Groklaw: MSFT phones home
 

I suppose the only people who think enough about such things to get upset have already read Grolaw's article:
Microsoft's Calling Home Problem: It's a Matter of Informed Consent. But maybe not, or maybe the dumbed-down coverage you'll see in a lot of other places is "good enough".

But PJ's words on this subject are definately worth a read...especially given the kind of ire we see around here about arguably much less intrusive monitoring conducted by the government.

I'm most pissed about not being able to uninstall. Maybe norton ghost will let me go back to a happier, less probing time.

This is just the cost of doing business with Windows. It's disappointing, but not particularly surprising. The only thing anybody can do about it is stop using Windows.

Which is what the article advocates.

And my personal meaning of "doing business" doesn't seem to apply here. This is more like aggravated assault; it is indeed essentially a root kit. Careful readers of MSFT EULAs over the last few years certainly won't be surprised.

Well I never consented to install this gadget on the two Windows machines I use; one at home (a laptop) or at work (for Exchange); the click-though points out that this is "pre-release" software, which I'm not certainly not interested in running for MSTF's benefit.

It's certainly a peculiar meaning of the word "release"; millions of people have installed this almost automatically, but it's not "released" yet.

MSFT, come back and ask me again when you have the final version. I'll think about it then.

In the meantime there's Ubuntu.

I told ZoneAlarm not to let it through. An imperfect solution, but it'll do for now.

Or, maybe I will. Try this link to remove the tool.

I agree: r:devil::devil:tkit.

I also especially liked this line of reasoning. "I am Spartacus!" hehehehe.

Sweetness! I think. Those wretches really really want taht shit in our computers. The first thing I tried was system restore. MS won't let me restore to a point before installation. I didn't try norton ghost since the last update point was a long while before I had downloaded a bunchof other software. I was thinking it would be a last resort, but maybe that wouldn't have worked either.

A number of the fixes on the site didn't work. Going to the third or fourth solution, C:\WINDOWS\SoftwareDistribution\ Download\6c4788c9549d437e76e1773a7639582a allowed me to throw out wga related files and applications. Only the folder wasn't 6c4788c95 etc etc. it had a different string of characters.

a file by any other name would reek as much...

Well, I think it is out, out damn spot...

I usually tell microsoft to "pound salt" somehow, they caught me at a weak moment.

Thanks V,

And Maggie, I am thinking I might want to go Ubuntu, will I have to learn linux?

It depends on what you want to do foot³. If all you do is Net, Office, E-mail stuff then Ubuntu will be a breeze. Of course the easiest way to see what it is like is to download the Live CD and give it a spin. If something doesn't work Ubuntu has good support forums and at least one person here has been using Linux for a while.

Thanks Jebediah, I mostly look at the cellar, surf the net, use photoshop, and never download unlicensed music from peer to peer filesharing networks. ;)

Sometimes I send an email.

Well..Photoshop is an issue, because it's Windows only. There are other image editing programs.

Gimp works well for me. It takes some getting used to for sure. As for P2P there is mldokney (does pretty much everything), DC++ clients, SoulSeek, IRC, etc, etc. Not that I have personal experience using any of those ;)

I may be in for a learning curve.

I think GIMP is great; I use it all the time, even on Windows. If you're dependant on a lot of Photoshop plug-ins it may not meet all your needs. For vector/path based graphics (a la Illustrator), consider Inkscape. For diagramming there's Xdia and also yEd.

I like GIMP. I had Photoshop on my old Macintosh, and when I got a PC a few years ago, there was no way in hell I was dropping that kind of coin on Photoshop again. Gimp does everything I ever did in Photoshop. The controls are completely different, but the learning isn't so bad.

Is this the other shoe dropping?
 

"Cost of doing business" indeed...


Is Microsoft about to release a Windows "kill switch"?

and 31 days until....
 

there's a crack out for it.

There already is a WGA crack (RemoveWGA - google for it, I'm not posting the link). It works incredibly well, BTW.

Microsoft doesn't realize that everything they try gets broken, and will continue to do so. If it runs on hardware, it will be cracked. It's just a question of time.

And yes, if Windows stops working en masse for a lot of people with pirated Windows, which is much more prevalent than people think, there will be an upsurge in Linux usage. Ubuntu is really looking good now.

However, they said that SP2 would break pirated versions of Windows. We see how well that worked :).

XP is really pissing people off. It's an evolutionary dead end (they are using the Windows Server 2003 SP1 codebase as the base for Vista) like the 9x codebase. It's got many issues (Windows Server 2003 hibernate mode actually works on my ThinkPad most of the time, as opposed to not on the new one) with power management, sluggishness/speed loss with SP2, a major increase in RAM usage since SP2 (it now takes at least 384MB RAM to run XP Pro without major performance issues), and issues with legacy apps due to SP2.

Windows 2003 Server is still the best OS they put out, by far. Too bad they didn't release it as a workstation OS. I'm running XP Pro on my T43, and it's slower in spots than 2003 Server on my R31 (which will be running Ubuntu Linux 6.06 soon). It also works well on a Pentium II :). It's the best laptop OS I have ever used, and it fully supported all my Thinkpad Power Management drivers, as well as my wireless card drivers.

Between WGA, Vista, and the rest of their mess-ups, I am not envious of Microsoft. Flipping the switch like Hughes did to the DirecTV users before the Superbowl is going to really piss a lot of people off. It will probably shut down a few corporations' PC's due to leaked VLKs from low-level employees. It will make people start to think that Microsoft has ulterior motives to take people's money.

All it will take is a version of Linux that installs AOL, Google Tools, Flash, a JRE, MP3/AAC/WMV/QT Codecs, and a version of WINE that can run iTunes, and you can make the market share of Linux increase significantly. The user interface, especially with Ubuntu, is improving.

I would not be surprised if Google is putting together the licensing needed to make a Google Pack for Ubuntu Linux soon that would have most, if not all, of that. WGA will make people think twice about Windows, and Google has a golden opportunity here to Do No Evil and provide a decent alternative that puts the rest of what you need to replace a PC on the desktop, while not making their own Linux distro :).

And yes, the only reason I am running Windows XP is because I have to for work. My other PCs run Linux, OpenBSD, and OS X.

They have retreated from their earlier position. From here.

now it won't seem so onerous when they present this plan again.

Can you believe? SWMBO, the same woman who cannot get her email, clicked on the dire warning pop up entreating her to "fix now" the Automatic Updates Turned Off.

I now have to go through the whole rigamarole again. I have now set her up as a limited account so she doesn't have privileges allowing her to make any of those types of changes.

I am concerned that she may need me around in order to log in.

that RemoveWGA was on it like a terrier with a rat in its mouth.

Thanks.

I think my computer is safe for democracy now.

Ya think? It's still running Windows... :-)

Point. I'm hoping this winter I'll have time to fool with Ubuntu and gimp. Right now it's all I can do to get here and try and throw a few bon mots y'all's way.