Windows Geniune Pain in the Arse

[Kintaro]

Well,

Windows Server 2008 R2 has this wonderful feature which checks if your copy of Windows 2008 R2 is genuine periodically and if it isn't it shuts down the system. This is pretty typical behavior of Microsoft, and it appears to have some bugs. For example, Microsoft doesn't know I am using a pirate copy - it claims it is activated and all that - yet it decided to shut it down. When looking up what the hell wlms.exe is and why it is shutting down my computer I found some pretty annoying cases. One guy was using the evaluation quite legally to test the software for his company to see if they want it, and the bugs started shutting it down. His company won't run the software now because it failed the uptime requirements.

Ironically, in the thread a Microsoft VP explains how to remove the permissions of the program causing all the trouble so it simply can't shut down the computer. I find this hilarious because this Microsoft employee has had to write what is in effect a Windows 2008 R2 crack to solve this problem and stop scaring away customers. On top of that, I have realized that if it shuts down the server every hour that you can just schedule a task to reboot the server every 45 minutes. Do this with two clustered servers a good ten minutes apart, and you can do this without downtime.

They might as well just be good sports about this and anally rape winlogon.exe like they do on XP. Oh wait, we could still administer the server via powershell and the management console via Windows RPC. Fucking idiots. They could just not bother with copy protection on server copies, and sue the big earners using pirate copies the old fashioned way. They would scare away less customers.

[piratePenguin]

Copy protection is one of mankinds worst ever ideas.

[Kintaro]

Copy protection is one of mankinds worst ever ideas.

Unless you use crypto and real DRM techniques its usually just trouble to legit users and potential customers. That isn't really possible with the operating system.

[piratePenguin]

Copy protection is one of mankinds worst ever ideas.

Unless you use crypto and real DRM techniques its usually just trouble to legit users and potential customers. That isn't really possible with the operating system.

"trouble to legit users" is not where I am coming from, in my opinion every person every fucking animal on the planet (this includes record company bosses ) should be considered a "legitimate user" of all the ideas, art and culture around them.

Copying should be encouraged, and I believe that one day in the prehaps not too distant future it will be. More and more people are growing up whose music, film tastes etc are moulded by what they get off their friends - illegally (I can mention almost all of my friends and myself here). And when these and more people grow up, and (I should say vested, but they are also all of this) stupid greedy animals die, we might eventually copy this idea: copying is sharing, and that's good for spirits.

This is, of course, an optimistic remark about the future. There is so much corrupted power involved that it's hard to know. But I know where I'm standing.

Besides, I'm absolutely sure it says in the bible that copy protection is lame.

[Kintaro]

Well, I think that is stupid for numerous reasons. Firstly, as an artist (and more of a hobby artist) I know that most artists want to be able to make a living from the work they do. There is more to the expenses than printing costs and bandwidth bills, musicians and writers actually have to eat and pay their bills while they write their music and generally enjoy themselves. Life is supposed to be about attaining happiness, and by 'copying' or 'pirating' or 'stealing' - however you want to say it - you are destroying that opportunity for the artists. The exact same applies to programmers.

Of course, copyright law and patent laws as they stand are primitive and coercive. They have stopped performing a function and have always done it at too great of a cost. This is why I am an advocate of things like TPM. I hope there will be a day that I can chose to only release my work in TPM garbled form and you can chose only to pay. Doing anything about it would put the blood of coercion on the hands of the freetards.

Anyway, your above post doesn't really objectively justify anything. You talk about mystic things like it being "good for spirits" and "bad in the bible." This is mysticism and it is pretty sickening since you seem to claim to be some sort of reasonable atheist. Reasonable except when it gets you a free ride. Another option to TPM would be building city walls, and throwing people like you outside of them for having nothing to contribute to society.

I don't know what you mean about corrupted power. It seems your entire view on this is poorly defined. What corrupted power? The fact that Tolkien had to buy tobbacco and food for over a decade to write The Lord of the Rings? That is just an objective necessity of human survival and for great long term things to exist society requires a means of exchange and freedom of contract. That is, I agree to publish my lifes work, and by reading it you agree to pay for it to help cover the costs of working on it for my entire life.

[worker201]

Besides, I'm absolutely sure it says in the bible that copy protection is lame.

If that's true, then I love copy protection.

[piratePenguin]

I didn't read your post entirely Kintaro, reason number 1 is that this isn't something I want to battle out over the internet, here no less, this is something I want to study and research more at some point in my life, and perhaps since I am not and never will be qualified in the fields of psychology, and other fields*, I may be interested in encouraging or supporting useful related studies (food for thought, and that is all this is: will ubuntu children be nicer than windows children? How does the subtly presented message of ubuntu (as an example) filter down to kids, who won't all be particularly interested in those ideals (and yet could take them on board wrt sharing). And then we can think about the real benefits of a free society, outside of the obvious (typically ill-informed) observations that you or I or anyone may have (and vested observations in the case of the real gold-diggers of the industries (who aren't artists)). For example I believe that you suggested that it will be impossible to make a living as an artist without copy-protection, which seems silly to me because artists existed before copy-protection. Of course you know this, and that artists exist today without copy protection (think bsd and additionally think fashion interestingly, it is legal to rip off a quality brands designs completely (just not TMs). Tomorrow I'll find a link to a talk very relevant to this discussion). Anyways my main point is that your post, my post is not useful, it is just what we feel.

Btw, my remark about the bible was a joke. Jesus advocated sharing (especially with piratepenguin, btw).

* Though I will be (notice: will be) quite informed in economics, and let me mention that the economical issues with this are more complex than you appear to understand, there is much information you should read from Lawrence Lessig as a simple example, but I think you already know about this. Surprising.

[Kintaro]

I don't know what you are on about.

I wasn't talking about philosophy or economics. I wasn't really even talking about politics, I was talking about philosophy. Yet I think even that is far too vague. I am talking about a code which supports human existence. This necessitates certain freedoms and certain human rights and for these things to exist we require inalienable human rights. You talk vaguely about gold-digging titans of industry, but what is the source of all the wonders which make this debate possible? It is these "gold digging" individuals you talk about. They should be able to produce what they produce on their own terms. This is what freedom is all about.

All I was saying is that artists, developers, writers, and so on have the human right to produce their work in forms that require you purchase it. Rather than doing that at gunpoint through copyright law, it would be a great progression for human achievement to do this through the Trusted Platform Module or other similar things. I just want to ask you one question: do you advocate using the law and thus force and coercion to stop people doing this? Because it sounds that way, and at that point you stop being a simple pirate and become an armed bandit.

What your original post ignores is the supply side of the debate entirely. You talk about music and art as if you are the member of some strange cargo cult - and all that you know is that these things "come from your friends." No, they don't. They come from the human mind and for the human mind to be capable of anything at all it requires a body which is free to act. When you seperate property rights from human rights you seperate a mans limbs from his own survival. Without the right to use his own arms, Calum wouldn't be able to impress us with nifty guitar riffs. It is sometimes a shame, because Calum uses that freedom to do questionable things with his mouth - but we have no right to stop that. My freedom allows me to do what I want: live off the stock market (really, ask me about that some time and we'll see who knows anything useful about economics, masturbate, smoke pot, and write poems about little girls. Worker201 uses his freedom to work at a green grocer and despite me looking like the fat cat, he probably has the more stable income and yet still pays less taxes.

My point is this, in the future I hope things like TPM can solve these problems. I won't run Windows Server on my network at all because in the time it takes for me to make the money to buy it - I could have just done everything on FreeBSD. Thus, suddenly Windows Server 2008 loses all its value in being quick and easy to set up. If that is how Microsoft want it to be, that is quite fine with me. At the same time, I think the guys at FreeBSD should be free write code under their own licence and have it enforced through the civil court.

When I see a GPL violation go unenforced I feel the same disgust as I do when I see The Australian Constitution (a social contract) violated beyond all comprehension. The sanctity of contract is very important, and so is the rights of producers to ship TPM in computers and for producers like Calum or Me to release our work on the Internet for free or on the Internet for profit.

* Lessig is really on the surface of economics, and his work is alright but as far as understanding economic behavior goes he is like Python, and what you really want to learn about probably won't be covered fully in your education. You will either learn a Chicagoian or Keynsian agenda depending on the whims of your faculty. Read Milton Freidman, read Maynard Kenyes, and read Frederich von Hayek and Rothbard and you will get the full spectrum. Nobody has a better theory of how small scale entities form the bigger picture than Friedman, nobody has a better theory of how to destroy freedom faster than Keynes, nobody has a better theory of how to end civilization than Rothbard's anarchism, and nobody has a better concept of sound and honest money than Hayek.

[piratePenguin]

Well I didn't read your first post so I don't know what you think you're at right there.

The way I see it, a musician could easily release his songs under a free license and make money off of playing gigs, if he is good enough, and if that's what he wants. For one a million more people will get to enjoy his work (is that not important to an artist? I think you're being very one-dimensional), the more people that do will not only go to his gigs, but will probably offer donations e.g. he could raise around the time of new releases. Besides, everybody's stealing music already and the artists are getting no money from their customers!!111 (did I make my sarcasm clear enough?)

Again, some of my friends would have about zero interest in music, nevermind in paying for it, if I couldn't have given them stuff from my collection 7 or 8 years ago.

edit: Oh, you said that the freedom to distribute work with restrictions on people is the important freedom. Well I obviously don't agree, and I'm not the only one.


here's that video i referred to earlier. How do you explain this?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zL2FOrx41N0

[piratePenguin]

One last thing: I noticed you put forward some sharp criticisms of some economists: but are you really any smarter than they are?

Also I surely know that my education should extend well beyond what I will learn in my degree wrt economics, history. What I'm particularly interesting in wrt history (off-topic) is why the Irish free state didn't turn out to be a socialist one: was it foreign pressure? Or the partition of Ireland, or why did people in this country change their minds about this. I know history students who want to be professors so I should just ask them.

Perhaps you should start a thread where you can tell us all about your stock market endeavors, I'd like to hear.

[Kintaro]

The Austrians like Hayek and Mises have the clear lead in being able to accurately predict the business cycle through understanding the conditions which create them. This is an incredibly long discussion. In terms of an economy serving consumers and producers - it needs to support the decisions of the individual participants. That is what objective law and the courts provide alongside individual rights. Central planning doesn't add any wisdom to an economy, for example. What it does is shut participants out of making decisions regarding their own things. Socialism removes intelligence from the economy by restricting thousand of actors, and thus thousands of minds replacing their decisions with a select group of bureaucrats with unearned power attained through a popularity contest rather than achievement.

To me what makes something 'economical' is as many consumers being producers as possible with the conditions of their employment to only be created by other producers acting freely with no Government intrusion into the economy except for indirect taxes and service based fees (contracts and the courts). I don't see it as a utopia - because the very idea of a utopia is about about stunted human development and a world with no innovation or changes whatsoever to avoid 'conflict.' Quite frankly I am tired of this 'the ends justify the means' holier than thou bullshit in the background of every economic discussion. What are the ends? To create a society that has no war, no hunger, and no suffering at all. Yet by what means? By destroying anything that might effect the balance, anything that might create the pain of a lesson to be learned, stifiling the imagination. This hedonistic short term goal of peace and conformity is about as sustainable as a hit of meth on a persons happiness. Once it is realized that creativity is forbidden, another type of suffering will become rampant through the utopia: oppression of free expression through censorship and oppression of private activity.

Generally for something to be truly economical in a utilitarian and subjective sense it needs to work for the desires of the participants in society. I like systems that account for scarcity and necessity through a bartered means of exchange: ie capitalist systems. For example I like to live a very relaxed life at the moment while managing a few portfolios for people. I actually don't have that much money, but my necessities by my own values are provided (food, internet, rent, power, gas, water, and such). I do a lot of things that don't involve either of these things, my writing, etc. These activities should be able to be anything a person wants that doesn't harm others directly yet still covers their own survival.

Microsoft's management should be able to hide their code, as it is their decision to do so. Ubuntu's team should be able to share their code. This is the most important thing about freedom of contract - but copyright should be only about that. It's pretty disgusting the way corporations use Governments to gain revenue through the barrel of a gun courtesy of the DMCA. It is worldwide and it is more corporatist and fascist than anything Hitler and Stalin could ever dream of. For anything else, to prevent things being distributed on ISOHunt or the pirate bay, it should be left to the distributor to require and use hardware and software that restricts its ownership. That is all voluntary activity and by doing anything about that on a Government level you commit the same crime as the companies using the DMCA.

At the same time, you should have the option of buying hardware that is TPM free and makers should have the option of building it free of coercion. This is why companies will produce hardware that can still run untrusted code. The project has never stated otherwise and doing so would be impossible anyway without coercive intellectual property law, because others will be free to create systems that either don't have TPM do both. We already have the software and the hardware - what we lack is a liazze-faire legal structure that prevents coercive laws of monopoly being used to have us all stuck with trusted code. This is the fatal consequence of copyright and patents in the traditional sense now that we have this kind of cryptographic technology.

Generally I think it will really only be closed-source application code and multimedia that will exist as trusted code. People will still be recording shit from TV as untrusted and so on. I personally like the implications of this for privacy and evasion of censorship and Government. Along with trusted code and such, it generally allows for trusted data in general. This could be your bank account, or it could be your will and signed you and a lawyer. The possibilities are endless, and anyone who is sinister of TPM should be equally as sinister of dm-crypt.

At the end of the day, I don't care how smart they are or you are. Others have the right to use TPM and others have the right to avoid it. If you really think openness and all that works - there should be no reason you can't convince people with reason to do things your way. Just get rid of the coercive big Government bullshit. I'll try to convince them otherwise.

Also you are wrong about the gigs. I for one multitrack and will never play a gig in my life. Mike Oldfield couldn't just do tubular bells right up as a gig. Also the money is far far less.

[Aloone_Jonez]

Just about every form of copy protection can be cracked or circumvented one way or another, if it's nor possible to do it digitally the analogue method can be used.

Copyright law is an artificial control on the economy which distorts the market, making people pay for pieces of plastic or zeros and ones. Laws restricting the transfer of information are more in line with totalitarianism than democracy.

Musicians who don't perform live would no doubt still exist if copyright didn't exist and they would no doubt still make money.

[Kintaro]

I agree, copyright is physical coercion - Activiation, WGA, and TPM are not however.

This doesn't make activation reasonable though and I'd like to get back onto that subject. With Windows 2008 Server R2 you get an evaluation period of sixty days. This is pretty nice of them really, but you also get to rearm that period five times giving you three hundred days of shareware Windows. Microsoft offer this extremely generous freebie yet at the same time they are strict on protecting intellectual property with activation bullshit that breaks the system. They even provide a handy script you can schedule to rearm the servers trial activation those fives times automatically in their support section.

The right hand doesn't know what the left hand is doing, but in any case the system shutting down like it does really pisses me off. You can tell its probably the kind of thing the programmer who implemented hated, but the middle manager insisted "oh noez, shut that fucker down." It would make more sense to just allow trial users to use the system for free but limit the amount of connections. That way its easy to give a quick test for deployment without buying it, and for Microsoft to enforce intellectual property on big companies so they can make a sale and keep developing this otherwise great system.

Clearly though, Microsoft want to be primitive cunts with licensing and I think this is why Linux rules the server world. To learn Linux you don't need any money, you don't even need a good computer. Microsoft has students and developers jumping through hoops that Linux does not.

[Kintaro]

http://balkin.blogspot.com/2010/06/copyright-elephant-in-middle-of-glee.html

[Calum]

at the moment, there are many competing theories about copyright and making money from your work, and unregulated copying etc.

Basically there's not enough real long term case studies for any one point of view to win out at the moment. In an effort to apply other models to this issue, here are my fairly scant opinions:

prohibition of something that many people are doing "illegally" never works. The only solution, whether it's morally right or wrong, is to legalise it, and licence it. Not sure what this actually means when applied to "illegal copying" though, i'm afraid. Does it mean the industry should take action in the countries where copying is more widespread? There are plenty countries where copying without paying the rights-holders is the norm. Perhaps the level of illegal copying going on in "the West" would actually be acceptable if this were applied across the board instead of having large areas of the world with basically 100% copyright violations.

Obviously this issue affects me in terms of the music industry much more than the software industry, and i've read a lot of opinions and still don't entirely know ehere i stand on this (which is remarkable since i'm usually so opinionated). Here's a really interesting article and associated discussion thread about this:

http://www.newmusicstrategies.com/2008/04/03/should-i-be-worried-about-piracy/

and here's another thread where we talk about this with regard to music ("we" being a community of songwriters, who are, i think, entirely hobbyists)

http://fawm.org/forums/thread/1257/