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Windows Nag Windows to Counter Piracy
Vicegrip writes "Microsoft is enhancing its Genuine Advantage program in the US, Australia, UK, Malaysia and NZ to now include persistent nag screens to remind that your version of Windows is not licensed. These nag screens will keep appearing until you license your version of Windows or, presumably, convince Microsoft they've made a mistake."
Install a virtual desktop manager. Move nag screen to an unused desktop. Voila, problem gone (or at least out of sight).
is the genuine check on genuine product..
Your copy of windows is genuine and activated.. but lets check it anyway. again. again and again.
Seesh.
There are no atheists when recovering from tape backup.
Quote
How to uninstall Windows Genuine Advantage Notifications
You can uninstall Windows Genuine Advantage Notifications by using Add or Remove Programs in Control Panel.
Now the obvious followup question is: What happens if I do uninstall this nagware? Am I crippling Windows? Will the Windows Genuine Disadvantage (tm) be reinstalled behind my back at the next automatic update? Will my name, address, phone number, IP address, and credit card information be phoned home to the Microsoft Secret Police?
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
Question: The new "Genuine Advantage" tester is an Update on Windows Update. What happens if you just don't install it?
If by 'registered,' you mean 'uninstalled and replaced with Free Software equivalents,' then yes, I have 'registered' every piece of shareware on my machine.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
It used to be that in my area of Shanghai I could see people selling pirated copies of Windows everywhere (about 16 stands of CDs in a 5km radius). Now, about half of those stands have stopped selling Windows, and are now selling Linux. Coincidence, I think not- MS activation is getting so annoying that they're giving up and going to Linux.
OSx86 FTW
That's interesting. My legit work copy of XP installed this update this morning and in the Add/Remove programs list it says Windows Genuine Advantage Notifications (KB905474) "This update cannot be removed."
Meanwhile, over here in OSX/Linux/FreeBSD-land, I'll happily tut-tut my relatives and friends who still use Windows and show them a better way to go about the whole computer thing.
time to burn a few extra Ubuntu install disks, folks :)
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
There's a LegitCheckControl.dll floating around that you dump into c:\windows\system32 whilst in safe mode, give the PC a reboot and all is well. Windowsupdate etc work fine.
Not that I've tried it or anything... ;)
The nag screens are for pirated version. If you didnt pay for it, stfu
Yes, for years I have been calling Windows XP, Whinedows.
I do agree there are too many annoying pop ups and messages, but then, because of the installed marketshare that Windows has, they have to cater to the lowest common denominator, i.e. people that wouldn't realize their USB could work faster because they have no clue what the difference is between 1.1 and 2.0.
On the other hand, you could model an OS like OSX, which tells you nothing. You never know when something doesn't work because Apple doesn't see fit that you should now. Apple thinks they know everything you are going to do, and so anticipates the problems you might have by just not allowing you to do it or by not supporting that feature. For instance, I had a printer that could support borderless printing, except Apple never allowed borderless printing because they thought it was too complicated for Mac users (I assume).
Of course, we are talking about people using pirated copies of Windows, so I don't have any compassion for someone that has an annoying popup that says they are thieves and should buy the software. They have two options. Struggle in the world of Linux where you would be ecstatic for a popup telling you how to install a printer driver, or just buy Windows.
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
I love the many comments in this topic about how people will switch to linux.
/. articles about the shortcomings of linux as a mainstream desktop solution, so I won't go into them here. Suffice it to say, if you aren't some kind of delusional fanboy, you can see the problems easily enough. [Quick, mod me down fanboys!]
And I'll bet it does drive a few people to look into it. For about a month.
Some few of those will keep it.
The vast majority will be driven crazy by the little things that are lacking from desktop linux and will either find a better cracked version or break down and buy an OEM copy of Windows. And be left with a bitter taste in their mouth for linux.
There have been many
Its a shame there isn't a Linus equivalent helping linux on the useability side of things. =(
The moral of the story? Take your PC off of auto updates and instead set it to ask permission first!
(btw, my copy of XP is legit.)
If it wasn't, you wouldn't have been able to disable auto-updates. Owners of copies that fail genuine check can choose between auto-updates or no updates, period.
i ate crayons when i was a kid and now i have two braincells and the blue ones taste nicer
How do they know that your Windows key is more legit than an identical key used 2 months ago?
Its like when people purchase games and the serial has already been registered.
Clever hackers create a random valid key which is used before the person with the legit box, when the person with the legit boxed version connects its too late, that magic number has already been used.
liqbase
Meaning they just need to alter this new notifier program to not actually do the check on the other part where it would see the other part isn't checking. I doubt this will stop any of the software pirates out there. But it's not really for them, it's targetted at the casual non-hex reading crowds.
BTW, circumvention of security is cracking it. All cracking is the circumvention of security, be it through offline modification, as in replaced DLLs, or in utilizing programming errors to bypass regular access.
They're there affecting their effect.
I predict that the Aero theme engine, even at its best, will leave a lot to be desired. This is the Microsoft Windows track record. They announce all these new features and what they "might eventually" be able to do. Does anyone remember "push" technology? With Windows 98 it was supposed to be the next great thing. It turned out to be a joke that never went very far. I also recall hearing about XP having the ability to switch simultaniously between five different users. I am thinking "great five virtual machines with their own environments." I had high hopes for that, as it was the perfect solution for applications that did not work well together....until I changed screen resolution in one and noticed that the other four reflected this change. I was hoping for five distinct environments like I was led to believe by the Windows hype, when instead the only distictions between the users was the wallpaper, program icons in the display, and an effort to protect the "my documents" data between users. I was hoping for something robust enough that I could install one set of programs for one user, and another for another user. Not the case. SP2 is a joke that was put into place more for marketing and to dispell negative hype than for its function. As for Aero, I usually do not indulge in such things except on my laptop where I use Window Blinds 5. In order to achieve the isolation I need between "user environments" I use BootItNG boot loader/partition manager to switch between several different partitions containing Windows and different sets of applications. And these are just two cases where Windows "innovations" fall short and third party apps are needed. Again, to Microsoft I say: "just install a small kernal on my system drive, I wlll populate it with apps and functions of my own choosing."
I read an article about this yesterday, I think it came from Google News (now I can't find it, and I was going to submit it to /. too) where the journalist actually corresponded via email with someone from Microsoft and got explicit answers to questions on how easy it is to install, decline to install, and remove. I think this was from some tech publication in New Zealand or Australia.
At any rate, what I remember being the bottom line was that you can decline to install the Notification system without penalty, by declining the EULA. However, how many people really read those EULAs, and how many people just click through them? We all know the answer to that. Once you've clicked through and agreed to install the software, it's not designed to be removable. Regardless of whether or not it may be possible to remove (much like IE is removable, if you're really determined) it's not supposed to be. This was made pretty clear in the email from the MS rep.
It's not uninstallable, it may perhaps be removable, is I guess the bottom line here. Those are two different things.
The closest you can get to "uninstalling" it is disabling the notifications, but they'll go back on automatically the next time a new release is downloaded.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
[If pirates are switching to GNU/Linux because of Windows activation issues,] Then it's working, isn't it?
Not once people in China, India, and other rapidly developing countries start developing and using applications designed for GNU/Linux. Then companies that trade with companies in developing countries will need to make their business processes Linux compatible.
Today i've decided that its time i try linux again. I have a dual AMD 2000+ with 1 gig sitting here doing nothing. I'll keep my amd64 windows, but i'm going to install linux on the older dual and get up to speed.
Thank you Microsoft.
That would be rather amusing, actually ... create a sort of Windows Genuine Advantage "war dialer" that went through and generated random serial numbers and registered them. One by one, if you just let it go (and Microsoft didn't notice) you'd deplete the keyspace. All of a sudden, people's shiny new HP's they brought home from Best Buy would start saying that they were "counterfeit," straight out of the box. And if you did it to Vista machines, that new interface wouldn't run, along with IE and Defender.
Man, that would be beautiful.
I have a feeling Microsoft would catch on though, when they saw the same IP address trying to register 50 or 60 different serial numbers a second. Maybe if you used one of those spam-zombie networks though, you could do it. (Now there's some irony.)
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
"Most windows users who even know what Linux is still don't even know how to choose what distro is best for them let alone the install procedure for even getting to screen one"
.iso to disk," argument. Thats what I did when Mandrake 8.0 came out and I was new to Linux. Installation was a breeze even back then.
Say a user doesn't download their version of Linux, and just buys the cd's from the store? That takes out the "Most Windows users are too clueless to know how to burn a
As to your comment about Linux "snobs" wrongly assuming that a common Windows user wouldn't know how to install it, you really must think people are retarded these days, or just haven't attempted to install a major distribution of Linux lately. My fiancee is totally computer ignorant, and she was able to install SuSE 10.0 Linux without even having to ask me a single "Honey, what do I do now?"
Most distro's, for the exception of ones like Gentoo and Slackware are super easy. Boot off the CD. Select "Installation". Click next. The GUI setup utility takes you through the setup, and even will automatically suggest settings for you, such as disk partitioning, package selection, etc. In 45 minutes, she was done installing SuSE Linux, all of her hardware worked (hence, no need for additional drivers to install), and she had all the software she needed for day to day work. Fin.
Whoah!!! Sneaky and something like Bar Stewards sprang to mind.
They certainly have changed it...
...and they use a noarchive meta tag to stop Google caching the old copy.
Oh well, I guess either the document was incorrect (copied from a template) OR the document was correct but they've changed the document to make it look like you can't do it (but in reality if you try it may woork) OR they've fixed the code and changed the document after it was pointed out (Sorry Piratz...)
-- Andy Jeffries Scramdisk for Linux (Change the orgy to org to reply)
I am one of those who hates the whole activation process. I feel it is intrusive and burdensome. It is none of MS's business what I do with my computer, when I do it, or how I do it. They have no right to this information and it is an invasion of my privacy every time I had to call them to get them to let me use my own computer with the product I paid for. Not to mention activation makes me feel like I am a criminal. Not too long ago I got tired of it so I got a volume license copy and installed it just to stop it. Now is it just me or does it strike you all as odd that it was less irritating for me to use what, had I not owned a valid license, been a pirated copy of Windows than to use a legal copy?
They suck and god willing one day I will never need to use their pathetic products again. On that note, they have already caused themselves a loss of about 100,000 dollars because of this. You see I am an executive who actually has a say on what products the company I work for buys. Awhile back I was asked which would be better an Apache server farm or IIS based one. As it was on weighing the two at the time neither was much better than than the other on a cost averaged basis. Well guess which one I choose. Of course now Apache kicks ass and it is easy to find support personnel so I am glad I made that decision but it just goes to show you that poisoning the water you drink from is not a good idea. As time has gone on I can pretty much say that MS attitude and greed has made me a virtual Open Source evangelist which is quite a change from the times when I thought MS was great product and actively recommended them for most projects.
First off I think this is up to Microsoft. If they want to ensure people buy their software and crack down on unlicensed copies then that's fine. I don't and wont use MS software unless its justifiable on a cost basis, and generally it isn't. (although I would love to see a good GNU Visio replacement, preferably with a good community base ... but that's another matter). So no I don't currently use any MS software anywhere, Linux on the desktop Linux and MacOS on the Laptops and PalmOS on the PDA
That aside it might actually help MS maintain market share. Some people will have to license on the back of this because it becomes possible to see when a machine hasn't been licensed.
OK so now we have Nag screens, this means that if you are using a pirated copy you get some inconvenience.
Some predictions...
Next we will see real limitations on what you can do with an unlicensed install;
So I expect some of criticisms of this will be
1) MS will cut themselves out of the market;
They might, but more likely they will get a few more licensed users and remember if you have to license Windows and you Have to license Office then they are going to make some money. If they do this now then they will leverage the market share they have (especially when it comes to document compatibility) BEFORE any of the alternatives (ODF) become widely accepted. The gamble on Microsofts part will be that they have everyone by the balls now but might not in two or three years time, best to try and secure that stranglehold.
Linux BSD and Apple (the Computer manufacturer not the Record Label) OS's only comprise a small market share at the moment so its worth while trying it whilst Joe User isn't aware of the alternatives or doesn't think that they are viable. Thus they can solidify and possibly extend their market share whilst increasing the proportion of that market share that is actually licensed.
2) Everyone will switch to Linux, BSD, Apple, anything to save money / hassle
Again Possible, but corporate users (Directors and managers who TRUST Microsoft) are being bombarded by things like the 'Get the facts' Campaign (which is pretty much just propaganda... in fact if you get the chance check out the case studies and then look at the companies that wrote them, most of their websites are hosted on 'Server: Apache/1.3.33 (Unix) ' including the one that has seen a significant reduction in TCO, an increase in reliability and security all by moving its web applications to 2003 server and .NET (to be fair I think they were talking about their intranet but still, practice what you preach!).
Companies however will take that on board, its the kind of thing that is used in internal company politics to the advantage of the anti-GPL crowd. Moreover as long as Joe uses a Windows box at work he's going to want to use one at home.
3) There will be a revolt, everyone adversely effec
Microsoft's knowledge base is wrong (and not for the first time either)
I have experienced this update first hand;
You can decline the EULA, but most people blindly click YES without even reading them.
The nag is highly annoying. It brands the login/shutdown screen, popus up a confirmation dialog with a short pause when you login, randomly shows a bubble dialog and puts a star-like icon in the system tray.
You CANNOT remove it from add/remove programs (perhaps you can if Windows is considered legitimate, but I certainly couldn't). And if you have pirated windows the WGA-related updates will be completely hidden after your next reboot. Seriously; both the Windows Update and Notifications patches were visible after I installed them, but HIDDEN the next time I rebooted!! Perhaps Microsoft will go the whole way and just install a rootkit next time? (or perhaps they already have.. I probably should check that too)
To dissable the warning requires that you run an ActiveX control from microsoft's website (and probably fill out a form identifying where you got windows from, I don't know..). There's no legitimate way of making the warnings go away without going through Microsoft.
You CAN still use system-restore and return to a point before it was installed. Microsoft might dissable this in future.
I already found a hack to cripple WGA Notification, which also prevents Windows Update from being able to restore it. Digg it.
Microsoft have NOT gone far enough. This patch is nothing but a minor inconvenience and is not going to push widescale migration to Linux as I'd originally hoped.
455fe10422ca29c4933f95052b792ab2
If you really want I can grab some of the literature for a laugh!
At a time when Microsoft is actually facing serious competition (Linux on the Desktop may or may not be "there yet" but it's frighteningly close, and a lot of companies want a piece of Microsoft's pie) it is doing things that, in a non-monopolistic environment, would simply drive users to more co-operative competitors. Granted, Windows users have always put up with orders of magnitude more irritation, frustration and general disgust than users of most other operating systems (exhibiting a degree of stoicism that, frankly, I don't have anymore) but there has to be a limit. What does it take to make a long-time Windows user give up and try something else?
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Pirates will always find ways around this stuff, but licensed users who do not stay up on the latest copy protection BS will be screwed.
.NET next year.
I'm a college professor, who teaches programming classes. Tuesday, I took a poll in my C# class the other day, and about 2/3rd of the students had gotten MS Visual Studio.NET to work, while 1/3rd did not have it working on their home PCs. Every one who had it working was running a bootlegged / pirate copy. Every one of us who paid for legitimate coppies (or, like me, got a free copy of VS.NET 2005 at the MS launch event) had run into insurmountable trouble.
I've heard from a friend that MS VS.NET does not run on OEM coppies of Windows. Frankly, I've given up. We're not teaching
Andy Out!
I'll repost the comment that I wrote on the Ars Technica forums. This in reaction to somebody who said that Piracy == Evil, and that if I don't want to pay for it, I simply shouldn't use it.
While I agree in principle, I feel Microsoft has lost the moral right to my money. My point:
I go out to buy bread daily and my town has a street with all the supermarkets right next to eachother. Microsoft is one of them. They sell bread but I don't like the taste of their bread, so I go and buy at a competitor. All is fine.
The next day I come back, expecting to buy my bread at the store I bought at yesterday, but the store is on fire. Microsoft is holding a wholesale on matches. I go to yet another competitor. All is fine.
The next day I come back, expecting to buy my bread at the store I bought at yesterday, but the store is flooded and you can see sharks swimming in the water. Microsoft is holding a wholesale on garden hose...
You'll see where I'm going at. In the end there is only Microsoft with crappy tasting bread, Apple who sells exotic whole grain Knackebrod and Linux who just stands on the sidewalk and hands out free stuff. The only reason why Apple still exists is because they are expensive, and the whole reason Linux exists is because Microsoft can't destroy their store.
In short, Microsoft made bloody sure I HAVE NO CHOICE but to use windows (I play games, yes I know about Cedega, I have other windows only programs that I need to run, yes I know of wine and reactos, stop trying to ruin my example). So I see no moral reason to hand this thug my money.
If windows ever becomes 100% pirate proof, I will head to Linux even if I have to give up gaming. I'm a software engineer. One thing Microsoft does NOT want me to do is go to Linux, find out that I cannot do certain things I _have_ to have and then make it myself. Although I do think Linux would start a tremendous growth spurt if this scenario would ever come into play.
What does it take to make a long-time Windows user give up and try something else?
:) ).
Excellent question. I offer a counter question.
What did it take for IBM to loose 75% of market (mind) share between 1988 and 1993? Possibly it could be because they were more expensive (IBM DOS/OS2), proprietary (PS/2,MCA), and had bad PR at the time (monopoly etc).
What did it take for Apple ][ users to switch over to Macs? Scratch that comment, I'm still an Apple ][ owner forever (Even though I own three Macs
What did it take for Lotus and Word Perfect to loose market/mindshare? Possibly cheap integrated Excel/Word versions? (We won't discuss the Windows API changes Microsoft made to gain advantage over Lotus/Word Perfect in this thread).
Enjoy,
It's just the normal noises in here.
There are two files named:
\windows\system32\wgalogon.dll
\windows\system32\wgatray.exe
Rename these two files to something else and the notifications stop, even the tray icon is gone, and there are no traces left in taskmanager either.
These are for as far as I checked, which wasn't really far at all. I just wanted the nagging notifications to stop. They stopped. I'm happy.
no sig = no personality(?)