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Microsoft Withdraws Vista's Kill Switch
l-ascorbic writes "In what they are calling a change of tactics, Microsoft has removed the controversial 'kill switch' from Vista in SP1. This feature is designed to disable pirated copies of the OS, but had led to numerous reports of it disabling legitimate copies. It will be replaced with a notice that repeatedly informs the user that their OS is pirated. '[Microsoft corporate vice president Mike Sievert] added: "It's worth re-emphasizing that our fundamental strategy has not changed. All copies of Windows Vista still require activation and the system will continue to validate from time to time to verify that systems are activated properly." Microsoft said it had pursued legal action against more than 1,000 dealers of counterfeit Microsoft products in the last year and taken down more than 50,000 "illegal and improper" online software auctions.'"
I guess this is one way to get Vista's adoption rate to go up. Just let it be pirated!
OS/X : Hereround 155$. Probably nicest user interface, at least at Panther level very stable, rock solid foundation (BSD) a real shell and real scripting. Oh and it gives me fanboy privileges.
Vista Ultimate: ~700$. Nothing really to offer, exept maybe this floating waterfall background, which must eat a ton of resources. Requires activation, abuses 30% of my resources for Hollywoods satisfaction. Oh: And by default I'm a criminal software thieve pirate.
I'd wager that if i really chose option three I must be a blistering idiot, too.
ich bin der musikant
mit taschenrechner in der hand
kraftwerk
A blog on ZDNet has this interesting bit:
This is software explicitly designed to make your computer less useful. It does nothing else for you. Why would "improving its back-end systems" ever make me trust it the least bit more?
Look, they can trot out lousy policy after lousy policy, but so long as they own the file formats, all else is moot.
Hence the ramrodding of OOXML, which, while painfully boring, is really under-reported in the geek press, like most imortant issues.
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
Just so you understand.
If I install a new motherboard in my PC that is not piracy.
If I format my old hard drive and install Vista on a new PC I built that is not piracy.
If I have to call to take down that nag screen then you must hire enough people that I never have to wait more than two minutes to get the nag removed. You must also offer a world wide toll free number so I can call no matter where I am and you must keep that number staffed until the sun goes nova or you go out of business.
Only then will any type of "activation" be acceptable.
Never mind OpenSuse is working just fine as is Ubuntu. Or maybe I will just buy a Mac.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
What stops MS from turning the switch back on at any future date? Although MS may have "turned off" the kill switch, it remains a feature of the system as long as MS auto-update can make changes to the OS without the user's consent.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
Excellent Microsoft, keep destroying the wide spread use of your own OS, frustrating your end users, and alienating the next generation of system/software engineers.
We'll be that much better off.
You!=Everyone else :) You have to remember that every bad story about Vista isn't representing the whole truth - that there are thousands of folks out there who are using Vista on a day-to-day basis, and are not having problems.
The next thing you will know is that the popping windows will become paid banners i SP2!!
I doubt Microsoft's numbers need much inflation considering Win Xp / Vista / 2000 / 2003, even still in use NT, 95, ME, 98 ... the upcoming 2008 server. Microsoft is sitting pretty all things considered. What I find most funny is a lot of /. has fallen in love with XP in their fight against Vista. Microsoft has them either way. When Vista becomes a stable product as XP did over its lifetime they will all be moving to it and ragging on the Windows 7. One step behind in the Microsoft line doesn't matter. They're still pwned.
I'm sorry, what business model should they use instead? Give everything away for free and hope that people paypal them a donation for their efforts? Build a business model off of paying for support? So they can have a market cap of 3.8B like Redhat instead of 300B? Are YOU going to hire / feed / clothe all those folks from Microsoft who get laid off or who's jobs get sent overseas?
IF the piracy reminders affect legitimate users, then that's one thing and an issue they would need to fix. If its only going after the people who aren't activating Vista, then good for them.
If you don't like it, them, and their business practices, then just STFU and "buy" something else. And if you hate Microsoft because you think they are a money grubbing, evil, capitalist company - then wake up to the real world. That's what business is about - making as much money as you possibly can, however you can do it, and make yourself and your shareholders rich. If you can't stand that idea then go buy yourself a farm somewhere in the middle of nowhere and milk some goats for a living - because you can't escape it in today's modern life.
Microsoft's not any more or less evil than any other large-cap corporation out there. The whiners better just face up to that fact and move the hell on. You are getting tiring to listen to.
I sig, therefore I am.
I imagine that 95% of those people could also use WinXP on a daily basis and not have problems either, and that 80% of those could use Ubuntu and not have problems either.
Beating sales figures aren't really a relevant comparison.
Amount of computers 2002 = X
Amount of computers 2007 = 5X
Yes, I'm pulling numbers out of thin air, but you get the picture. There are lot's more potential customers of Vista then there where of XP.
What I'd want to know is:
1. How many percent of older MS-systems have upgraded to Vista.
2. How many percent of OEM computers come with Vista relative other systems.
3. How many percent of non-MS users have switched to Vista.
3. How many percent of those who have switched/upgraded are happy with Vista.
Then compare the same percentages to those of XP after the same period of time.
/.Mattsson - My native language is not English, so please don't whine over linguistic errors. (That's lame anyway...)
My dad wonders why I'm so negative about Vista.
He got it with a new laptop and claims to have no problems.
Then I ask if I can use his laptop to burn a iso with Nero.
His response? Nero isnt compatible with Vista.
He didnt realize at all what he just said. It was perfectly normal for him for programs to not work.
There have been plenty of things like that.
That one was just the most recent being from yesterday.
Someone claiming that Vista has no problems is completely different from Vista having no problems.
What's he using, a 5 year old version of Nero?
I've got some consultants that work for me that have Vista loaded on their machines. Some won't comment about it. One seems to be pretending he likes it and one doesn't seem to have a problem explaining that they are running it because Microsoft strongly urged them to do so.
It is my opinion that Vista is a good idea badly implemented, poorly presented and inappropriately pushed out.
It's a good idea because Windows and security are generally considered to be diametrically opposed. Windows and stability are generally considered to be diametrically opposed as well. Vista is a good idea because it's actually trying to address those problems.
It's a bad implementation because it causes people to feel very lost. I can't say that plainly enough. But frankly, moving from Win98 to WinXP was a similar experience although perhaps not as intense.
It's poorly presented because it has problems with backward compatibility and support for older software. I don't consider this a "problem" except that Microsoft did not adequately warn the public of this issue. Part of the problem with Windows is that it supports a LOT of broken behavior in older apps. This comes largely from software being written for broken, badly implemented or undocumented Windows API calls, but also to keep good software running after Microsoft updates their API. Getting rid of the burden of backward compatibility is a step forward for Microsoft and part of why Vista is a good idea.
It is inappropriately pushed out simply because it's not ready for prime time in the sense that prime applications and average hardware cannot be supported under Vista and it hasn't been stated clearly or loudly enough that to run Vista, "off the shelf" isn't good enough. Microsoft hasn't spelled that out well enough for the consuming public. Sales people want to sell. Consumers pretty much buy whatever is offered to them. (Though consumers are actually starting to wise up about that bad habit!) I recall when WindowsNT was being introduced. It had a set of requirements well about those of Windows 3.1 and was considered to be apart from mainstream Windows. It was accepted that it would run slower on old hardware and was intended for only the most powerful machines and the most advanced of applications. WindowsNT wasn't simply pushed out to consumers saying "Here! This is new! Use it!" It was offered and relatively slowly adopted by IT and eventually by consumers in the form of Windows2000 which even then was pretty much presented to business.
An appropriate push for Vista would have been to create "Elite Computing" status for Vista users initially and make WindowsXP usage appear to be legacy. It would have provided incentive for consumers to "strive" to be good enough for Vista. It would have provided incentive to software makers to update their software for Vista. We're not seeing that. Instead we're seeing "I'm sorry, that computer only ships with Vista... if you want that machine, we cannot support you under XP... you have no choice in the matter." How dark is that?! More than dark, it's inappropriate.
It's true that the whole truth isn't being told. But mostly, the truth that needs to be told isn't being told by Microsoft to the consumer.
Oh, ye of higher moral values. So I assume you work on your own farm, generate your own power, sew your own clothes, grow your own food, and hand built that computer you are using to type up your comments on? No - I didn't think so. You are just a part of the problem and the machine as the rest of us.
Do I wish that everyone had enough to eat, that there was no "want" in the world, there wasn't any resource shortages and no disease? and that everyone could go off and do whatever the hell they wanted all the time? Sure I do! But as much as I'd love to be off drinking, gambling, and cavorting with supermodels all day, I'm also a realist and realize that that is a fantasy world.
Capitalism isn't a religion - its a fact of life. It always has been. People need stuff, other people make and sell stuff. If you don't like that - then don't participate. (And you will very likely starve to death or die of disease.)
I don't get how Microsoft is "exploiting resources." They built a product, they can charge whatever the hell they want for it, and its their right that people aren't stealing it. Period. If you don't like the product, don't like the company, think they beat midgets with bats to make them right the code, or whatever your personal stick up your butt is with it, then JUST DON'T BUY IT. If you, and the legions of haters out there are so damned smart, then your lack of market share should make the product tank, will force Microsoft to go back to the drawing board and write a product a little more to your liking. In the meantime, shouting "YOU GUYS SUCK!" from every mountaintop is just pissing everyone else off and makes you look like a sheep that's joining the bleating crowd of the anti-Microsoft "religion."
I sig, therefore I am.
and that 80% of those could use Ubuntu and not have problems either.
Until they want to install something like say...oh, the Flash plugin. Or install software easily.
a) New version of Nero are compatible with Vista b) That is a problem with his version of Nero, not Vista. OS upgrades tend to break compatability with older software, be it in Ubuntu, OS X or Windows.
You!=Everyone else :) You have to remember that every bad story about Vista isn't representing the whole truth - that there are thousands of folks out there who are using Vista on a day-to-day basis, and are not having problems.
I think that the main issue most everyone with Vista is not how bad it is but why they need to use it. There isn't a compelling reason to use Vista (other than DX10) for most End users if they have WinXP.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
So I buy my copy of Adobe Photoshop Elements from CompUSA or somewhere, shove it in my DVD drive, then type "sudo apt-get" into the notepad application? And it magically installs it?
Yeah, I'm being purposefully dense, but anybody who truly believes that "sudo apt-get" is the end-all and be-all of software installation is simply out-of-touch with the rest of the industry and the intended non-technical users of the product.
Comment of the year
gp asked for CP/M, parent advises to go for DOS instead and gets modded informative ???
MP3 Search Engine
Fact: there is piracy
Fact: the current anti-piracy system does not prevent piracy
Fact: the current anti-piracy system pisses of a lot of people
Conclusion: they should keep doing it because they, "have to do something"
Do you really not see the problem here?
What would I do eh? I think a good model in this case is give it away free to individuals and charge businesses for using it, and by businesses I also include OEM licenses. I would guess that that is where MS gets most of it's money anyway.
Oh, and I completely disagree with your assumption that any market-dominating OS would "naturally" include an invasive and overblown copy protection scheme.
It really is not just a perception. These things seem so obvious to me to be a flaw somewhere, I wonder how quality assurance even passed that. On XP, you would just see the copy window flicker onto the screen and poof and the file would be there.
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
What I find most funny is a lot of /. has fallen in love with XP in their fight against Vista.
Don't confuse "falling in love" with "choosing the lesser of two evils". For all the nasty, ridiculous, and lame qualities that XP manages to invoke, Vista is simply far, far, worse. As a software vendor, Vista has been a TRAIN WRECK for us, despite fairly extensive testing with Vista B2. It's as though the O/S is specifically engineered to prevent you from actually doing *anything* with it. For example, it requires some SEVEN "Yes, I approve" clicks to install our application from the website.
Yes. SEVEN. "I agree to download the executable". "I agree to save the executable". "I agree to run the program" "I know it's an installer and might install something". "Yes, I'd like to install everything." "Yes, I agree to let the installer install something in Program Files" "Yes, I agree to let the installer update the registry".
Only ONE of those prompts is ours, the "I want to install everything". This is not security. This is teaching your users to frustratedly click "OK" on every dialog box they see without reading them.
Which then worsens problems for us. We now find many of our tech support calls involve users complaining about a problem that has a fix they've already been notified about.
Example: User calls, having problem claiming attendance, saying that "they get an error" and that's it. The error that they saw briefly and clicked "OK" on as quickly as possible (without reading) said something like: "You set the enrollment dates incorrectly in your program, and so we cannot find the school calendar to claim attendance on. Please check the student's enrollment date and try again.".
Training your users to ignore notice boxes by throwing lots of meaningless ones up does not improve security, it increases human/machine interface tension and results in frustrated, ineffective users.
Porting our application to OSX originally took us a month. Porting it over to Leopard was done in a day, with no complaints. The only change since 10.3 for us has been that Leopard removed the requirement to call X11 expressly. Now actually EASIER to write X11 apps for OSX, our application bombed after hunting for X11 binaries and not finding them.
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
WTF? I thought that the reason windows is so bloated and crappy was 'because it has to maintain backwards compatibility' ?
They whose government reduces their essential liberties for temporary security, receive neither liberty nor security.
Therefore, I'm asking parent if he or she disagrees with applying the same logic across OSes.
--
Given enough personal experience, all stereotypes are shallow.
I have a product where you give me money and I give you a product and kick you in the balls. I don't know why you bought it, because there are non-ball-kicking alternatives, but you did.
Then I "respond to customer concerns" and "improve the overall experience" by not kicking you in the balls as hard, or only kicking you in one ball.
I will expect praise when I implement this latest feature, and no more complaints of "Hey, I'm still being kicked in the balls" from you.
Replace "balls" with "box" or whatever it is girls have down there if needed.
Until they completely pull DRM out of the kernel, I will never support the corporate adoption within our enterprise. In a perfect world, the DRM should only activate when "Premium Content" is being played. However, if we are copying gigabytes of .mp3 voice recording files (recorded phone calls to customer service, etc.) Vista just bogs down and stops. "It won't do that", we were promised last year while Vista was being readied for release. "It shouldn't do that" we're told when we encountered the problems, but it doesn't matter, Because. It. DOES.
With today's computers and today's work environment who DOESN'T work with or Manipulate multimedia content at some point? How could we possibly rely on an operating system that treats all multimedia content as special requiring extra inspection attempting to verify that I'm not trying to circumvent some nonexistent copy protection.
Windows Vista truly is the longest suicide note in history.
Good security is based upon reality and common sense. Common sense is a function of having common knowledge.
You really don't know what the hell you're doing if your application is causing that may popups. I've downloaded other software from the web, and get ONE UAC prompt. Perhaps you should try signing your binaries, and then get on MSDN to figure out what else you're doing wrong.
You forgot to mention that he also paid $99 bucks for Elements. How much did that GIMP install cost?
Don't tell me to get a life. I'm a gamer; I have LOTS of lives!
Linux: plug in the hardware, application opens.
Windows: plug in hardware, find driver CD, now, am I Admininstrator? no: OK, run-as........
The fact is that for a lot of hardware (cameras, music players, etc.), under Linux, it is simply a matter of plugging it in; while under WIndows, I have to go through the process of installing some drivers from a CD. I don't see how that makes Windows easier to use.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
In the old days, viruses used to do things like delete users data to be malicious. Now, virus authors go to great lengths to write stealth rootkits to be sure there is never any visible sign to the user that the virus is installed on the system.
Viruses used to written by basement hackers who wanted to be elite and cool and to show what they could do, and visibly damaging people's user experience drew a lot of attention to them. Now, viruses are authored by hackers payed by organized crime, and they are used to mail spam, steal credit card numbers, and blackmail companies for cash under threat of DDOS attacks. Today's hackers won't bother going after the kill switch, it's not in their interest. They want those machines online, unknowingly marching to their orders like a good little botnet bot should.
Can anyone tell me how to set my sig on Slashdot?
Oh and one more followup to the UAC thing:
UAC Doesn't call out on a whim: Its when you do admin-based functions on your machine, such as
modifying files owned by another user to which you have no rights (hmm, sounds like you need sudo for this)
adding/removing programs
lots of 'system' level settings in the control panel
Regedit will even run without UAC prompt, and lets you access HKLU
This is actually one point I *hate* in Windows versus the current generation of Linux systems.
/etc/yum.repos.d, and from then on out, the global system update monitoring process tracks Adobe's software as well as the vendors. I don't know much about non-free software, but I do know that yum in RHEL requires authentication tokens to easily interact with RedHat servers. The framework is simple http, so I presume at the worst, https with http auth would be a viable thing for automated updates even for commercial, for-pay applications. I don't know about flashy layers over yum (I normally use ubuntu) that make yum administration painless, but I do know that Ubuntu wraps up the low-level framework in a mostly clean way. I added the wine repo by opening a terminal and copying and pasting the two lines from the wine repo install directions to the command line. It's not that hard, but a simple GUI tool could wrap even that.
In windows, they have a semi-appfolder oriented design (except most apps either must or choose to dump some crap in system wide directories). As a result, they started out without anything resembling decent package management, and left it to third parties. Now you have a number of InstallAnywhere, MSI (microsoft's eventual 'standard'), Nullsoft installer, dozens of one-off installers for specific applications, and a bunch more I'm forgetting that are semi-standard). Most are moderately to severely anti-unattended and inconsistent. They have the 'add/remove' programs control panel, but largely it's relegated to just remove software, and even then some software ends up mangling the list so that different 'components' appear independently on the list, but uninstalling one breaks the uninstaller for the other, so you should have used the uninstall icon which a lot of programs put right next to running the application. It's horribly mangled and ugly and if the world wasn't so damned used to it, it becomes painfully obvious how piss-poor Windows has dealt with this.
Meanwhile, Linux was 'stuck' with the need to provide an alternative view on which pieces of software owned which binaries that were mixed in with everything else. To get out of a relatively messy situation that was undeniably there, they rolled the most sophisticated package management for a platform ever (mainly deb and rpm). With that, installs *knew* in a standardized way what other programs needed to be installed to work right, and things kind of 'just worked'. It was beautiful.
Then, recognizing the power of the package management, repository management emerged. Apt and Yum are the two prominent things. This above anything else is an *incredible* framework for software installation and, *CRITICALLY* updating. Not only does the *extremely* rich platform 'vendor' provide 99.9% of packages most common people would ever need, the architectures are pluggable so that third-parties can smoothly integrate their updates with your process. Using your flash plugin example and, say, Fedora Core. Adobe provides a yum repository. The low-level mechanics is that a file gets dumped in
Now, compare that to the MS side of things. Well, you got Microsoft update, which generally cares only about the low-level windows stuff (though I can't remember if Office would tag along for the ride or not..), which also wants to WGA the hell out of clients, but we'll put that aside from now. I install Java, and what happens, a freaking java update checker/manager starts (it can't hook into the running MS update architecture). I install quicktime, Apple's software updater starts running (same as Java). I install Half Life, suddenly Steam also needs to run to manage updates for games. I install Warcraft and Blizzards software starts checking for updates independently. Repeat for Bioware, Symantec, etc. Oh, my video driver, well, I'll have to go to a website somewhere and manually check for updates. And that *still* omits a ton of applications for which they never implemented an update management solution. I
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.