Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft Uses WGA To Obtain Record Jail Sentences
theodp writes "According to Microsoft, 'No information is collected during the [Genuine Advantage Program] validation process that can be used to identify or contact a user.' That's little comfort to the software counterfeiters who were just handed jail sentences ranging from 1.5-6.5 years by the Futian People's Court in China, especially since Microsoft contends that much of the estimated $2B in bogus software was detected by its Windows Genuine Advantage program. 'Software piracy negatively impacts local economic growth,' explained Microsoft VP Fengming Liu in a celebratory New Year's Eve press release. But then again, so does transferring $16B of assets and $9B in annual profit to an Irish tax haven, doesn't it?"
Seriously, There is a persisting writeup from a japanese LUG years ago talking about how pirated copies of windows cannibalize the linux userbase and dev base.
Pirated windows is the bane of linux, and I applaud microsoft for slitting their own throat by pursuing windows counterfeiters.
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
The moral of the story is: don't trust a commercialistic company not to try to gain advantage - any way it can. Especially Microsoft.
Excuse for why is your room always messy?
I'm betting that a good amount of the information used in this case came from posters on the WGA forum, where people can post if they're having issues with WGA. One of the tools available in that forum is a WGA diagnostic tool which will generate a sanitized text dump of a user's windows validation information. Most cases on that forum are people whose brother, cousin, or sketchy PC shop installed a common warez release of Windows on their systems, but several there are people who bought apparently legitimate software from resellers which failed validation and later turned out to be counterfeit. Microsoft got in touch with these users, identified the resellers, and I'm betting that this news story is the result.
Sounds to me like they were just bragging that WGA actually noticed when a user had a counterfeit copy, not that it had any effect on the sentence.
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
WGA exists to bug users that have stolen the software and so Microsoft has an overall clue about how many people have stolen the software, not go after specifics.
I remember seeing a report from Microsoft saying they knew for a fact that 1 in 3 corporate machines were stolen. If they wanted to target for the purposes of bringing them to court it wouldn't exactly be difficult; they just want to irritate thieves and have an idea how many rogue copies there are.
throw new NoSignatureException();
And a lot of you guys will be screaming murder. Have you realized that GPL enforcement and Windows license enforcement comes from the same thing as Copyright law?
This is my sig.
So did MS lie when they assured me that no personal information was collected when I installed WGA?
(RTFA)
Maybe not. Oh well, so much for a massive class action.
"But then again, so does transferring $16B of assets and $9B in annual profit to an Irish tax haven, doesn't it?"
What's the point of adding that statement? So it's OK to steal from someone who is "rich" or who has a shrewd accountant?
I don't like Microsoft any more than the next guy, but winking at large scale theft of their product because they somehow "deserve it" is just plain wrong.
Cheers,
'Software piracy negatively impacts local economic growth,'
And buying Microsoft software takes money out of local economies and sends it to Redmond. (And buying Apple software does the same thing, but to Cupertino).
I say that using non-free software can also negatively impact local economies, but people do it anyway.
Really, answering my own post here, it's not just as black and white as that. Companies using open source would help energize their local economy by using local companies/consultants, but often they don't. And companies using MS software, while spending for it, may use local companies/consultants as well, keeping some of the money local.
However, in the case of real large scale piracy, it's the worst of both worlds, because money has left the local economy, and not gone to the rightful owners (in this case, Microsoft).
creation science book
The summary appears to suggest that Microsoft was lying about WGA not collecting personal information, otherwise I just can't see why that statement appeared in the summary at all.
Unfortunately, the facts don't support that accusation. All we know is that WGA was used to count how many users had a particular counterfeit copy of Windows; this does not require any identifying information, just a license key. Microsoft then determined through other means that this particular copy originated with a particular pirate group (and yes, piracy is the correct term here).
I also fail to see what Microsoft's accounting practices have to do with this story. Is the submitter trying to suggest that a wrong committed by Microsoft somehow negates its right to seek justice in court? That's not how it works.
Obligatory disclaimer: I'm no more of a Microsoft fan than anyone here, but biased, sensationalist story-telling pisses me off.
Short version for those who can't be bothered to RTFA: WGA doesn't send personally identifiable data, and the people sentenced were not end users but pirates (yeah, I said pirates. Suck it bitches.) who sold on illegal copies.
It's hard to blame Microsoft for moving money offshore to avoid taxes, we're the idiots that tax the hell out of our populace and our companies and think no bad could ever come from it. Perhaps if we were a bit more supportive of success rather than spending $700B - $1,700B rewarding failure ...
It's hard to blame Microsoft for moving money offshore to avoid taxes, we're the idiots that tax the hell out of our populace and our companies and think no bad could ever come from it
The problem is that the US won't close the loopholes they use.
Close the loophole, send a few shots across the bow of the tax havens and get them to cooperate. A lot of these tax havens have one problem - they're too easy to take over.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
Yes, it does. So, the natural solution to this is to give corporations incentives to keep their money local instead of sending it to tax havens. America used to be a tax haven for foreign investors. If we want to pull out of the recession quickly, we should restructure our taxes and spending accordingly, to encourage people to squirrel their assets away on our soil, rather than Ireland, Switzerland, the Caribbean or Indonesia.
This is just basic, good sense, especially if you are one of those people who believes that the rich can buy influence. If you believe that, then what makes you think that they won't be able to get their assets overseas while the middle class and lower end of the upper class get taxed into oblivion?
'Software piracy negatively impacts local economic growth,' explained Microsoft VP Fengming Liu in a celebratory New Year's Eve press release. But then again, so does transferring $16B of assets and $9B in annual profit to an Irish tax haven, doesn't it?"
It is called a lack of accountability and transparency. Update the tax code to account for these places, making it near-impossible to use tax havens without incurring an unmanageable loss. How's 1,000,000,001% do as a minimum that scales up as the taxed amount goes down? Of course, there is the military option as a good deal of those tax havens are quite easy to topple.
What about the knockoffs in the realm of physical goods?
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
....human.
You are born and you will die and in your human lfe time you have to fit it in to the ideologies others have created. But why if there is a better way than teh way being used?
If anyone is looking for to use MS windows pirating as an excuse for the bad economy or in any way contributing to it... Wake up.
The economy is not what it is because of the knowledge, natural resources and man power we have, as what we have here calculates to a far better result.
But it is what it is because of how badly it has been manipulated by its inventors (inventors of the monetary systems of how new money is created).
The abstract of money is easy to manipulate, to easy to detour away from the values one actually produces.
When you have systems like the abstract stock market that is based on the abstract concept of money, it is in essence no longer an investment in a company but a method of transferring wealth without productively producing anything, and you have inherent problems.
As to the pirating.... Why are they doing it anyway as there are free options which are improving to the point of being better than, and surpassing, proprietary software.
So.... So what that MS has busted some pirate software producers. Obviously it is their (pirates) own choice to play the risk game.
This is not news of how well their genuine windows advantage works as those going to prison only become a burden on society to support them.
Oh wait... food, clothing, shelter..... supplied for free? I guess there is an advantage to pirating...
And when the next few generations die off nobody will know the difference anymore.
But if everyone pinched in being productive then we obviously would have a much better living so called economy.
The more OSS expands and improves the more obvious it is going to become that there is another and better way.
"The counterfeit software, found in 36 countries and on five continents, contained fake versions of 19 of Microsoftâ(TM)s most popular products and was produced in at least 11 languages."
How many languages were the original products produced in? At first glance, it sounds like they were filling a need.
"The only legitimate use of a computer is to play games." - Eugene Jarvis
Microsoft says pirating software takes money from local economies! (read: pirates are stealin' America's money!!1one)
Microsoft uses an Irish tax haven to keep billions of their dollars out of reach of the American tax man.
If you don't see the hypocrisy in that, please read:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypocrisy
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
What you're basically saying is that just one raid justifies MS annoying all of us legitimate users and treating us like criminals.
Buying a Microsoft product from Microsoft "negatively impacts local economic growth."
Buying from a pirate directly contributes to local economic growth - in the short term, at least.
It seems likely that any Microsoft product is a long term liability, though.
you had me at #!
How is it again that getting free software negatively affects "local" economic growth? If I live in a dirt poor country how is my economic growth helped by sending my money off to Microsoft?
Actually, it would seem that pirating software is a much better incentive for local growth -- instead of spending my hard currency on a bunch of easily replicated bits, I can use that currency for something tangible that builds my business, like a machine -- in a more efficient way using my super-duper Excel spreadsheet analysis.
Step out the front door like a ghost into the fog . . .
Microsoft is a convicted criminal enterprise. It beats the hell out of the rest of us why Americans remain so unconcerned about the vast scale of their theft, not to mention the tax evasion - and continue to let them get away with it and even defend them... No wonder your house of cards is collapsing...
you had me at #!
You say that as if they deserve anything other than what they got. They knew the risks, they knew the penalties (or should have), they got caught. Now, it is time for them to pay the price.
Maybe all you poor little whiners who cry every time someone is busted for violating other people's rights should imagine how you would like it if someone violated your rights. Oh, that is right, when someone violates the rights of FSF or the like, you want the book thrown at them.
What a bunch of whiny hypocrites you lot are.
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
Most GPL && Linux fans in the audience welcome Microsoft's efforts to crack down on Windows piracy. People who are using pirated copies of Windows are using Windows drivers and Windows applications and Windows games and overall increasing Windows market-share. If someone is not using Windows (pirated or otherwise), they'll be much more likely to jump towards Linux - especially if they're looking for a free(-of-charge) OS. The GPL fans should be cheering at such suicidal actions from Microsoft.
/.'s arguments against WGA (and other sorts of DRM) have more to do with how it treats the legitimate end-users rather than getting software without cost/payment. There isn't really anything comparable with GPL'd software, what with how the GPL is specifically designed to avoid such things.
"A witty saying proves nothing." - Voltaire
Having some disadvantage, such as no family with the resources to send you to college, doesn't mean you are somehow entitled to be compensated for that disadvantage from the pockets of other people. Life is not meant to be fair, live with it. You CAN get some compensation if somebody chooses to do it for you as a gift or privilege, and that's perfectly fine - you just have no RIGHTS to that effect.
So did MS lie when they assured me that no personal information was collected when I installed WGA?
As I understand it, WGA includes a tool to submit an anonymous tip against your supplier. So it collects no personal information about you but instead about your supplier.
If I live in a dirt poor country how is my economic growth helped by sending my money off to Microsoft?
Well, if you walked into a store in your dirt poor country and bought a copy, it might help your local economy. Or if you ordered a copy from Amazon.com, a resident of your country would probably be paid to deliver it. Someone might even pay you to install it for them.
One more reason to move toward Open Source and tell these fuckers to take a hike. Having a nasty, paranoid mind-set, I have avoided WGA like the plague. There's less convenient but effective ways to keep my system updated, and properly-maintained security to deal with the time lag.
I'm not worried about piracy, but I don't for a minute believe Microsoft's claims about WGA. I'm certain they're collecting personal information, and I'm equally certain that at some point, they'll find a way to sell it or offer it to one government or another.
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
Despite the hatred against Microsoft, commercial or large-scale cloning of MS-products is not ok.
The right thing to do, is to destroy Microsoft completely, burn Bill and his EEE (extend, ...) and marketing team in hell and nuke everything from orbit, just to be sure. ;)
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
Thats an economic fallacy called the Window Broken Fallacy.
The gist is that a kid breaks a window,therefore stimulates the economy to "create hundreds of dollars" of potential wealth in services and such.
The fallacypart is that would have happened any number of different ways. Instead, the person with the broken window is out that much money.
the guiding principle was that you only trade with those who you can trust (to a degree).
Sure, like Mexico and China, neither of which are worthy of anyone's trust in this regard, since they perceive the United States as a free candy store to be exploited to the maximum degree possible.
... it's just hot air.
Furthermore, I wouldn't give Clinton that much credit. Clinton was no angel, believe me (much of the regulatory change that allowed the current financial crisis can be laid at his feet, not George Bush's.) Neither is George Bush, and sixteen years of these two Presidents has been a disaster.
Keep in mind though, that the root of all this evil is Congress. Without cooperation from our lawmakers, without appropriations to fund activities, without Congress to make regulatory changes, no President can do squat. A President can declare war if he wants, but if Congress doesn't fund it
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
The page in the last link seems to be down here. Anyway, here is the Google cache link: http://209.85.129.132/search?hl=en&as_q=cache%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fwww.finfacts.ie%2Firelandbusinessnews%2Fpublish%2Farticle_10005150.shtml&as_epq=&as_oq=&as_eq=&num=10&lr=&as_filetype=&ft=i&as_sitesearch=&as_qdr=all&as_rights=&as_occt=any&cr=&as_nlo=&as_nhi=&safe=images
I recall Bill Gates stating that if people are going to pirate an operating system, he preferred they pirated M$ Windoz.
Didn't Ballmer get the memo?
"Suppose you were an idiot...and suppose you were a member of Congress...but I repeat myself." Mark Twain
A beta version of MS Windows Vista Mark 2 (AKA MS Windows 7) could only be available via Bit Torrent as a result of either MS itself putting up this torrent, or one of its partners putting it up.
I personally tend to the view that it was MS Marketing that put it up, as I'm convinced that MS would rather their software be "pirated" and used almost everywhere than not pirated and to have a majority of people using anything else.
Corporations cost money to taxpayers to support. Roads, hospitals, schools, utilities, emergency services, military protection, etc. are all expected by corporations as part of local services.
Untrue for the most part and a sweeping generalization like that ignores the benefits of having a corporation do business in the local area (employment, etc.).
You are partially correct, in that if all profits, capital spending, payroll and (possibly) product sales is moved out of a taxation jurisdiction, then that jurisdiction will suffer. There needs to be some balance and you can look at the tradeoffs that were made in the automotive industry with Japan to see some of them.
Lower the taxes too far, and those huge business moving to your nation will bleed you dry.
No that's not a problem with taxation. Lower the taxes and EVERYONE will come.
There are many ways for politicians to come to terms with organizations who do business on their turf. In the 1970s, my parent's church wanted to buy some adjacent property and expand the church. The city of San Luis Obispo said "Yes, but ... we want you to pay for a street extension along one side". So, they did.
I am far more distrustful of politicians who have only their own interests to attend to, than corporations who have to keep their consumers and employees happy.
That is cool logic. And by extension of it... When *I* get charged taxes, I pass that cost of living on to my employer, who in turn passes it on to the consumer. This puts the citizen's hidden tax burden two levels deep. This makes it even harder for the taxpayer to know exactly what their true tax burden is. So, by your logic *I* should not have to pay taxes anymore. As soon as the various tax authorities let me know that I no longer have to pay taxes, I will declare you a genius.
This is complete nonsense. Please look into the history of the theft of Half-Life 2 from Steam, and of the various internal corporate documents that crackers like Kevin Mitnick used to steal with considerable success and considerable frequency. Such documents have considerable appeal to crackers to try and steal, and they will certainly attempt to do so via any means they find available, whether that is using an undetected rootkit on a laptop inside Microsoft's networks, or stealing a DVD or DVD image from a partner. Tight security for anything as broadly deployed as a Windows operating system at this stage of testing is basically a fond desire, but unlikely in the extreme to be successful.
Seriously, enough already. You guys who "warn" us about twitter have been at it almost as long as twitter has. What does that say about you?
http://outcampaign.org/
WGA wasn't used to throw users of the pirated software in jail. WGA was used to determine the pirated keys being used, and the number of them in circulation led the the charges that put the pirates in jail.
And please tell me, why do I have to tell NoScript to allow doubleclick.net before my comment will preview?
Seriously, WHO'S tracking users?
MS Windows is not "broadly distributed". It is only distributed to those who have signed up to be guinea^H^H^H testers. All these few hundreds (a few thousands at most) of people are registered with Microsoft.
If Microsoft cannot even control over who has which copy of its OS when it puts it out to be tested then how can it possibly keep this OS secure when people deploy it into production environments?!!
Oh yeah. It can't do that either!
We're not talking about people pushing ripped copies of a purchased CD here - we're talking about pre-release copies that have been distributed to a limited number of testers for testing purposes.
It is not too big a leap, based on the known business practises of this dodgy corporation, to consider what underhand marketing ploys they would use, or continue to use.
Putting its own OS up on bit torrent is not beyond the realm of what Microsoft would do if by doing so it gave a marketing advantage against its perceived opposition.
Games don't factor into this. Microsoft's dodgy business practises do.
I love the articles about MS and Windows Activation. they bring out all the real paranoiacs on /.
"A few hundred people", including off-site partners, is more broadly distributed than many commercial and most private software projects. It could, possibly, have been a malicious behavior by a Microsoft employee or partner, but there is no compelling reason to think that it was anything other than a simple theft of the code. That's not a "dodgy business practice issue", that's a "it's very difficult to secure several hundred DVD's in several hundred people's hands", coupled with the understandable popularity of such a pre-release of one of the world's most popular OS.
Only if you drink the Kool-aid. This comes from Gates himself:
Although about 3 million computers get sold every year in China, people don't pay for the software. Someday they will, though, and as long as they're going to steal it, we want them to steal ours. They'll get sort of addicted, and then we'll somehow figure out how to collect sometime in the next decade.
We are Turing O-Machines. The Oracle is out there.
While that's true, it's a separate matter. There's just no need for Microsoft to _plan_ or deliberately leak the software. It's far too likely to be stolen as a matter of course, with no corporate malfeisance necessary.
Of course it doesn't. What an absurdity. The more money kept out of the hands of government thieves, the better. I can't condone their awful software, nor, what's far worse, their use of violent force (through support of governments) to attack, imprison, and fine innocent (of any real crime) copiers and users of software, but I wholeheartedly commend their efforts to keep some of their own money out of the hands of evil thieves.
You're misusing the Broken Window Fallacy. The fallacy only applies when there is an actual breach of rights or damage to property involved. In this case, there is no breach of Microsoft's property.
---In this case, there is no breach of Microsoft's property.
But there is to the customers.
Normal sales transactions include paying for an object. Money and object are transfered at sale, in which ownership is transfered.
With software, that is not so. They claim some additional title after the fact by reason of DRM, or remote orders, or by tattle-taling on you. Tell the people who got their machine disabled by Microsoft because of some anti-pirate code and tell me that blackmailing their data isnt a form of Broken Window.
I would claim that the Broken Window Fallacy is true for the users: they are the ones who are punished and have gained something "broken" and must fix.
Ireland is one of the wealthiest nations on Earth! If you believe this crap, then by all means, check my eBay listings. I have some fabulous landmarks that I picked up on the cheap in the down-turned economy that will fetch you a handsome profit if you take them off my hands...
The main reason that a lot of countries are upset over Ireland is because of the fact that they are one of the most capitalistic countries in the West, and have grown very rich and successful by being a tax haven and business mecca for Europe. Consequently, they have, for their size, a very large and robust economy and have to fight off immigrants with a stick. If I were to expatriate, Ireland would be at the top of my list of countries because of all of the job opportunities that exist there compared to most of Europe.
Robbery is taking things from people under the threat of harm period. It doesn't matter if the robber returns some money taken from me in the form of some service that "we" (that means "you and the like-minded people") take for granted, but that _I_ didn't request at all or at least from this provider, at this moment, at this price and quality and in this scope.
People chipping in together is a perfectly good way to achieve common goals - but only when the financing is voluntary and the goal is shared by every person in the group. Otherwise it is a glorified robbery.
The entire paragraph you've somehow misidentified as an "introduction" is only a paraphrase or another article that the writer is responding to. The author only partially endorses the opinions of this other article, and actually goes so far as to parenthetically make points you'd probably agree with.
...but my only concern is this: using violence to drag a human being into a rape hole, for duplicating a few bits and bytes, is immoral.
And we are all the poorer for living in a society so corrupt that this is regarded as not just legal, not just condoned by us, but also the blessed course of action.
Rudd-O - http://rudd-o.com/
And quite a few assholes, too, apparently.
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
> "A few hundred people", including off-site partners, is more broadly
> distributed than many commercial and most private software projects. It
> could, possibly, have been a malicious behavior by a Microsoft employee
> or partner, but there is no compelling reason to think that it was
> anything other than a simple theft of the code.
Again in my opinion I think you're wrong.
The reason why I think you're mistaken in your view is that it is not too big a leap, based on the known business practises of this dodgy corporation, to consider what underhand marketing ploys they would use, or continue to use.
Putting beta versions of its own OS up on bit torrent is not beyond the realm of what Microsoft would do if by doing so it gave a marketing advantage against its perceived opposition.