Crackers are not criminals

Subject: pimping M$

Andrew Andrew Andrew, Off-the-wagon again I see. Got yer knickers down. Back pimping for M$ and its' audio-crack / video-cocaine masters in Hollyweird ?

For shame, Andrew ... a basically GOOD boy like you. Truth is, if M$ didn't ENSURE a crackable product, then plug-uglies like *nix and Apple nancy-boyz would stand a chance of reaching the crucial 15% penetration mark.

Competition, Andrew that's the word.

But NOOOOOOOOOOOOO -- M$ will NOT allow that even if it has to GIVE ( AKA crack ) away their DRM_infected OS. You know this, I know this ... everyone knows this.

So stop snivilling. To the woodshed with you, Andrew ... it will make a better man of you.

Faithfully
Dr Ray Hartman

Subject: Ebay Auction + INQ Review = Violation

Heya,

Yeah, you guys have the right to incarcerate him for publicly posting "copyrighted" material and/or for "plagerism" in full for not citating his content.

That's if you want. Or you can just tell the guy; "Dude, cite your source and you can avoid legal charges."

The Dude

Subject: Microsoft accused of encouraging piracy

Encouraging "piracy" has been a long term marketing strategy. Here's the quote from Chairman Gates, then CEO, back in 1998 that you were looking for:

"As long as they are going to steal it, we want them to steal ours. They'll get sort of addicted, and then we'll somehow figure out how to collect sometime in the next decade."
- http://news.com.com/2100-1023-212942.html

However, the core problem is that of proprietary data formats (e.g. all the different versions of MS Word) and various proprietary protocols. ESR, a well-known and admired crank, pointed this out in his analysis of the first "Halloween Papers"

lars

Subject: In reply to Ken Lord

Dear Ken,

Charlie is quite right with some of his claims I'm afraid. Also, your claim about "You can't do whatever you want with your car, and you can't do whatever you want with your house" is twaddle. Yes I can do what I want with my car and house including breaking the law with them. If I do this then I expect to be punished. But I can still do what I want with them. Software and DRM takes the alternative of preventing you from doing things in the first place, regardless of whether those actions are legal or illegal. That is generally what is so bad about it.

Vista's activation for example. Well let's use your car analogy. How about if you'd legally bought a car, parked it somewhere, locked it with your key and left it only to come back and find that someone else had driven off with it. You'd be annoyed. But how would you feel if the car company then accused you, the legal buyer of being the thief?

That's a situation many Windows users have been put through after being wrongly told that their legally purchased and valid OS is actually (and incorrectly) pirated. I've even been through it with an XP serial at work. It's not fun when several dozen machines start wrongly whinging that they're running dodgy software. That's why I don't like WGA and activation. Because in its current incarnation, it's badly conceived and accuses the wrong people.

And we have your DRM arguments. Fair Use isn't irrelevant at all. If I buy a copy of some music I expect to be able to enjoy it without the record label deciding which equipment I can and can't use. I recently had a DRM protected CD which wouldn't play in my car stereo. This is a CD which won't play in a CD player for christs sake. The only bad choice I made in this situation was to legally buy the CD in the first place. Incidentally, it has now been returned.

Piracy is a bad thing and companies do have the right to make some steps to try and reduce it. However once these steps involve limiting and crippling the rights of their paying customers or otherwise discriminating against them for having legally bought the product, then the companies taking these anti-piracy measures are no better than the pirates themselves.

Simply "Not buying" often isn't an option. With cars, If I don't like what Ford have done, I can happily buy a Toyota instead and it'll work just fine on all the same roads. If I want to play Alan Wake in a few months time however, I'm going to HAVE to buy Vista because it won't run on anything else (deliberately thanks to Microsoft). I can't stick with XP, I can't move to Linux either. Looking back at your car analogy again, how about if Ford were to drive almost all other car companies out of business, produce special roads which only their cars would drive along and then charge £30,000 for a standard car model. What other choice would you have?

Reasons like this are why many people feel plenty of sympathy to users who have their serials cloned, but virtually no sympathy at all towards Microsoft who has to sort out their mess.

Regards,
Dave

Subject: OneCare flawed by origin

I would like to point out that I was a happy user of One Care Beta until I learned that MS had degraded the threat level of a malware made by a company it had purchased. Sorry, but that decision killed any confidence I had in OneCare stone dead.

I cannot trust a product that changes its threat levels in such conditions. The current performance level of OneCare is irrelevant to me. It could be right 99.9% of the time and it still wouldn't matter.

The right thing to do would have been to recognize the existence of the malware, remove it from the product list of the newly-acquired company, and transform the whole thing into a major coup against malware makers by stating that the code would be reviewed and Windows reinforced against such products. With the right PR campaign, it would have been the golden opportunity.

Instead, MS lowers the threat level of the malware. Talk about brain-dead ! And I should trust those people ? Sorry, no can do.

Pascal

Subject: R600 pictures

Yea Gods, look at the size of that thing...

I hope they manage to shrink it down before production! Are PCI Express cards allowed to go full length?! O_o

Steve

Subject: Change the picture ;-)

Re the cheeky tw*t using the Inq review for his ebay listing

Go on change the picture. It's on your server so you can have some fun with it. Just edit the original article so it points to an unchanged picture and there's no harm done.

Paul

Subject: Conservapedia

Andrew,

Either I've suddenly become very stupid (possible but unlikely) or Conservapedia has stopped the creation (ha!) of new logins. Maybe I should evolve one instead. It seems that our conservative, freedom-loving friends don't want any public debate.

It's also ever-so-slightly ironic that they are using that pinko commie open-source Wikimedia to run their site when I'd have thought they'd prefer to pay a god-fearing capitalist corporation to supply them with something more appropriate and expensive. God-botherers move in mysterious ways, their blunders to perform.

The Mahatama of Religious Ironies (Mrs)

Subject: Vista activation crackers are criminals

Hi Mike,

Crackers are not criminals. One might think so, but they are not. Over the years it has been proven that illegal installs make something into a success.

Just look at the timeframe and what happened:

Dos -> Hacked into other machines...success Wordperfect -> Installed illegal at home users....success

Lotus123 -> Installed by homeusers illegal....success Windows3.x -> Copied all over...again sucess Windows9x -> Homeuser illegal copies....another success.

Windows2000 -> same

WindowsXP -> same even with pirate check!

Windows Vista? -> could fail because they try to make it too hard to install illegal. (or change hardware + too expensive in total!) Nero, copied all over, everybody wants Nero these days!

Symantec AV/InetSec, same thing....

We all know that illegal installs of software makes it to a success.

Just look at Office (any version) it's because of illegal home use it's a success, OpenOffice is no match even when it's free.

Microsoft shouldn't try so hard to fight illegal installs as it could backfire. It's the illegal stuff that makes a company great in making money. Allways have been the case, allways will.

No company ever been successfull if the software was too hard to copy, and there are samples all over that prove this. If the homeuser uses it, companies will buy it. And as a result OEMs will install it legal as homeusers request it.

Not a single company ever got big by legal installs alone, not a single one. Fight illegal copies and you lose in the end, it happened to all of them. Microsoft can face this as well, no matter how much money they have.

Just my opinion.
Billy Noname

Subject: Religion

Hello,

I've loved to read your articles and laugh at your sarcasm. But there rises a difficult topic: religion. Please, don't take stances or attitudes in this topic. Don't even write article about that. Because your atheism just doesn't work for me. Don't try to convert me to your religion. Yes, atheism is a religion, confidence that 1) there are no supernatural powers 2) there's no after-life and so forth. Stop this religious aggression towards other religions.

Thank you.
Little Knob

Subject: Oh Lord, protect us from apologists with keyboards

Dear Ken Lord

"He loves those locks, but not the Vista Activation lock." The difference is if you buy a new sofa, your front door lock won't suddenly bar you from entry because it thinks it's no longer on the original house.

"Fair Use is irrelevant, a CD was not meant to work in a tape player."

I for one don't buy CD's for the sake of having a nice shiny disk. I buy it to listen to the music contained on the disk. How and where I listen to it, and on what device, is my business.

mr.orangepeel

Subject: Vista activation crackers are criminals

Hello, This is not fairplay. I know and respect licensing, but by calling a hacker a criminal is way to irresponsible. Criminal is a person who murders, kills people for whatever the reason, but I think that the one (ore ones) who cracked the licensing are very smart, and this proves, people!, yes you all! that Microsoft is full of you know what and they can't come up with a decent way to activate or deliver a quality product. Heck, this so called Vista is nothing but a remodeled Windows XP with a shiny look and DRM's and XP is by far the best OS ever (too bad DirectX 10 is Vista only, cause Flip3D exists in XP and the Sidebar too and doesn't need Quads or FX'es or 8800'es, so Vista would have remained in stores until uncle Bill called for a major drawback). Wake up and smell it, have you ever seen the movie "Antitrust"?? They are screwing with our mind! (I made this one up...or did I?)

Cheers,
Deio

Subject: Vista activation crackers are criminals

I'm amazed the offices of the Inquirer can accommodate such a high horse.I'm sure Andrew Thomas has never copied a CD,taped some music off the radio, or even kept a recorded TV show on video for a while.It is worth reminding your readers that piracy is, indeed, illegal, but very few people should ever attempt to scale the moral high ground, lest they might slip.

Righteously Indignant in Edinburgh

Subject: I have a problem with that Andrew Thomas

Hi Letterman! ;)

Ignore him, if you mean that you have a problem with this girl, called Andrew Thomas, she is a friend of the funny and shiny DRM VISTA! ;)

Girlie's like Andrew Thomas, who are in love with shiny Microsoft, can't be a real great old smart OS guru like us! :)

Nice weekend! ;)
Frank-J. Bebber