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.'"

Comments

Market share?

[Noctrnl]

I guess this is one way to get Vista's adoption rate to go up. Just let it be pirated!

Let me think...

[CaptainZapp]

Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon : Free as in speech, free as in beer comes with about 20000 apps (the number's pulled out of thin air, but there are a lot of apps available), of which most are probably quite simple or outright crap, but there's true quality stuff among them and the pre-selection by the installer is quite good in my book. Oh and I'm part of the Ubuntu community, too.

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.

Re:Let me think...

[plague3106]

Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon : Free as in speech, free as in beer comes with about 20000 apps (the number's pulled out of thin air, but there are a lot of apps available), of which most are probably quite simple or outright crap, but there's true quality stuff among them and the pre-selection by the installer is quite good in my book. Oh and I'm part of the Ubuntu community, too.

And I can't really buy games off the shelf, nor printers, or a lot of other hardware, and have it work. Oh, and Linux does have its own problems, weird things breaking, spending hours figuring out what exactly is wrong, and then diving into a text file to change some obsure setting. Most of those 20,000 apps are shit. Sorry.

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.

People knock Linux / Windows UIs; I find Macs to be infurating. Why exactly would you want to be a fanboy? Fanboy is just another word for zealot.

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.

Surely you mean only ~$260? Not very computer savy if you can't find Vista at a good price.

I'd wager that if i really chose option three I must be a blistering idiot, too.

The other option is that you're a smart professional that just wants to get things done. Since I ditched my Linux desktop and server, I spent more time doing the things I want on the computer, instead of trying to figure out what text file I got wrong and then being told to RTM (which doesn't exist).

Re:Let me think...

[15Bit]

Its basically horses for courses - you use the OS which does what you want the best. This will inevitably be a trade-off between functionality, software compatibility, user friendliness and cost. I have a Windows XP desktop and a file-server/firewall etc running Fedora. I don't run Windows on the server cos it doesn't do what i want. The same is true for Linux on the desktop. So i mix and match according to my needs. I'm sure many others do the same, and look admiringly over the fence at the prettiness of OSX, or the stability of Linux, or the universality of software for Windows. But in the end, your computer must do what you want, and having a pretty OSX box or highly secure and stable Ubuntu desktop is pretty pointless if all the software you need to use runs only on Windows.

Read this on ZDNet

[kat_skan]

A blog on ZDNet has this interesting bit:

This drastic change in Microsoft's WGA system is only the latest in series of attempts to smooth WGA's rough edges. In August, Kochis apologized on Microsoft's WGA blog for an outage that incorrectly flagged thousands of customers' systems as "non genuine." In October, Microsoft removed the WGA validation requirement from IE7 downloads. Two weeks ago, on November 20, Kochis promised to "build more trust in WGA" by improving its back-end systems, its response times, and its customer support.

Getting rid of the "kill switch" is a much better way to build that trust.

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?

Dear Microsoft.

[LWATCDR]

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.

Re:Dear Microsoft.

[nine-times]

Only then will any type of "activation" be acceptable.

No, not even then in my book. I use my computer for relatively important purposes, and the real purpose of the OS is to stay up and running and allow me to access my data and applications. That's priority number 1, and in fact most of what I care about.

Therefore, in my opinion, When I see an OS vendor who spends their time trying to figure out how to make their OS not-work and how to make it disallow access to my programs and applications, I must assume that they don't understand the first thing about what they're doing.

I know that explanation might sound too clever by half, but I am dead serious. When Microsoft should have been spending their time figuring out how to keep my system running at all times, they were instead engineering a kill switch. It's like if a shoemaker was trying to engineer a shoe so that it could easily be made uncomfortable or made to fall apart.

So my message to Microsoft: as long as you're spending your resources trying to figure out how to make my computer less useful and less reliable, I will not buy your OS anymore. Spend your immense resources on making an operating system that does what operating systems are supposed to do, and I may reconsider.

Kill switch is still there if...

[G4from128k]

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.

Re:Why stop there?

[dave420]

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.

Re:How soon...

[icepick72]

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.

Re:Why stop there?

[Entropius]

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.

Re:Why stop there?

[cheater512]

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.

Re:How soon...

[mcrbids]

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.

Re:Why stop there?

[zmollusc]

WTF? I thought that the reason windows is so bloated and crappy was 'because it has to maintain backwards compatibility' ?

Re:Why stop there?

[whoever57]

It's main disadvantage is that it's still harder to use than Windows if you want to do any sort of configuration, installation of applications and drivers.

Above is BS. I have had recent experiences with many pieces of hardware that goes like this:

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.

Re:Why stop there?

[Junta]

This is actually one point I *hate* in Windows versus the current generation of Linux systems.

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 /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.

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