New Anti-Piracy Windows 7 Update "Phones Home" to Microsoft Every 90 Days | Hacker News Reader

New Anti-Piracy Windows 7 Update "Phones Home" to Microsoft Every 90 Days

lauren.vortex.com

30 pointswglb39 comments

For example, a major PC game manufacturer has apparently announced that their games will soon no longer run at all if you don't have an Internet connection to allow them to authenticate at each run.

Which "major PC game manufacturer"? I don't doubt there is one -- BioWare attempted that once -- but I really dislike weasel phrasing. If you know which one, spell it out. If you don't know, research it first. Just don't write it like that.

It is Ubisoft.

See this http://www.shacknews.com/onearticle.x/62098 (random article from google) for example.

Ubisoft, for one.

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=DRM+need+to+be+onli...

KB71033 doesn't sound like a valid KB number - it's way out of sequence with current KBs, which are approaching KB900000 or so.

Hey there, there are a few things the author got wrong but the KB will be KB971033.

I work on Windows Update, so can't really comment on anything else about it... but if you want to keep an eye out for it, that's the KB to look for. Anything else you need to know about it (i.e. release dates) can be read about on the Windows Team Blog.

Disclaimer: I don't represent Microsoft.

(Author)'s basically describing WAT. So while the number might be off, the patch itself exists.

http://windowsteamblog.com/blogs/genuinewindows/archive/2010...

Edit: pronoun fail.

Lauren is a he. That is a picture of him on the bike. And a very interesting fellow.

I am a male 'Loren' by birth, but 'Lauren' to everyone who has ever tried to write down my name with explicit guidelines. (When I was young, my mother once accidentally almost enrolled me in a girls' school, which was delighted at the opportunity to welcome little Lauren.) As such, I have little to offer in this discussion other than: Thanks for helping to keep the pronouns straight.

I also always struggle with the temptation to say "What he's saying is …" when referring to an anonymous poster --I know it may not be the correct word, but it's so much easier than finding a gender-neutral re-phrasing. I quite like the grandparent's suggestion of '(Author)'s' as a substitute for 'his' or 'her' (or 'his or her').

And I have learned recently that "their" is acceptable in this context as well.

I probably wouldn't have made the comment other than the fact that I did some work with him back in the 80s.

Furthermore, all the references to KB71033 found by Google are about this exact same phone-home news:

http://www.google.com/search?q=KB71033

For all we know, MSFT gave different KB numbers to different people they briefed on the issue; allowing them to easily track which person is talking about it/leaking/being influential.

And, as of right now (1:39pm 2/11 CST), a link to this stingraycharles' comment is #1 on Google if you follow his link.

It's rather like an infinite loop, no?

This is absolutely ridiculous, I wonder how long it takes before Apple to take over this behavior. Crackers will always be able to outsmart Microsoft. The only victims of this technology are paying customers, like me. Maybe it's time to cancel my Action Pack and Websitespark memberships and use software from a company who trusts its own customers and doesn't treat its customers as potential pirates.

Seeing as you can't buy a mac without OS X (and that you can't buy OS X for a non-mac), I imagine it's much less of an issue. Doesn't quite seem worth the effort to engineer a DRM system just to block people skimping on the occasional $29 upgrade.

Why would you expect Apple to follow suit? They don't even have activation codes. They already treat their paying customers the way you're asking to be treated.

Apple has other products which could incorporate this behavior (not trusting their customers) like itunes content, iWorks or potentially jail broken iphones. I mean there are various ways for Apple to gain more control over their users.

As far as I know, Apple doesn't even make a product with online activation. They use serial numbers or nothing at all. They just don't care about controlling their users.

Someone isn't a longtime user of Logic Pro, which had one of the most obtuse and disruptive mechanisms to security that I ever experienced. Heaven forbid you lose your dongle...

Apple didn't originally develop Logic Pro (or the dongle), they bought it from Elogic. Within one release of buying it, Apple removed the dongle from the copy protection system. To be fair, this was pretty hard, as Logic actually offloaded some DSP processing onto it.

Today, the copy protection consists of:

1. The installer phones home to see if your serial is blacklisted. If Apple can't be reached, you can install it anyway (unlike activation).

2. Serials are blacklisted with each point release

3. Offline update install packages are behind a serial-wall on Apple's website, but are accessible with the system Software Update utility, which does not check serials.

4. Logic Pro broadcasts its serial over Bonjour, and won't start if another system on the local LAN is using the same serial

This is by far and away the most lax copy protection system of any of the professional DAWs. The primary copy protection is that it's mac-only, and the people who blow $2k on a mac aren't likely to balk at a few grand on good software.

This is not entirely true, if you treat iPhone applications like a software

Doesn't the iPhone have online activation?

True, hence "I wonder" when they do..is wondering something enough to downvote comments?

And yes they do care about controlling the users, they just use other ways to enforce that (appstore, hardware lock-in)

As far as iTunes goes, they've been going towards less control what with removal of the DRM and all.

I could definitely see Apple doing it on the App Store. If you jailbreak your iPhone/Touch and install one of the piracy app "stores" the whole process is just way too easy. I was perplexed why anyone would waste their time trying to steal a 99 cent app but after using the tools I understand. It's way too easy right now.

We can blame Microsoft for this but we should also blame the pirates. When piracy is hard and obscure it doesn't really hurt much. When these people go out of their way to create super easy methods of piracy and bring it to the mainstream they are forcing companies to react. They don't have to stop piracy completely but instead make it harder so the mainstream isn't so tempted.

It's definitely fair of Microsoft to try and protect its intellectual property. However I'm a paying customer and I expect that if I pay for their product I will not be hassled by their anti piracy measures.

Personally I rather have them invest the money they get from paying customers on creating more value for other people to buy their products than to create more "measures" against piracy. We all know that products with any form of DRM have a worse user experience than those exact same products without.

iPhone OS software? Maybe. Mac OS X software? Don’t think so.

Apple’s Mac consumer software is ridiculously easy to pirate. You can download iWork from Apple’s servers and find out the serial with five seconds of light googling. iLife and Mac OS X don’t even have a serial or any other kind of copy protection. (They might be harder to pirate, though, since you have to get the DMGs.)

And now get this: The $29 Snow Leopard update is license wise nothing more than an update for owners of Leopard and Leopard only. But the disc will install Snow Leopard even if you don’t have Leopard. It would be trivial to test (the could even let you install to an empty hard drive – just let the user insert the Leopard disc once to test whether she has it) but they don’t do it.

Software is maybe three percent of their revenue. Why overly protect it if pirates will find a way (or just not buy)? They don’t care much about protecting their Mac software from piracy because they make their money with Macs, not Mac OS X.

That might change with the iPhone, though. Don’t expect this Mac policy to carry over.

Suddenly, a pair of big, burly guys barge into your house and demand that you let them check your computer to make sure that it's "genuine" and not running pirated software.

This wouldn't bother me at all. I would then say, "Come back with a warrant," and expect to never see them again. If they secure the warrant and come back, then they are legally-entitled to inspect the machine, which is fine.

Too bad they don't know the password for my full-disk encryption, though. (My Win7 install is a VirtualBox image that runs inside my Linux install.)

But anyway, I love strict enforcement of software piracy rules. If people become unable to pirate commercial software, they will use and improve Free Software -- ending the problem of proprietary software forever.

You may joke, but this happened to some people I know, a few years ago, by the BSA, here in Belgium.

Not only do they check if you have anything installed now, but if there was anything, from the software companies they represent, ever installed, for which you cannot prove now, on paper, that you paid for it.

They then offer you the choice to settle now, for a respectable sum of money, or be officially charged, and you can await your trial.

I would await my trial, where all the illegally-collected evidence becomes inadmissible, and the charges are dropped with prejudice.

But of course, it would never get that far, because they wouldn't be allowed in my house, and they wouldn't be given the decryption key. (Any EULA they wave in front of you is invalid in the face of piracy; when you install pirated software, you are only violating copyright law, not the EULA. Let the police deal with it.)

I do not see any problem at all with this.

Its a completely valid thing for Microsoft to do. If you do not buy the software then you cannot use it. It's not a free OS. If you want a free OS go download some flavor of linux. Otherwise if you want windows you buy it. Why wouldn't they try to keep out people who have pirated their software?

They could have made it auto forward all of ones information to the police, since technically they stole the software. I think annoying you with some pop-ups is a much more friendly way.

The downvotes tell me we have some pirated versions out there ;)

The concern is about a) false positives, b) what happens on non-internet connected machines inside secure facilities e.g. nuclear power stations, banks, police stations, hospitals &c. &c.

So the only victims will ever be valid paying customers.

As far as b) is concerned, it says if it can't connect to the validation server nothing happens. No penalty.

As far as a) is concerned, call customer support. It says you might be able to get it for free if you are a victim of fraud, and if not you should be able to clear it up. You can easily bypass the activation limit by calling support, so something like a false positive should be easily correctable.

I really don't see any valid excuse against this unless you pirate. And if you don't like the system for any legitimate reason, don't buy Windows.

And what if the company goes away? Or is acquired by another company that doesn't want to support it?

Don't forget, this isn't just Windows. Other companies will point at MS and use it to justify their own actions.

If the company goes away then the servers that invalidate your Windows will not do so anymore.

This system would be a problem, but only if having a working OS depended on Microsoft keeping its servers up.

I'm reasonably sure the Eula states that you, quite specifically, cannot use Windows for things such as Nuclear Power Plants.

Likewise, if you were using it, wouldn't you be talking to Microsoft about specially hardened version of the software (or to a linux vendor who could provide the same)?.

You might not run the reactor with it or the heart monitors but ancillary staff need terminals for which Windows is suited and if I was running the place I'd want an air gap.

I found this interesting piece "... the update runs quietly in the background protecting your system."

Hopefully it really doesn't mean some kind of active protection eating precious resources.

Ah, "Protecting" as it would be a shame if anything were to break around here.

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