Update for Microsoft Windows (KB971033) - Caution!

This is not the right place for posting this kind of info. So I apologize in advance … However, according to the many posts I’ve read here about Windows 7/Linux dual or triple boot, I would assume that some of you guys might be concerned about what’s going on in the next Windows 7 update, scheduled on february 16.

Here’s the article: Lauren Weinstein’s Blog: Who Owns Your PC? New Anti-Piracy Windows 7 Update “Phones Home” to Microsoft Every 90 Days

Interesting if only for the measure of ‘sadness’ it confirms. For all those windows users that think that win7 is the ‘Dog’s Bollocks’, think again. And last time I looked, where Dog’s Bollocks are concerned, you’ll be licking your own. Have fun with that.

The counterbalancing view is here:
Windows Activation Technologies Update for Windows 7 - Genuine Windows Blog - The Windows Blog
No doubt it’s as biased as the first one, so it’s interesting to read both.

Forget about the burly men coming in the door. That’s not for at least a decade yet. But the real issue of Msoft remotely disabling (to a small degree) the intellectual property that was stolen from them is indeed interesting.

People who would never shoplift, seem to feel no guilt about running pirated copies of Windows. It’s still theft, but they don’t look at it that way. And when Microsoft fixes the hole that was being used, the pirates find another hole to exploit and the masses will download, format and install the new pirated version.

I can’t blame Microsoft for trying to stop the pirates or the masses of users that want a free ride. However, many people do blame them and call them evil for creating things like Genuine Validation, and blacklisting CD keys. They get on the web and blog about how wrong Microsoft to invade the pirates privacy. WHAAAAAAAAA!

These people could use Linux, but their conscience doesn’t seem to bother them enough to do that. Many of them could easily afford to pay for a copy of Windows, but are too cheap to do so. Some will just use a pirated copy and never install updates, and run a vulnerable system that becomes part of some bot-net.

All three of my PCs can pass validation and I won’t have any issue with applying the patch. I can also sleep well, because I have no guilty conscience to keep me awake. :slight_smile:

If you run Windows you need to pay for it’s use. What I can not understand is why MS thinks that a certified copy would need to be rechecked every 90 or fewer days to see if it is still certified??? All it will take is some blackhat to write a virus/Trojan the makes it look like a copy is not certified and all hell will break out. Change a few DLL check sums here and there should do it. What is MS thinking?

That’s a good point. It seems that about once a week, I do something that causes my PC to have to validate Windows again. I would think that once it has passed validation, that should be good enough. If it was validated when installed and activated, what would cause it to become a pirated version later?

Hi
Replace a critical component eg hard disk, video card etc or re-install.


Cheers Malcolm °¿° (Linux Counter #276890)
SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 11 (x86_64) Kernel 2.6.27.42-0.1-default
up 6 days 10:37, 4 users, load average: 0.08, 0.09, 0.11
GPU GeForce 8600 GTS Silent - CUDA Driver Version: 190.53

Yes, but that should not make it a pirated version.

Can you understand…

[ul]
[li]Why they use to put MAC addresses in Word and Excel documents ? That was before complaining bloggers time. But there were already clever journalists in Germany to report what ended up beeing a bug in MS Office and fair enough judges to con**** MS for privacy violation?
[/li][li]Why doesn’t this forum let you write C O N D A M N in good english?
[/li][li]And why did MS invent Win Modems (and why it suddenly became impossible to find ‘real’ modems ? )
[/li][li]And why did MS hire IBM programmers … and why did OS/2 die ?
[/li][li]And why did BeOS suddenly stop existing ?
[/li][li]And how come that Linux included SCO code (actually stolen from BSD)?
[/li][li]And why can you buy laptops with Windows 7 preinstalled, probably a Windows license (dunno) but no Windows original DVD, just an image, sometimes not even the OS image but some OEM rescue stuff that you are supposed to burn yourself, even on machine without DVD writer at all?
[/li][li]And what did Steve Ballmer ingest or inhale as he called Linux “as cancer that attaches itself in an intellectual property sense to everything it touches” ?
[/li][li]And why should you buy him crack (again and again): YouTube - Steve Ballmer going crazy
[/li][li]And why am I regarded as a criminal when I ask for a BSD compatible mainboard in computer stores?
[/li][/ul]
I don’t know the reason of this mess … but I suspect that too many people sleeping well might have their part of responsibility about which pratices should be considered acceptable or not. (Unfortunately this is not limited to Operating systems). If ever there were a ‘conscience’ in this world, it has never been on MS side.

It’s very disturbing that MS more and more puts the average user under general suspect, following the motto “Guilty until proven innocent” :sick:
With this, they now classify everyone as evil pirate, regardless if they are or not, and everyone has to prove every 90 days that he/she is innocent and not a pirate, by means of the phone-home update.

Also, let’s not forget how sloppily programmed this activation stuff generally is. In the past, there already were a lot of false positives, of innocent people wrongly classified as pirates. I doubt it will be much different here.

With some luck though, MS will shoot into their own foot with this update, and if people get as angry about it as they should, then there’s a good chance they’ll become smart enough to turn their back to Windows.

btw: I think this should be moved to “General chit-chat” or even “Soapbox”.

Yes. I thought (I might be wrong) that most people who might be interested by this info would look in that forum (for solutions to their dual boot problems) and never go to “General chit-chat”. That’s the reason why I posted it under Install/Boot/Login (after some hesitation).

Hi
But it will require re-validation, which I think is the issue. You
validate your legal copy, somehow you code is duplicated and used and
gets blacklisted. If you have to replace and re-validate, it won’t let
you. I think this won’t affect OEM version images (well it hasn’t on my
netbook…yet :wink: )


Cheers Malcolm °¿° (Linux Counter #276890)
SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 11 (x86_64) Kernel 2.6.27.42-0.1-default
up 6 days 12:34, 4 users, load average: 0.40, 0.20, 0.12
GPU GeForce 8600 GTS Silent - CUDA Driver Version: 190.53

Interestingly enough, this is actually against our laws if you want to examine them thoroughly - they (in telecommunication cases such as this one) declare that no information shall be transmitted from your computer without prior acknowledgement on your behalf.

The only way Microsoft could make this legal would be to inform the user during the installation of this patch that it would be “calling home” on regular intervals.

I’ll have to examine my legal books (Yes, I’m reading law nowadays…) a bit (also; I’m not your lawyer :p).

I think the real issue here is the intrusion and violation of a persons rights. You have the right for example to lend something that belongs to you to someone else under conditions that they fulfill some obligations to you concerning what you lent them, but you do not have the right to follow them around to make sure that they do so.

To place something in their computer that calls back like that is no different even though it is licensed and not a lent and constitutes and intrusion into their homes and private lives as well.

Even if you asked them ahead of time and they agreed, do you think it would be right to follow them around as long as they had your property to make sure they did/didn’t do what you said they must/couldn’t with it?

Would you even do it?

Well I suppose under certain circumstances, but not in general and not for long periods of time.

Microsoft may have the right to protect their intellectual property but there are better ways.

Chrysantine, I don’t know if you remember, but this is one of the things I was referring to when I said in another forum that it’s not the patent, but what you do with it that causes the problems.

A kind remark without wanting to be exaggerated:
please do not employ words of which, and weight and/or even meaning you do not currently reflect on.

This began with the use of the word against the current healthcare policy reform of the US and culminates in a (IMHO) not healthy or acceptable trivialization of a very important issue. There are ****, but neither the healthcare reform nor the update have anything to do with.
Microsoft is a private corporation with a monopolistic market-power that does everything to have even more power. Every corporation potentially does. The results can be disastrous for democracy (see the case IG Farben). We may well be on the trajectory but I still hope we are not yet there.

The fact that users obey to whatever imposition has a lot to do with people not understanding that “there is no free lunch”, so democratic values, respect, real free market and a lot of other issues are not self runners. Big surprise, you have to stand up for obtaining these things.
Not employing the aforementioned word out of context would be a right step in the right direction. Not buying a product that poses not acceptable conditions another.
But as said, people think everything is a self-runner.

@please-try-again: habeus corpus is out of fashion. Didn’t you notice?

Besides this considerations, as it is a private industry and as long as it is not breaking laws it has the right to protect his private property (a concept that (un?)fortunately is at the base of the current system. So maybe we should speak about a need to indicate more clearly the limits of the concept of property and to what extend defenses are legitimate).

In all cases we should thank the MS corporation for free publicity for Linux (maybe they are doing it for earning more on Novell certificates?).

Personally, I did solve the problem I had with Vista in 15 minutes. Knoppix, format the hole disk, install openSUSE. Never saw a technology advance in a machine so fast then that time.

Cheers, and don’t be angry at me for pointing out the above issue. I really think it is important.

Anyway this is the soapbox…

@Tokugawa-Ieyasu and stakanov posts have been edited to conform with
Forum T&C’s.

To all, if there is an issue with a post, please use the report
button :wink:


Cheers Malcolm °¿° (Linux Counter #276890)
SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 11 (x86_64) Kernel 2.6.27.42-0.1-default
up 6 days 16:21, 4 users, load average: 0.21, 0.16, 0.07
GPU GeForce 8600 GTS Silent - CUDA Driver Version: 190.53

Well, for me it wasn’t an “issue” but still, maybe a good choice. A terrible sensible terrain. Thanks for the advice about the button.

(Although a doubt is raising in my mind: that doesn’t mean that in one years time our posts will be He xxx, I saw that you speaking about *** I think this is *** because only a *** can have this solution. I am instead for *** to be sure that we are not *** at the end.) :wink:

The comparison between MS and IG Farben (which unscrupulously supplied the Germans during WWII) is very fitting. MS is really going into that direction :sick:
We really need a clearly more strict control of the market to avoid such things from happening. The so-called “Free” Market is actually destroying people’s freedom >:(

Yes, that’s probably true rotfl!

No problem.

Guys, let’s stop invoking Godwin’s Law in this thread - that’s going to
border on political discussion very quickly.

Thanks,

Jim

Jim Henderson
openSUSE Forums Administrator

Back to topic…
I just read half of the post from the link below and then jumped to comments from the users. What interesting i saw was the users using redmond softwares complaining against this update. May be you guys read this already, if not let me recall it again.
This is interesting one there:

"So let me get this straight. Say I purchase a genuine copy of Windows 7. Later, through no fault of my own, my cd-key/serial/etc is hacked or stolen by a third-party, and becomes available on the internet. It is used by hundreds of individuals and is added to Microsoft’s list of compromised licenses. The next time WAT checks, it will appear that I have a pirated copy of Windows 7, my OS will be ‘downgraded.’ This is ridiculous.

Checking that a license has not been compromised is useful during the initial install or activation process. This prevents compromised keys from being used on more and more machines. However, it sounds like this new system can easily invalidate installs that were initially authentic. Pirates will just move onto a new license key. The only people this system will hurt are the original customers who legitimately bought Windows and will suddenly find themselves running an ‘illegal’ copy. The pirates will keep pirating, and the paying customers will have another reason to avoid Microsoft products."

Windows Activation Technologies Update for Windows 7 - Genuine Windows Blog - The Windows Blog

Whatever redmond do, pirates will never stop pirating it. NEVER… so it does not bother them at all…the effected users will be the customers loyal to redmond paying them bucks for its softwares.
Just my thoughts!