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Paul Thurrott Bitten by WGA
suntory writes "Paul Thurrott, one of the most important Microsoft advocates, has been bitten by Windows Genuine Advantage. As some Slashdot users have reported, Paul installed a bunch of updates in his machine and now Microsoft thinks that he is using pirated software." From the post: "Truthfully, I can only imagine what triggered these alerts. The software was installed to a VM a long time ago and archived on my server. I no doubt used a copy of XP MCE 2005 that I had received as part of my MSDN subscription. If the WGA alerts are to be believed, it's possible that Microsoft thinks I've installed this software on too many machines, though that seems unlikely to me. I can't really say. Anyway, that's what it looks like to be a suspected pirate. Like many people who will see these alerts, I don't believe I did anything wrong. I'm sure that's going to be a common refrain in this new era of untrusting software and companies. Ah well."
The acceptable face of spyware
Dear Bill:
The following argument is so old it should probably be modded redundant, but given Steve's mental faculties, perhaps it bears repeating.
1 - Pirates will not be hurt by this as they have corporate keys, etc
2 - Genuine customers will be annoyed by this
3- Therefore this makes no sense
By presupposing your customers are dishonest Microsoft creates tremendous ill-will. This would, of course, normally be a bad thing. Worse - they have that nice monopoly so it doesn't really matter. This causes unhappiness and resentment, even amongst ridiculous Redmond fanbois like Paul Thurrott and Ed Bott.
So, my friends, there is only one way out. If we want to be happy, Windows must be kill -9'd.
He certainly is a bigger man than I. I can say that I would have been as diplomatic in his situation. Then again, what are the chances of that.
"Thanks for all the money you paid to us. We've used it to buy off ISO among other things" -Microsoft
Didn't you know?
You have to keep buying your Windows software every year or two in order to update it, how else is Microsoft going to stay the biggest software company in the world?
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
I will be royally pissed if I received one of these messages after spending hundreds of dollars on a software product. And if they disable the software beause they think it's pirated, they will lose me as a customer - forever.
I can just see it now, businesses trying to get work done while dealing with those messages.
I've had some problems with the new WGA that has gone out, and I find that it is only hurting and hindering legitimate users. People I know who are running Corporate or otherwise cracked editions are patiently waiting for a new crack for WGA, but legitimate end users are worried / concerned when the little alert pops up saying that their copy of Windows might not be legit. It has been my experience that if you are using a cracked / Volume / Corporate version of Windows, you know it, you ignore the messages, you wait for a crack. The legit users who see this message get scared. Therefore, I don't see WGA solving any of the problems MS intended it to.
Ah well?, Ah well? This is the extent of outrage in "this new era"?!? Amazing!
Imagine if Linux (or another alternative OS) did not exist, we would all be thinking that it is normal (or not ?) to get annoyances with our pirated (or not ?) version of the Microsoft operating system. I say "we", but in fact I should say "I". I'm just wondering if people will realise that there *is* an alternative to Windows and its DRM and its annoying "you are a pirate" attitude. I bet no, or at least not until a long time ... sad :/
". . . I don't beleive I did anything wrong. I'm sure that's going to be a common refrain in this new era of untrusting software and companies. Ah well."
No, not "ah well."
Customers have a legitimate expectation to be treated as if they are wanted and valued not as if they are a threat to the enterprise for using the product they purchased.
Companies that treat their customers as criminals instead of as their reason for being in business will find themselves at a severe competative disadvantage. Such actions will hurt companies who engage in them, in big and small ways.
WGA has already resulted in several lawsuits. Those court proceedings are sapping resources from Microsoft. There is time being spent by developers and software architects in helping lawyers prepare court cases instead of doing the more important parts of their job. Those resources aren't being used to fix bugs, develop new features, or in any way serve current or future customers.
That hurts the both the consumer and the stockholder.
-Apple, for example, does not burden users with Product Activation or any similar anti-piracy technologies in its Mac OS X operating system- Now why the hell would they? OS X generally only runs on Apple hardware. So someone would have to buy an Apple computer (with OS included) to run the pirated copy.
Why would he be outraged? He is trying to sell Windows. He's trying to get people accustomed to the accusations that come from WGA. He's not trying to discourage them from using Windows altogether. It's his job to do this!
I'll probably be modded down for this...
Fixing the computers of friends and family, I've had occassion to call in to Microsoft on licensing issues quite a few times. They've always been tremendously helpful, non-judgemental and ready to listen. It's not a perfect system, but it's fairly well designed to handle false-positives and take care of mistakes fairly. It does put them at a competitive disadvantage in that I'd rather buy a product that didn't have activation and authentication, but that's their call to make. I have a problem with our government subsidizing enforcement, but what a private company does with it's own product is fair game, as long as they let me know about it before I buy it.
"Don't you know you're going to shock the monkey?"- Peter Gabriel
Um ... no.
While it's true (and I'm damn glad) that Apple doesn't mess around with any "activation" crap per se, saying that they don't burden the user with any 'anti-piracy technologies' is a bit rich.
After all, I have a $1500 hardware dongle sitting under by desk to prove it.
Apple doesn't need any WGA-like stuff, because even if you pirate the OS (which, let's face it, happens all the time -- heck, you can dupe an OS X installation CD using tools provided with OS X), you can only run it on hardware purchased from Apple. Assuming they ratchet up the requirements accordingly every few years, they have a stream of income from you. Not as much as if you bought each version of the OS as it came out, but it's still something. Apparently, it's enough for them not to burden their users with onerous phone-home spyware.
The biggest reasons why I wish the OSX86 Project people would just crawl under a rock and disappear, is that if OS X ever gets severely cracked to the point where an average user can install it on commodity hardware, I can almost guarantee that Apple will go the activation route. Sure, I'm sure they'll be a lot friendlier about it than Microsoft has, and the whining will be suitably mild (and they'll have lines of pundits defending them), but it'll be obnoxious just the same.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
This kind of stupidity is exactly why my OS of choice is now Linux. No WGA. No product activation. No problems.
Bibo Ergo Sum.
...except that, if you were to read TFA, you would see that this is not a pirated version of Windows. Do you really want to start a program where you randomly accuse your customers of being software pirates, even when they are not? How will that help "stop piracy" when the real pirates are using corporate keys to begin with (and are immune from WGA) and the real customers are being falsely flagged?
But I guess you just wanted to whine about Apple.
"So you think my money is counterfeit? I'm a counterfeiter as well?? You are sending me to jail for 40 years? Ah well."
"You're everywhere. You're omnivorous."
True, but the story here is that WGA is a problem for legitimate customers of Windows. No legitimate OS X customer is ever going to be bothered by or even realize that OS X checks for TPM. (This assuming that Apple doesn't start doing other, DRM-related stupid stuff with TPM.)
Actually if you look on BitTorrent right now (at one of the bigger trackers, e.g. Pirate Bay) and just type in Windows XP, some of the most popular downloads aren't just straight ISOs of the Microsoft install discs, instead they're cracked versions of them.
... heard it from a guy, you know, on the bus.
In some cases you can get cracked versions of Windows that bypass all the serialization (it just drops in a corporate number), install faster than a legit disc, and have a lot of updates not in the MSFT discs slipstreamed in, so it reduces your update workload once you get the thing installed.
In many ways, the cracked products are superior to the legitimate ones from an ease-of-use standpoint.
Not that I'd know any of this from experience or anying
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Yeah but what about all the people using cracked versions that don't know it. I imagine there's a TON. How many times do you install XP for a friend or something, and instead of telling them they need to cough up $XXX for an intangible license, you just install the cracked version.
Sure the user is using illegal software, but you can really blame them when they genuinely have no idea?
... and I still don't buy it.
:-), there was a bloke ("Rob C", a postman actually, who my brother actually ended up working with for a while) who spent a lot of time cracking games and putting N of them on a disk with his name on the menu. Lots of disks made their way around the pirate scene. Did the XL somehow become a dongle, just because it wasn't a PC ?
:-). I must have spent ~$1200 on a mac, and ~$300 on OS so far. 25% is a significant chunk of cash just to assume the user will be "a good guy/gal", but that's what they do, and I (for one) appreciate it.
The argument that the machine is a "dongle" only works if it were true. It's not. I can purchase a copy of OSX Tiger and give it to any number of other Mac users to install on their machine, and Apple lose money. Sure, you *have* already bought a computer from them, and I'm sure Apple are happy about that, but to claim that it somehow restricts you from piracy is just wrong.
Back when I were a young lad, I had an Atari XL (the first computer I ever had that came with a disk drive
People operate within their communities, if there is the potential for theft within that community there will be some people who will take that opportunity. For the mac, the community is mac-owners, and the potential for piracy is just as valid within that community as for PC owners within theirs. The Mac community is smaller, true, but that doesn't matter when you're (ahem) "swapping" software.
I just don't believe that spending $$$ on a computer entitles you to stop spending $ on software from the same company (can you tell I'm a reformed character
Simon.
Physicists get Hadrons!
Irony.
So where you from?
Was the accusation something like "How many computers have you installed this software on?", or was it "You have installed this software on too many computers.".
When I called them, as I've had to do from time to time, they ask how many machines it's on. I say one. They say thank you and activate it. No big deal.
God save our Queen, and Heaven bless The Maple Leaf Forever!
This may be somewhat OT, but is anyone else sick to death of this? Welcome to the world of Corporate double-speak where:
Small = Tall
Medium = Grande
Large = Venti
So why in the world is it called "Windows Genuine Advantage" anyway when it's really just an anti-piracy detector? What conceivable "Advantage" is there for the consumer and why wasn't Windows Update just left well enough alone? I know Microsoft has a right to protect it's products but at least have the decency to call it what it is: Anti-Piracy validation.
And before I get modded flamebait, I'm not particularly picking on MS or Starbucks here. I am trying to make the point that in many ways and in many different forms of media we are increasingly being conditioned to accept corporate and marketing double-speak that just does not make any sense. These are just the examples that came to mind first.
What if the Hokey Pokey really is what it's all about?
I'll agree that MS hasn't given me any *huge* hassles getting products activated when I had to call in - but that doesn't make me any happier about it. It's basically an unnecessary extra step I have to go through that I shouldn't have to bother with.
I do a lot of on-site computer service, and I regularly run into situations where a PC is dead and a motherboard has to be swapped out. After that, XP always thinks it's being installed on a 2nd. machine, instead of the original one. That means I'm always stuck making that phone call and reading off the big, long key code to the voice recognition system of theirs, only to get put on hold to talk to an agent who asks for the first part of that key again and makes me answer the questions.
If you have an OEM license bundled with a PC, vs. a retail copy of XP, they ask additional questions too, such as "What brand and model of computer did this copy of Windows come with?"
Sometimes, I think the only reason they seem so generous in re-activating these licenses is because they've outsourced their call centers to other countries, and the people doing the phone support are trained in a real basic way. I doubt they even understand enough English to make their own determination of whether or not my requested use for the Windows activation is legal or not.
(EG. One time, I tried to explain that my Windows activation problem was due to experimenting with installing my copy inside Virtual PC, and I had since removed that - and just wanted to put it back on my original PC like it was supposed to be. That was met with the support person repeating the question over and over, "How many total computers have you installed Windows on?" They seemed to have no idea what I was talking about.....)
The article's author, while lamenting the fact that Microsoft has just accused him of a federal crime, simply responds with a sigh and a recommendation that we should all get used to the idea.
EXCUSE ME?!? No.
This guy has already decided to go with the lemming mentality. He figures that lots of people will have this problem, so why worry? That's what people thought about the RIAA's threats too, until the lawsuits started.
But there is something to be said about this. If over the course of time (which already started years ago) MSFT loses the geek crowd, the geeks themselves will be left in the dust as to the new tricks and specifics for fixing windows. How many of you are going to be fluent in Vista a year or two after it is released? Not many, because not many of you are actually going to use it. Soon enough the only geeks left available to help the computer-unsavvy folks with the unavoidable windows problems are the paid "geeks" like geek squad who really dont know what theyre doing anyway. The only reason windows has survived as well as it has to this point is because windows really hasnt changed all that much over the past 6 years. What i predict will happen (and i've seen this happen a number of times already) is that the geeks that are asked to help friends and family will just install Ubuntu. Windows loses in the long run.
This is an unneccesary moral delimma for the power user like me, do I help my friend, or do I help Microsoft's bottom line. GM doesn't make you buy another car when you lose your keys.
Tough choice? I think not. You should help your friend understand that, if the computer doesn't work because XP needs to be reinstalled without the media, money needs to be shelled out. That's just the way it goes with Microsoft. Sorry it sucks, but that's the scenario. Maybe next time your friend will think twice before depending upon crappy software from a company that enforces such a practice, or maybe be less careless about losing the original media/license (or counting on a "friend" who would endorse the use of an illegal copy).
Don't get me wrong; I don't support many of the business practices of Microsoft, and I completely understand the desire (not the acting out!) to install illegal copies. But that's exactly why I make damn sure that everybody who asks me understands these practices perfectly. There is no better service I can provide than to give them the knowledge they need to make a fully-informed decision about how and where they spend their hard-earned dollars. If they're in a cruch, your friends need to know it's Microsoft forcing this on them, not you.
I don't follow tech news very much. I don't care about Windows Vista, as I plan on running Win2k until I get a Mac. But from a journalistic point of view, SHAME ON PAUL! As many other people have said "Ah, well," is NOT an acceptable response to this situation. I'm not saying he needs to take on WGA as a personal crusade, but when you've set yourself up to be a reporter and professional reviewer, complacency is not acceptable. An utterly lackluster, lapdog article. Disappointing.
That's why young people drive a lot of the change in the world: they're willing to sit out on the curb to protest things, where people with another twenty years are thinking "I support that, but I don't want to make waves."