Vista Can Run Without Activation for a Year

An anonymous reader gave us a heads up on this article for people who like putting things off. It begins: "Windows Vista can be run for at least a year without being activated, a serious end-run around one of Microsoft's key anti-piracy measures, Windows expert Brian Livingston said today. Livingston, who publishes the Windows Secrets newsletter, said that a single change to Vista's registry lets users put off the operating system's product activation requirement an additional eight times beyond the three disclosed last month. With more research, said Livingston, it may even be possible to find a way to postpone activation indefinitely."

Re:How long before Microsoft patches Vista

[Anonymous Coward]

Doesn't it need to be activated to receive updates?

That is intentional.

[nietsch]

On the one hand MS tries to make life hard for the small time infringers (most of them), but on the other hand they still need to be number one of most infringed software, so there needs to be a backdoor. They need to be the most infringed because the infringers are the easiest turned customers. If there were no ways to get around MS licencing tricks, there would be no more potential new customers when the next release of Windos arrives.
My Father decided to buy a fresh Vista licence after using illegal versions before. That lasted about 3 days, then he decided to switch to linux (no, it had something to do with a 64bit intel compiler that was beer-free on linux only).

Re:How long before Microsoft patches Vista

[Tanuki64]

True, windows simply is not trustworthy. I mean automatic updates are something great, but a company, which uses such a system to further their own interests and not that of their customers is simply unacceptable. Ok, one can say that if I use a pirate copy I cannot complain, but even as a legit user I'd be bound to be a plaything of Microsoft's political interests. Best example is how fast they updated their DRM routines. I doubt that a user complained that he could do things with his windows, which he should not.

Nope, the only way to use windows is in a virtual machine without network access.

Edit the SkipRearm Key

[Dekortage]

Microsoft tells ya how to do it [microsoft.com].

How long before we see this as a Slashdot user name? "Hi, I'm Skip -- Skip Rearm."

given last weeks article...

[pjr.cc]

Given last weeks article about how ms want people to pirate their products and that they do it so that people would eventually turn to the "legal" route, does anyone believe this was found by "accident"?

seriously, hasn't this always been the way? give people a way to run MS's products pirated? maybe im just an old cynic..

Re:How long before Microsoft patches Vista

[kripkenstein]

True, windows simply is not trustworthy. I mean automatic updates are something great, but a company, which uses such a system to further their own interests and not that of their customers is simply unacceptable.

100% agreement with you. Notice, though, how (at the end of TFA) Microsoft's position is that product activation is for the benefit of their customers. Something along the lines of "products hacked to avoid activation may be faulty" and such. So, a forced patch through Windows Update would be 'for the good of the customers', to save them from the perils of running WGA-less Windows. War is peace, and all that.

One can only hope that in the long run such anti-consumer activity will come back to haunt them.

Re:Why bother?

[MichaelSmith]

it's not just IT people that pirate

My wife and I both use laptops which dual boot WindowsXP and Ubuntu. She has to run a windows application for her work and it doesn't work under wine so I got the free vmware player but got stuck because you need the commercial version to create a virtual disk.

At work we run Suse+vmware+windowsXP so I asked around in the IT department at work and got some good advice about working with vmware but the windows guys in IT acted like I was an abusive husband for giving my S.O. Linux to use and offered me vmware xp images from their network to take home.

I said thanks but I prefer to run my own copies of the OS, mainly because I can reinstall it any time I want. But the attitude of these guys was just take it, we don't care which surprised me a lot.

Round and Round and Round It Goes...

[dpbsmith]

It doesn't stop pirates.

But it does deny access to paying customers... some of Microsoft's biggest and best customers.

So Microsoft needs to put in a backdoor so that their support professionals can take care of those customers over the phone.

But if you're telling hundreds of people about a backdoor, sooner or later it will leak.

So Microsoft will need to patch the backdoor.

But if they do that, once again, they'll be screwing their best customers.

So they'll need to open another backdoor. Quite possibly the new backdoor will be opened by the very same patch that closes the SkipRearm backdoor.

Microsoft doesn't benefit from this. Microsoft's customers don't benefit from it. The only people who benefit from it is the computer trade press and Slashdot, which is assured of an endless stream of news stories to talk about.

Re:Why Vista?

[Anonymous Coward]

Many printers (including my HP 2600n) are still unsupported.

Haha. You were suckered into the age-old "host based printer" scam. "Host based" printers don't internally support a standard printer language like PostScript or PCL. Instead, the printer only supports a proprietary protocol which requires a specialized, vendor-provided OS-specific driver. Only in a few cases have people been able to reverse-engineer a subset of these protocols.

A major disadvantage to this for consumers that it allows manufacturers to "sunset" older printers.

That's why I only buy standards-based printers - it allows me to decide when my printer is no longer viable. All of my printers are more than 10 years old, and I have no plans to retire any of them.

Printer manufacturers don't provide host based printers in order to save inordinate amounts of money per unit - the chipsets required to support PCL and/or postscript are very inexpensive. This is all about vendor control.

Re:Why bother?

[rucs_hack]

My point is that compared to simpler Linux installs, or (god forbid) windows, its a very hard thing to install, so saying that it's an alternative to Vista is sheer folly.

And you can't install it without the manual, because they have this habit of changing things so what worked a few months ago suddenly doesn't work any more.

I'm afraid the USE flag thing is that bad. One of the recent GUI installer releases failed completely because of a tk dependency, and even hosed some systems entirely.

I've used gentoo for years, and I'm a fan, but I am all too aware of the risks of using it, you have to be far more careful then with other distributions.

Re:Why bother?

[jimstapleton]

Well, here's my rational. And as a background, I've had maybe a total of 10 months use/admin experience with FreeBSD, and several YEARS worth with Linux and Windows, so my oppinions of Linux/Windows are not from lack of experience with Linux/Windows, and my experience with FreeBSD may be somewhat short, at their best, all three seem equaly pleasant to admin, but when it comes down to the average or worst case, I find that's where FreeBSD shines.

1) In both OSes, I've found installing new programs to be easier than in any distro of Linux that I've used (RH/FC, Ubuntu, Gentoo), namely less failures. Much moreso in Windows than in FreeBSD.

2.f) In FreeBSD, when something breaks, I've found the documentation to be much better than the documentation I find in Linux, and the error messages tend to give a bit better information on finding the source of the issue. I also find things tend to break a bit less often in Linux

2.w) In Windows, when something breaks, which is actually pretty rare in my experience (at least for 2K and XP), there's plenty of documentation online, and in the Windows help files - between the latter and Google with the right error messages pasted in, most errors I've run into aren't hard to solve/bypass

3) The FreeBSD community, on a whole, has been more friendly, and less RTFM than the Linux community. (to me at least)

4.f) FreeBSD is very much oriented to the server/enterprise mindset, with everything geared towards /just working/. Linux tends to be geared more towards what the devs want, which is the latest and greatest at a breakneck pace (though not necessarily with enterprise Linuxes and their derivatives - I ought try out CentOS some time, but FC has always seemed slow and bloated to me, compared to any other OS I've used, which makes me leery of anything based off of a RH distro). Each has their pros and cons (example: better hardware support, a larger selections of applications for any given task, and much nicer looking system administration utilities are major advantages for Linux), I just tend to find the BSD set of advantages more useful for me.

4.w) Windows tries to make everything oriented towards ease of use, so that the end user can get quite a bit done without thinking too much about it. It does abstract a lot of lower level things and make them difficult to get to. Probably the reason why I don't use my Windows box any more, now that everything I need done is done on my BSD box.

5) I find Linux is the only OS where I've spent more time trying to get things working, than with either of the other two.

And please don't call me a moron or stupid because my oppinion and experiences with the various operating systems don't match yours. People work differently with different thigns, I am not telling anyone /not/ to use Linux, I'm just trying to say there are valid reasons people don't use Linux. People see problems and approach problems differently, and thus different methods of execution of a specific task are more or less effective for various people. FreeBSD and Windows are better for me than Linux. I can't tell you which is better for you, you have to decide on your own. I will say if you /havent/ tried it, then you certainly have no right to comment on it, and even if you have tried it, you've no right to insult me because my decisions and oppinions don't match yours. Sorry for this rant, but I've gotten that kind response from similar posts before, it's rather annoying, and it wastes both my time and the time of the writer, while providing nothing productive.

Re:Just don't bother...

[jslater25]

What I find to be horribly ironic is that Vista is everything that many users ASKED for. They wanted shiny graphics. They wanted a calendar on the desktop; they wanted to see search capability on the Start menu. IE7 was something IE users requested. Task switching (displaying folders like a Rolodex). My Computer is now simply named Computer to help lessen the confusion. Something called a Breadcrumb Bar. The list goes on.

Now, before everyone starts bashing me, please note I did not say ALL users asked for this. Nor did I say ANY /. users wanted any part of this. In fact, any techno-literate person would prefer not to have the added processes that Vista has running all the time. Personally, I don't see much point in going to Vista because I don't want a calendar on the desktop, I don't want to sacrifice my collection of games for the few that MS has added only for Vista. I prefer few processes running in the background to optimize my system for what I want running, not what MS believes I should have running.

Unfortunately for those in an office setting, many will be forced to go to Vista when OEM dealers stop offering XP as an option. I know my office will be looking at Vista within a year because we are too lazy to buy XP licenses and reinstall Windows XP after wiping the HDD of Vista.

Re:HP 2600n is a new breed...

[pikine]

Here are the prices I got today from HP's website. After you subtract the unit price by the cost of one black toner and three color tones, you get the hardware cost.

model unit-price black-toner color-toner hardware-cost
2600n 400 75 83 76
3000n 600 133 130 77
2605dtn 700 75 83 376

I think that means you get much better hardware with 2605dtn.

pet operating system

[morethanapapercert]

IIRC, the PET operating system was BASIC wasn't it? Then some shame is quite appropriate as I am ashamed to admit I still have a "cheat sheet" of PEEK and POKE codes around here somewhere that I used as a reference when writing my very first program. (A steerable rocket ship and asteroids made up of ASCII characters. The asteroids didn't break apart properly but I got an A anyway because I was able to squeeze the whole program into only three cassette tapes!)