable Online Windows Activation
CasterPod writes "As of February 28, Windows users who purchased their PC will no longer be able to reinstall without calling Microsoft and answering a series of questions. The move is part of an anti-piracy effort to close 'a loophole that enabled unscrupulous resellers to use Windows XP product keys that were stolen from large OEMs.' Specifically, Certificate of Authenticity (COA) labels on PCs are often unused because OEMs preinstall Windows and bypass product activation. The product keys can therefore be stolen and reused. First WGA, and now this."
Just means you will have to use a corp key which does not require activation. I know as a support tech I would never sit through a freaking queue every time I had to reactivate windows.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
They won't disable key activation, just for keys that are assigned to the top 20 OEM clients of Microsoft.
They are however planning to get rid of online activation alltogether.
Hmm, I hope India has enough people to man those call centers.
The pirates will still crack activation anyway. It's only the unscrupulous resellers of Windows that get hurt by this.
What the catcher is, you calling them to activate is technically a support call.
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Not, that is blantantly untrue.
Product Activation is it's own group at Microsoft, seperately administered and staffed from all other units, including technical support. The call centers of PA are completely seperate from all other functions.
There is never, and has never been a charge associated with activation.
Additionally, Microsoft does not charge per minute technical support rates, and as far as I can tell, never has.
For desktop products, like Windows XP and Office for example, the fee is $0, $25, $245. Most are free, additional support - like programming a macro or something of that nature, costs $25. Dealing with server-technologies, company wide networking, or other business technologies generally cost $245. These fees are per incident, regardless of how long it takes or how many people you have to talk to. I worked with an MS support person once for 4 days, 9-5 pm, 8 hrs a day, to solve a critical problem with networking. Fee? $245.
I suggest you learn a little bit more about MS and thier support services before you go spouting off about what you remember.
Here are some links:
http://support.microsoft.com/oas/default.aspx?ln=
Actually, you are really, really, really wrong.
XP has a fantastic penetration rate for MS. There are very few users not in a corporate setting using Windows 2000. Most users before XP were on 98, 98SE, or ME. As those users replace their computers, they got a big dose of XP. The die hard Windows-fanboys upgraded legally or not - to XP a long time ago.
MS sells Windows by attrition - those PII and PIII boxes out there have been replaced by newer PCs running XP.
MS hasn't released much in the way of sales numbers, but XP is very well represented in the total slice of Windows users. I the most recent PDC (Professional Developer Conference), an MS VP of Sales suggested that XP was about 60% of all Windows users. XP or 2K represented almost 75% of all Windows users. That means that the really legacy products - 95, 98, and NT4 represent less than 1 in 4. That's a damn good rate for any business.
MS is rapidly consilidating its users on the same platform. Before XP, you had two entire different product lines. MS has finally merged them into one line, and the userbase is very happily consolidating.
Make no mistake, MS is generally very happy with XP adoption rates.
heres the best loophole
http://home.pages.at.nyud.net:8090/cw2k/Antiwpa/
Sam's is different, you signed a contract there.
If you were just reinstalling to trace this problem, you could have held off on activation until you had solved it. You don't need to activate Windows immediately after you install it, you're given 30 days until you have to. (Not that I think activation's a good thing, or that you shouldn't be able to reinstall your OS as many times as you want to.)
This comment was thought up very late at night and does not necessarily reflect my views at a more reasonable hour.
See, that's the kind of "users are idiots _and_ thieves" mentality that's causing the problem in the first place. (And not just Windows. I wish all those idiot game publishers who now even want to install low level copy protection drivers on my machine would die a slow painful death. Cancer, for example.)
The fact is, users may not be versed in fine points like configuring a firewall or understanding security threats (then again, 90%+ of programmers have no clue about security either), but they _can_ Google, you know. You'd be surprised how finding a copy-protection crack for just about _anything_ takes mere minutes. Even little old grandmas know how to google nowadays, or get told how to real quick.
Also those users do _not_ live in a vaccuum, as the software companies and movie producers seem to assume. They seem to think the Earth is made of some 6 billion hermits, each living on a separate mountain top, and never talking to each other. If one of them found out how to download a crack or warez on P2P, surely noone else can learn that from him or her. Sad to say, that's not how it works.
If they're friends or family of a pirate, guess what? They'll get an already patched CD from that pirate. Or a CD and including the patch program separately. And then copy that CD further for others.
Or they'll get pointed at www.gamecopyworld.com, or whatever other crack site fits their particular problem, by someone who knows. E.g., someone like me.
Now I don't support piracy, and in fact I'm firmly against it, but I support idiotic copy protection schemes even less. Copy protection just doesn't work. Period. As was said, the _only_ ones affected are the honest paying customers. And I'll be damned if I'm gonna support that kind of thing.
When someone bought a product, it wasn't because they're too stupid to google for a crack, it was because they actually wanted to go buy it. Whoever wanted to pirate the stuff, actually went and pirated it.
And then going and dragging the paying users through indignities like having to call tech support to get their product activated (oops, some kiddie with a serial number generator already used yours, so more time on the phone is needed), or like having copy-protection-related trouble in the game they paid for (we'll just make your game crash because your CD drive is called "E:" instead of "D:", so surely you're a bloody pirate with CD emulator software), is just stupid and uncalled for.
Not that it will stop greedy corporate fucks from doing it anyway. There's a class of people for whom money is the only thing in life, and worth pursuing no matter what collateral damage they cause. Even when they don't even get that money.
The thought "but we could make 100 extra bucks from the only 2 guys in the world who don't already know how to download a crack" just overloads their brains. They just _have_ to get that 100$ at all cost, even if it means kicking every single honest user in the teeth. With steel toed boots.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Actually, stores where you pay a membership fee (Costco, Sams Club, etc) have an agreement you sign when you get a membership. One of the stipulations is that you must show your receipt to the person at the door. If you don't want to do that, don't become a member.
If a door nazi at a normal store does the same thing, you have no obligation to stop, and they have no reason to hold you unless they actually suspect you've stolen something.
Absolutely true. I've worked in retail and I KNOW that there was a lot of product walking out. But our management told us, never NEVER attempt to detain someone unless you actually saw them take an item off the shelf, hide it on their person, and try to leave the store without paying. Oh, and you had to keep them under observation the whole time, to make sure that they didn't remove the item from their person before leaving. The losses are insured, the false imprisonment charges and any following lawsuits are not. :)
I think I called the police once, on a guy who stole a $0.95 auto-trader magazine. It was pretty funny
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Speaking of reducing prices, read the latest Cringely column. He predicts Microsoft will net billions more in revenue by issuing their antispyware software free.
And here I thought Bill was finally smart enough to realize that charging for the ASW product would be a pittance in revenue compared to the bad publicity about charging for fixes to one's own flaws.
When in reality, the point of releasing the ASW software for free was to put the other companies out of business and force 100 million upgrades to XP SP2, thereby generating billions more in revenue.
In other words, as Cringely puts it, even Microsoft's "good" actions have a predatory purpose.
Fortunately Cringely also suggests this will hurt Microsoft later.
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I've had WPA trigger on my installed-and-activated copy each time I moved the system partition to a different drive, especially if it was bigger.
Yes, I know, I ought to totally reinstall, but when I have a drive start to give me read errors, I don't feel like risking death of data by hunting down what directories it may be in.
And when I buy a bigger drive and want to use it as my Windows system drive, and install SuSE or something on the old drive, I should be able to do that, without telling Microsoft what I'm doing.
I know this is a bit advanced so it is not for the "average" computer user. But what I do is...
/mnt/where/I/mounted/my/rev/drive (35GB) (you can use external HD, or your favorite mass storage device)
/dev/hda ...
Set up my computer the way I want it, All MS Software activated, such as office. (FYI this works with Windows Server 2003)
1. Boot to Gentoo Live CD
2. dd if=/dev/hda | bzip2 >
When spyware or just general Windows Entropy slows the system down too much, I back up my data...
1. Boot to Gentoo Live CD
2. dd of=/mnt/where/I/mounted/my/rev/drive | bzip2 -d >
3. Reboot
4. Use windows normally, have to re-install games
5.
6. Profit?
The one "Bad Thing"(TM) about this is that data has to be on a separate disk. You can also modify the above to use partitions and have all data on a different partition. Though with any windows reinstall it is a good idea to reformat, with slow version, the partition to NTFS. So you'd have to do this in either case.
Anyway This works well and gets around that stupid reactivation crap, now I'm *VERY* glad I do this.
And remember kids, ALWAYS backup your data on a normal basis. HDs will fail!!! There is no question, they will fail. If I was not clear let me repeat that, THEY WILL FAIL!!!!! You need backups, and if you do this as you should, the above process will be less of a fuss.
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