Microsoft made headlines yesterday with it’s global anti-piracy day ‘celebration’ – a kind of Microsoft version of a hallmark anti-holiday (if you’ll excuse the anti-pun). Tectonic has a very well written article on just how much the marketing blurb by the BSA in South Africa ignores (short version: all the actual facts) and the register had two stories on the anti-event and it’s associated black-screen-of-call-the-customer-a-thief WGA deployment.
WGA shall apparently standing for: Witch-hunt, Gossip and Accuse.
Update: or even better – Windows Guilty by Accusation
Of course as tectonic points out the picture is rather more complex than the BSA paints it. More eloquently I would say the BSA painted a stick figure with one ear (xckd style) and wants us to believe it’s the famous Van Gogh self portrait. Please note that I am NOT trying to suggest any association between XKCD and the BSA – and that I am just using a metaphor with well-known imagery, if anything the BSA’s drawing is rather crude by XKCD’s actual standards.
One particular quote stood out for me in the register articles:
Rob McKenna, Washington State Attorney General, said the trade in counterfeit software was “killing American jobs and suffocating competition”.
He claimed a third of all installed software was pirated and that a ten per cent reduction in the trade over four years would “create $41bn in economic growth and 32,000 US jobs”. McKenna said buying fake software was not like buying a fake scarf or handbag because you could not know what damage it could do to your computer.
That last line actually made me laugh out loud. Is this guy suggesting that when you buy a real copy of windows you do know what damage it will do to your computer ? Well aside from installing windows ? No you don’t. It’s closed-source proprietary software. Heck MS has a record of including malicious software in their proprietory products (of course they don’t call it malicious but that’s what I call WGA and other privacy intruding programs that phone home). They have a history of deliberately obfuscating processes to prevent non-MS applications that compete with their own from working well (how is this not harmful to end users who may prefer the non-MS application ?).
And that’s just what they did so far. FUD takes on a whole new level when Microsoft can get a bleeding Attorney General to pretend that pirated copies of Vista could cause potential harm to your computer – in completely denial of the fact that any proprietary software whether obtained legally or not has harm as a guarantee !
How about the fact that MS has update servers you cannot disable ? The ones they use to update WGA among other things. When RedHat/Fedora’s package servers were exploited, they shut down updates, came clean and made sure users knew how to protect themselves, and users were able to shut updates down themselves at any moment. If Microsoft’s update servers get pwned… well I guess every windows user out there is fsck’d … oh wait, windows doesn’t have that command – I guess they are just plain fucked.
The only way to get software that won’t harm your computer is to use software which can be and are independently audited (by other people, by you or by people you employ to do it for you). That means free software. Anything else is basically giving up your privacy, security and other rights to an untrusted party with nothing to gain from respecting it, and a habit of leaving glaring holes where other malicious (but rather less ambitious) parties like virus writers, crackers and phishers can get access to your most important private data for such uses as emptying your credit card. Of course, that’s exactly what Microsoft hopes to achieve so like I said, the others are no more malicious, just less ambitious since they don’t try to get every credit card from ever computer user in the world.
Still, here’s hoping that Microsoft stops just talking and actually starts getting a bit more heavy handed on piracy (italics because I don’t like the word). Their tactics pissed of Ernie Ball enough to switch his guitar string company (the best in the world) to GNU/Linux several years ago. The worse they get – the more people will start telling them exactly where they can stick their EULA’s and switch to something that doesn’t try to control you or rob you blind.