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Illegal users get to install SP2

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Originally posted by: Kappo
Originally posted by: drag
Originally posted by: Kappo
Well then, that's good. Screw the users that steal software.

I hope that they do get viruses for stealing food from the mouth of all those hard working programmers.

Those BASTARDS.


Were you being sarcastic?

Yes.

So in reality you just wanted to take this chance to bash MS to prove your e-p33n? Just checking!

I am just play'n fun.

I can't bash MS anymore then they bash themselves. probably had one guy from MS saying that stolen software will not be supported, and then you probably have another guy from MS saying how they care more about the internet community and will make patches aviable to everyone.

So MS is just full of it again, and even if they are or aren't in reality its not like it matters.

Just remember back when WinXP was not released yet and people were freaking out about the "horrible horrible" protection sceme and how WinXP sucks and how they aren't going to use it, blah blah blah. Nobody was going to get rid of win98, it worked fine, and activation was such a pain in the arse etc etc. Then corporate edition came out and they all shut up and stole that OS just like they stole Win98 SE and Win95 before that. Now when ever somebody even mentions "coporate edition" everybody automaticly assumes that they are talking about piracy in one form or another. Even people who are asking about it for legitament reasons get flamed right away till they explain themselves.

Then on top of that MS talks about just wanting to protect their own intellectual property when they themselves stole so much from other people and scammed lots of companies in partnerships. You won't here half of what goes on because later they just settle out of court and sign NDA's and everything is hidden behind PR like 95% of what goes on in this industry. But the lawsuites that do end up going to court are very telling. Hypocrates.

But then again, it's not like MS is the only people acting this way, and they do put a lot of work into Windows so I respect their wishes with their software. They made it, its theirs, if it wasn't for B.G. it wouldn't exist in the first place, so they can do what they want with it.

To me why would anybody be stupid enough to be dishonest and go thru all the trouble and waste the time to steal a OS when you have perfectly good free ones aviable?

Bunch of lamers. People who purposely steal software are as big a dorks as MS is trying to milk their customers for as much money as possible.

I wasn't MS bashing, I was expressing my cynicism to the whole thing.

Personally I think that MS should release the 2nd service pack for everybody to use, but insert a posion pill that will in a few months will bring up a activation notification.

This activation notice will give people a chance to call MS and activate it if it's legal or purchase a discounted OEM liscence if it's a illegal copy. A memo should be "accidently" "leaked" describing a painfull and technically involved way of defeating this 2sp-based activation sceme.

Then after the activation will be "cracked" and on the April 1st of every year the OS will e-mail MS technical details about the OS, the Mac Address, cpu, motherboard type, harddrive type, and other objects used in fingerprinting a machine for the original activation.

Then the OS will quietly and silently corrupt itself and everything on the drive and anything it has access too.

Then when people finally give up and try to activate a real version of MS their computer will be recorded and documented as using stolen software. In order to activate WinXP then the bastards will have to pay for TWO full priced liscenced of windows. One for the stolen copy, one for the legit copy.

Now that's a activation sceme I would use if I was incharge of MS.
 
The problem with that drag is, what about corporations with tens of thousands of computers?
Suddenly getting an activation notice on every single one of those would annoy quite a few people.
 
Originally posted by: Sunner
The problem with that drag is, what about corporations with tens of thousands of computers?
Suddenly getting an activation notice on every single one of those would annoy quite a few people.

Nah, you see those won't be using bad activation keys. I'd just record and document all the legitament keys out there and ones that are legit, won't be pestered.

Plus for I'd start a program were people would trade in their old copies of Windows OS for ones that are completely up to date. (all the patches, drivers and service packs...)

With the advent of SP2 I would introduce a new OS auth. service. A program that you can install on any desktop that will keep track of the liscenced software and basicly be your own little private MS activation software server. It will keep track of the per-seat or per-whatever so that you don't ever have to worry about activation again. If you run out of liscences it will still allow you to install and activate the software, but will include a notice that you realy should buy enough for your needs.

If push comes to shove then I would have to say that if a corporation does not have liscences for some of the software it's using then MS can not support that orginization till they become legit. (then later use the activation server as a avenue of attack of some of the nastier forms of new viruses, just so that they get the picture, see?)

Then I would try to leverage other software companies to use this free auth. service (downloadable from ms.com of course) to manage their own third party thru plugins. So all your liscencing needs can be handled thru a nice little app that you can tie into your MS SQL or Access database for easy accounting. (and if a company is using 5110 liscences and gets charged with 5300 or so, what could the harm be?)

The benifit for coporations would be that they now would never have to worry about software inventory or keeping track of everything, and liscences they never use will not have to be paid for. (throw the dog a bone 😉)

(mhwa ha ha... *drag plans for world dominance*)
 
Well then when a person calls in to complain or to validate the activation I will have the phone people explain that this was just a anticipated bug with the upgrade to SP2 due to the new activation server sceme.

A couple press annoncements explaining the problem would be out after the release of SP2. I would tell them about the new sceme and how it will benifit companies and how this was a unfortunate repsonse needed to couteract the rampant pirating of software.

Then I will buy some extra glossy pages out in those magazines just to make sure the spin goes my way.

If some big clients get pissy, I'll just soften them up with some deep discounts of Office and some other assorted software. Maybe a free vacation for the CEO or something if they sign a NDA about any problems it caused if there happened to be a major issue.

Note: it will still give you plenty of time to re-activate it with no problems or "accidental" corruption for a good long time after the install, and you do get another chance to get it right, even if it was actually stolen. No prosecutions, honest.

Also anything with SP2 can be activated in-house using the new activation server. So any inconvenience will lead to the ability for the admins to be slightly more lazier and they will love us for it.
 
Originally posted by: drag
Well then when a person calls in to complain or to validate the activation I will have the phone people explain that this was just a anticipated bug with the upgrade to SP2 due to the new activation server sceme.

A couple press annoncements explaining the problem would be out after the release of SP2. I would tell them about the new sceme and how it will benifit companies and how this was a unfortunate repsonse needed to couteract the rampant pirating of software.

Then I will buy some extra glossy pages out in those magazines just to make sure the spin goes my way.

If some big clients get pissy, I'll just soften them up with some deep discounts of Office and some other assorted software. Maybe a free vacation for the CEO or something if they sign a NDA about any problems it caused if there happened to be a major issue.

Note: it will still give you plenty of time to re-activate it with no problems or "accidental" corruption for a good long time after the install, and you do get another chance to get it right, even if it was actually stolen. No prosecutions, honest.

Also anything with SP2 can be activated in-house using the new activation server. So any inconvenience will lead to the ability for the admins to be slightly more lazier and they will love us for it.

Sounds like an awful lot of trouble compared to just letting everyone install it, especially seeing as piracy in many cases benefits MS, as n0c mentioned 😉
 
Sounds like an awful lot of trouble compared to just letting everyone install it, especially seeing as piracy in many cases benefits MS, as n0c mentioned 😉


Na, We would do stuff like this on a pretty much daily basis. We want to get people so hooked on this crap that when people talk about Linux they say stuff like "how are we suppose to keep track of our liscences if Linux doesn't have a built in activation server support?"

Plus around the time people begin getting pissy to much thats when we release the "Corporate" Edition of Longhorn. 😛
 
Originally posted by: drag
Sounds like an awful lot of trouble compared to just letting everyone install it, especially seeing as piracy in many cases benefits MS, as n0c mentioned 😉


Na, We would do stuff like this on a pretty much daily basis. We want to get people so hooked on this crap that when people talk about Linux they say stuff like "how are we suppose to keep track of our liscences if Linux doesn't have a built in activation server support?"

Plus around the time people begin getting pissy to much thats when we release the "Corporate" Edition of Longhorn. 😛

Hmm, I think I'm going to have to kill you, just to make sure you never make any of this a reality 😉
 
I say it's a Trojan Horse ploy. They give the illegal users a false sense of security, then give them SP2, which in fact is an advanced scanner to detect illegal usage, and then report it back to Microsoft. 😛
Any other conspiracy theories?
 
* If M$ does decide to release the SP@ for all ( incl. illegal installs); they are probably trying to save their own $$ rather than helping the pirates. Imagine a situation where a company has licence for 100 machines, ends up installing on 105 ( so technically 5 are illegal installs?) . 100 'legal'machines work well, one of the 5 'illegal' have a problem due to say a worm. How is M$ to find out whether the broken machine is legit or not? If they have a support contract with the company, they will have to honour it. In other words, $$ spent. OTOH, if all 105 machines are patched and they work fine, M$ doesnt have to provide tech support.

*What prevents M$ from installing trackers/ its own spyware on users' machines to find out whether the OS install in legit or not? After all, the SP2 source code isnt known to most users,; and moreover, most ppl dont bother reading the EULA anyways.
 
Originally posted by: civad
* If M$ does decide to release the SP@ for all ( incl. illegal installs); they are probably trying to save their own $$ rather than helping the pirates. Imagine a situation where a company has licence for 100 machines, ends up installing on 105 ( so technically 5 are illegal installs?) . 100 'legal'machines work well, one of the 5 'illegal' have a problem due to say a worm. How is M$ to find out whether the broken machine is legit or not? If they have a support contract with the company, they will have to honour it. In other words, $$ spent. OTOH, if all 105 machines are patched and they work fine, M$ doesnt have to provide tech support.

Support is profitable for MS. That's why they provide support, when you buy a liscence you get a free troubleshooting call, but each time after that it's something like 250 dollars per phone call, or 75 bucks or 150 bucks, or something like that. I don't remember.

Anyways support isn't something MS is going to lose money on.

(edit:
or maybe not... What do I know, anyways? Nothing. 😉)

*What prevents M$ from installing trackers/ its own spyware on users' machines to find out whether the OS install in legit or not? After all, the SP2 source code isnt known to most users,; and moreover, most ppl dont bother reading the EULA anyways.

Admins monitor network traffic and analyse it for any patterns of misbehavior. For instance were I work each and every connection that is made thru the external fire wall is recorded and monitored, anything unusual is going to show up.. especially if you see a pattern of traffic going to microsoft.com.

The one execption of this is when you go to download the updates and MS's online stuff anylizes your machine to determine the needed updates. Some stuff they do then is questionable, but nobody outside MS is going to know exactly what information is being sneaked accross, if any.

They got busted in Germany a while ago when some smart network admins disected the network traffic during updates and found transactions that may or may not of violated some German consumer protection laws.

But stuff like that is not going to keep me awake at night.

PR dictates that they can't move against their customers and be all that sneaky, 9 or 10 people already dont' trust MS farther then they can throw Bill Gate's net worth in the form of 10 dollar rolls of quarters. Anything underhanded would have a immediate and negative backlash.
 
Support is profitable for MS.
Agreed. But imagine a situation where a legit user had to be put on hold because of 'other' people. Else make thm pay for premium support// hire more tech support staff? I am not aware of the dynamics behind tech support myself, though
 
It is not our place (support professionals) to grant/deny support based on the legality of their software. Callers are not screened based on their license compliance. Fact is, people unwilling to pay for a legal license to use the software generally do not want to pay $245 when it doesn't work.

As for the profitibility of support, I will say only this: there are many expenses associated with providing support.
 
When the time comes that it's released couple things needed to be done around where I stay, sigh!
  • Install on all my PC's again.
  • Create another Slipstream CD that includes the new SP2.:disgust:
Oh well, just another thing to add to my list and just blowing off steam.
 
All of this discussion is moot at this point because MS clarified themselves/changed their minds and decided that sp2 will not work on pirated OS installs.

Link here.
 
Here's hoping it will still work with a keygen. Despite owning a legal copy of XP Pro, I just run a cracked version to avoid the hassle of calling MS every time I reinstall. What a chore it would have been when I was troubleshooting my SATA/IDE configuration on my IS7 and I reinstalled over half a dozen times in less than a week!
 
That's what I thought, which is what prompted me to install the legal version in the first place. However, it seems that whenever I reinstall, my hardware has changed "significantly."
 
Re-installing the operating system will require activation everytime regardless of any hardware changes.

I don't know whether you would have to phone M$, but an online activation would definately be required.
 
Yes, absolutely. But you do not have to call us if the hardware doesn't change. You can do it with about 3 clicks over the web.
 
Want to help stamp-out piracy? Start using Linux and FREE you minds!

Maybe Gates sees the future and M$ is not in it. Better to have mindless pirates that you control rather than more penguins nipping at your heels.
 
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