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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.
Question: The new "Genuine Advantage" tester is an Update on Windows Update. What happens if you just don't install it?
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
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... ;)
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
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."
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."