Thank you for helping since generally speaking a landlord can enter the premises with fair notification as codified by state laws to perform repairs, inspections, etc. He does not need your permission, only to notify you he is going to.
They do?
I think the best you could possibly say is that it depends on which state you live in and which court you end up in if it goes to court. I have read that wa state doesn’t allow this in any software, but when I googled for the RCW that covered it I couldn’t find it (which could just indicate I don’t know where to look).
Maybe, maybe not. I assume you follow all of the stories surrounding legality of EULA’s, this is clearly an undecided area in the courts. Note the recent case against autodesk in which a federal judge ruled that a software sale was not a license and that the terms of the license that restricted transfer of ownership were invalid.
This is the most pointless argument so far.
Yes, I can cite for that: Source: The Piranha Brothers, http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=536149&page=3
How is a landlord performing maintenance on your house ever an analogy for WGA?
While I do not want to do backseat driving, this topic should perhaps be closed or moved to GD.
Are there not some security updates that are dependent on having WGA on the machine? (or at least only accessible when you have WGA?
Leaving aside the rights and wrongs of WGA and the rights and wrongs of forcibly removing it… is it not a fact that certain important updates for Windows and other Microsoft applications just aren’t available to users who have not jumped through the WGA hoop?
Well, the hack that the OP used isn’t designed to remove it, it’s designed to fool it that it’s genuine. There are indeed many updates that require WGA to be on the machine, but this should allow them through.
However, these hacks are usually only temporary and do eventually fail. I could use that as an argument why it would have just been quicker to call Microsoft, but there’s little point - the OP can simply download a different version of the hack whenever a new problem occurs. There isn’t just one version of WGA, and there isn’t just one way it can get onto your system.
They must do currently, or they wouldn’t be able to send viruses that make your computer annoying to use. If there are any cases that have made this illegal, I’d like to hear about them.
But surely, unless you have it set for automatically, you can still deselect WGA in the list of available updates? It is not part of the original XP package and agreement; therefore you should be able to refuse.
The lawsuits regarding Microsoft and WGA are still winding their way through the courts. There have been previous cases with results on both sides of this type of issue (vendor remotely controlling software after the sale) and there are state laws on both sides of this issue.
Bottom line is that it’s an open issue with the most recent strike against an EULA being completely enforceable (regardless of other laws) is autodesk.
His analogy, not mine.
Yes you can.
I believe this is mostly true, but you have to A) Have automatic updates turned off and B) Be constantly careful not to select WGA because they will recommend it every freaking time.
You can set Windows Updates not to install WGA and not to notify you again, but when a new version of the tool is released it’s pretty much a sure thing that it will be offered again.
You can deselect it from the list of updates, or hide it so that it doesn’t keep appearing, but:
-That will shut you out of some essential updates
-Different versions of WGA released subsequently will still need to be deselected or hidden (this isn’t a devious method to try to sneak it onto your computer - the same thing happens with different release versions of other updates such as IE7 and various drivers)
See my earlier posts in this thread. I had (and still have) automatic updates turned off and and was checking every single time, and still they sneaked it onto my list. I had no system problems as a result, true enough–but it’s the dishonesty and insulting nature of what MS did that vexes me.
I don’t think there’s any sneaking going on here - they probably just released a new version that wasn’t the one you had unchecked or hidden.
I’ve had the same thing with updates I had hidden (IE7 and AC97 sound chip drivers) because I knew they would break a specific PC (IE7 caused really bad things to happen with some unpatched BIOSes and AC97 sound drivers sometimes install themselves on non-AC97 machines, causing all sound to stop working)
I unchecked and hid these updates, but they (or rather, subsequent release versions of them) still popped up again later.
But there is a button “Don’t ask me again for this update”. Either way, it seems clear that you can refuse.
Sure, there’s always a way to refuse - in the extreme case, you could just switch off your computer and never use it again.
But the consequence of refusal to accept the WGA update is a reduced level of access to future updates - possibly important ones.
I never hide updates. I look them over every morning and decide which I want. I specifically remember that the Tuesday before Nyctea opened this thread, I had done that as usual and un-checked WGA. The next day, when I checked for updates, WGA was no longer on the list, but a buttload of identically-named patches were. This is why I believe (though I will concede that I cannot prove it) that Microsoft changed the update name to one of those patches, or included it in one of the patches. This is why I’m calling them sneaky.
Maybe, although in my experience, WGA usually arrives in the form of 'You need to update something before you can use this website" - that is, Windows Update wants to install it before you can perform the scan for necessary patches etc.
That is not what happened in my case.
The only update I know of that required validation, prefereably by means of WGA, was IE7. Are there others that will not install without checking the validation first?