Pirated Office XP Posted on Usenet

Somebody, probably internally at Microsoft, posted a cracked copy of Office XP to Usenet. Office XP is the soon-to-be-released office suite that has a stringent copy protection scheme built in.

There’s a nice piece of unintentional humor provided by Lisa Gurry, product manager for Office, who said — presumably with a straight face, “Consumers need to be aware this software is not official software and will likely contain problems for them if they choose to install it.”

Will likely contain problems fro users who choose to install it? Doesn’t that describe pretty much every Microsoft product?

The Single Best Thing That Ever Happened to Microsoft

During the Microsoft trial that eventually ended up in an order for the company to be broken up, a lot of anti-Microsoft folks (I’m thinking specifically of the wonderful folks at Slashdot) were thrilled that Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson understood their anti-MS arguments so well and would stick it to the company.

I felt like a distinct minority arguing that Jackson was the best thing that ever happened to Microsoft. He was so clearly biased in his view of Microsoft and so arbitrary in his rulings and decisions, that he pretty much guaranteed that his ruling against the company would never stand up. Biased judges are nothing new, but usually they try to be a bit more discrete.

Wired summarizes the appellate court’s outrage at Jackson’s behavior with chief justice Harry Edwards saying, “We don’t run off our mouths in a pejorative way…. The system would be a shambles if all judges did that. Good heavens, is that what judges do? They take preferred reporters in?” Edwards went so far as to ask whether or not Jackson’s conduct might have violated the oath he took upon becoming a federal judge.

A lot of anti-MS commentators made much of the fact that as the finder of fact, the appellate court would probably be unwilling to overturn Jackson’s finding that Microsoft had attempted to use its Windows dominance to harm Netscape. But as Judge David Sentelle pointed out during the recent appellate hearing, that assumes that the judge is a neutral fact finder and Judge Jackson was so obviously not neutral, “Why is the finder of fact entitled to deference anymore?”

And once you get beyond Penfield’s longstanding antipathy for Microsoft, the trial court found plenty of evidence that Microsoft engaged in some pretty unethical business practices (which should shock no one) but surprisingly little evidence that Microsoft had illegally leveraged its OS dominance to drive out Netscape (part of the problem being that Netscape did a pretty good job of self-destructing without any help from Gates and company).

ShareSniffer Exposes Microsoft’s Lack of Security Concerns

ShareSniffer claims to be an alternative person-to-person service like Napster, but strikes me as a parody designed to embarrass Microsoft over the way MS deals with security issues in Windows.

Specifically, a lot of people who have set up home networks have turned file sharing on so they could share files and peripherals over their home LANs. In the process, however, a lot of them have also configured file sharing so that it shares part or all of their hard drives with the Internet. Anyone who knows the correct IP address can access such hard drives as if they were sitting at the computer.

Now Microsoft certainly has a bunch of excuses — essentially blame the users who are misconfiguring file sharing to pointing out that this wasn’t much of an issue until recently because few people had home LANs and even fewer had high speed connections.

The bottom line, however, is that the option to share files over the Internet should not be built into a consumer-level operating system the way Microsoft has done. It shouldn’t even be an issue because it should be something that the average user can’t accidentally do (the irony here, of course, is that while it is often extremely difficult to configure Windows in ways that would be helpful to the average user, it is relatively easy for users to do something almost nobody intentionally wants to do such as placing the contents of their hard drive on the Internet for anyone to come along and access).

And it’s not long the ShareSniffer folks are the first people to realize users are making this mistake. This is a longstanding problem that Microsoft has done nothing to deal with. The obvious way to deal with this would be to take out the option to share the HD over the Internet and put that option in a separate program under the accessories area that explains in detail exactly what enabling the feature will do before users set this option. A few people will still make the mistake of installing it, but nothing like the large number of people who today set it inadvertently while trying to figure out how to make a network function properly under Windows (which is a pain in the neck unless you have a dedicated IT staff, which most home users don’t).

Limited Install Microsoft Products

Wired has a story about Microsoft’s latest copy protection scheme which includes limiting the total number of times a given piece of software can be installed.

When activating the software, the Product Activation utility examines the PC’s hardware and generates a “hash,” like an electronic fingerprint, based on all of the different pieces in the system. When the software is activated, Microsoft stores both the activation key and the hash. That way, if a user has to reinstall the software, Microsoft’s server will recognize the hardware configuration.

One or two peripherals can be swapped out of a system and the hash would be preserved, but a major overhaul or new system would require the user to call Microsoft to confirm that they have rights to the software to get it activated. If the software isn’t registered, the Microsoft operator can see how many times the software has been activated and decide based on the number of activations and the story the user tells.

Microsoft insists honest users have nothing to fear. “If it’s an honest customer, then they know what they did, they don’t have to remember a bunch of lies,” said Nieman. “If you’re pirating the product, you have to remember a bunch of lies.”

Stupid, stupid, stupid. Okay, I’m probably not the typical user but in the last four months I changed the video card in my main system twice, added an additional hard drive, swapped about 6 PCI cards in and out, and upgraded the memory. And I’m going to wait on hold for Microsoft? Are they going to help me do this at 2 a.m.?

No thanks. Unfortunately there’s no way to ditch Windows at the moment because of the lack of applications on other OSes, but I refuse to use Office anymore and am surviving just fine. Hopefully Linux will mature into a viable desktop OS or somebody else will find a way to route around the Redmond behemoth.

Licensing Issues with Front Office and Microsoft

In my plug for Front Office Football 2001 I forgot to mention that Electronic Arts has used an insanely stupid licensing mechanism, which is worth noting because rumor has it that Microsoft is going to begin using a similar system with the upcoming Whistler and Office XP.

FOF2K1 is distributed only over the Internet. When you download and fire up the game, it asks you to enter your order number. The game transmits the order number to an Internet site which generates a license code specific to the machine you’re using — I’m assuming they’re writing the license code somewhere on the C: drive.

Here’s the insane part. When you buy the game you’re granted a license to run the game on two machines. The Internet server is tracking how many different machines you’re running the game on. If you decide to use a third machine the game has a feature in which you can de-license the copy on machine A, install the game on machine B and then license it again on machine B.

The problem should be obvious. Suppose I have the game licensed on my home machine and my laptop and someone steals my laptop. Or perhaps the hard drive on my home machine bites the dust. According to EA’s licensing scheme I’m already using my two licenses and am screwed — time to put up another $25 for a two-machine license (if they simply give me an additional license if I say my laptop was stolen or my hard drive crashed, there is no point for the copy protection in the first place).

I haven’t seen any details but have heard that the copy protection for Microsoft Office XP and Whistler will have a similar feature that keeps track of the number of installs of licensed software. Already it’s being reported that beta testers of Whistler quickly hacked the copy protection after running into Microsoft tech support people who had never considered the problems with this sort of system.

Unfortunately so far I haven’t run into a crack for FOF2K1, but I’m still looking.

Microsoft’s Arrogance

According to the introduction on its site, Bugtraq “is a full disclosure moderated mailing list for the *detailed* discussion and announcement of computer security vulnerabilities…” Microsoft, with its typical myopic arrogance, fired of an e-mail warning after one of Microsoft’s announcements of yet another bug in their softare was reposted to the Bugtraq list.

According to the list moderator,

It seems Microsoft was not very amused at my posting of their advisory to the list the other day. As the copyright holders of the work they have told me in no uncertain terms that I do not have their permission to redistribute a text version of their web page bulletins via the mailing list or the securityfocus.com web site, and that doing so would be considered an act of copyright violation.

There you have it. So until Microsoft changes their policy or changes their email bulletins back to the old format you won’t see them on the list. Of curse [sic] the vulnerabilities and their information will continue to be announced.

Just when I think Microsoft couldn’t possibly get more petty or arrogant, they go and prove me wrong. It is inconceivable to me why such a large corporation would treat its customers in such a shabby manner.