sailor wrote:
I think they tried that once. Remeber PC-DOS and OS/2?
Anyway, what’s this P2P/P3P thing I keep hearing about in this thread? I remember hearing rumors years ago about how Microsoft secretly logged all your data and sent it to their corporate headquarters. What makes P2P/P3P any different?
I was going to whine at length about Microsoft’s tradition of coersion, involuntary beta testing (anyone remember W95ver.C?), gaping security holes and ridiculous instability (crashing to the desktop in W2000 is still crashing), but you know what? I think we’ll just have to wait and see.
Nobody will ever accuse MS of shooting below the lowest common denominator, and I think what people want after six years of buggy, unstable, non-intuitive operating systems is something rock-solid and uncomplicated on the surface. Since nobody at Microsoft is as clever at screwing up an operating system as an uninformed user is, plenty of tweaks and back doors will still have to be available. Therefore I give MS the best odds I’ve ever given them to create an operating system that is both dependable and tweakable.
I give them a 15% chance.
I work at one of the largest companies in the world, and today I asked one of the main IT guys what he thought. The first topic that came up was WPA, and in his opinion it makes the OS a complete non-starter for us. That’s about 750,000 PC’s, guys.
And we’re in the process of switching all the web servers and mail servers to non-MS solutions, because of their rapidly changing and increasing licensing fees. We are Microsoft’s largest corporate customer.
I think Microsoft may have to do some backpedaling on their copyright protection before this is all done.
But I’m actually pretty enthusiastic about the rest of Windows XP. Even the early betas were pretty stable. Microsoft CAN make a good operating system - Windows 2000 is an excellent OS. People still struggling with old technology OS’s at home like Win 95 and Win 98 will see a huge improvement from XP in terms of stability and general usability. It remains to be seen whether Microsoft can really overcome enough compatibility issues to make this a successful general operating system for the public.
But the copy protection crap has got to go.
Is this ‘activation’ thingy the same as in Office 2000 ?
If it is I won’t be buying XP anything !
The activation thingy in Office 2k is only a product number. WPA is when you have to verify the number over the internet or the phone.
I think we just found out where o’l Bill is doing his public trials.
Here in Australia office 2000 has a CD-Key which you use to install it, then you have to email or phone Microsoft for an ‘activation key’ Only when you have typed in the key AND it matches the CD-key will the bugger work.
Satan is amongst us and living in my PC.
Sorry, P2P was my error, I was stuck on that “peer to peer” acronym when I actually meant P3P. They had to use that dumb acronym to avoid confusion if they used PPP. It stands for Personal Privacy Protection or some similar misnomer. It is a system in IE6 that you will enter all your information in, in conjunction with MS Passport or something (it isn’t quite clear, because they’re not finished with Hailstorm yet). But what IS clear is that IE6 will store personal information and if the website requires it, the browser has a way to permit access only if you provide your personal information. Instead of protecting your privacy, it is a devious method to traffic in your personal data.
This article has the most positive outlook on P3P:
A brief quote:
“Microsoft is to incorporate ‘a new protocol… into beta versions of Internet Explorer 6.0 that allows users to define the information they don’t mind sharing over the Internet and informs them when Web sites want additional information.’”
In other words, it is sorta like supercookies that store all your personal data, your bank account info, your SSN, etc. Do you remember when cookies just came out? Everyone assured us they were benign, and that we could voluntarily turn them off. But people who turned off cookies soon found themselves locked out of most of the web, and turned them on, surrendering more personal info. But now it’s worse, you might not be able to access much of the web without giving much more personal data than you EVER want to give. Soon, you will find that you “don’t mind sharing” your private data with every hacker and nutjob webmaster.
Allow me to play Devil’s Advocate for a moment.
First off, I agree that Microsoft’s plan for activation will have a LOT of glaring errors for power-users (the Joe Average user, who can’t tell a modem from a video card and probably will never change a single piece of hardware, ever, would probably be safe).
However, for a second, take a look at the opposite side of the coin… Microsoft loses a lot of money to people making illegal copies of their OS and distributing it. Heck, if I wanted, I can go out and get ten copies of Windows 98 for free.
While WPA doesn’t seem like the ideal solution (based on Sam’s previous post describing the process), I’m curious… what is? I imagine that they can simply make extensive upgrades to the program security (heck, Blizzard’s been putting CD-RW protection in their games for the past year), but it’s probably not too difficult for a moderately experienced hacker to break (I’m assuming).
So, obviously WPA isn’t an ideal solution… but neither is the current security features placed in the Windows OS. So where’s the middle ground?
Sometimes you just have to accept some piracy. I’m as anti-piracy as the next guy, but you have to be realistic and recognize that anything Microsoft comes up with the hackers will break in hours or days anyway.
WPA isn’t meant to stop that kind of piracy anyway. It’ll do nothing to prevent hackers from putting hacked copies on their web sites, or corporations from using more copies than their licenses allow, because large corporations are usually signed up for Microsoft Select, and the Select CD’s won’t have WPA on them.
What WPA is meant to stop is casual license violation by the general public. Like, a person buying a copy of Windows XP and installing it on his computer, his daughter’s computer, and his wife’s computer. Then lending the CD to a friend who has Windows 98 and wants to upgrade. That kind of thing.
But just like the government has to accept some level of crime in society when the only way left to combat it is to violate our civil rights, so software companies must accept that a certain amount of piracy will occur. Step too far over the line with your copy protection, and you start damaging legitimate users.
Remember the old days, when software came with special keyed floppy disks that had to be in the machine for the software to run, and couldn’t be copied? Well, the hackers figured out how to copy it, but Joe user found himself with a piece of software with a finite lifespan, because eventually that floppy would become unreadable, and then the software was useless.
Then there were dongles, which would hang off your serial port and activate your software. Some high end software still has them. But when it became a more general practice, people found themselves trying to hang 3 or 4 dongles off the back of the machine. It was a major pain.
Both of these copy protection methods failed in the marketplace and had to be withdrawn.
Another problem with excessive copy protection is that it teaches people how to cheat. I discovered hacker BBS’s years ago, not because I wanted to steal software, but because I was sick of having to constantly swap CD’s or floppy disks. So I’d buy a game or a business app, and immediately go find the crack for it to get around their obnoxious original-disk requirements.
So Microsoft will help breed the next generation of hackers, greatly inconvenience the general public, and help to make sure that their totally unprotected Select CD’s get widely spread throughout the hacker community as fast as possible.
And yeah, it’s mainly the power users that get hurt by WPA, but guess what? Power users are the guys writing the reviews, making purchasing recommendations and decisions for their companies, hosting the TV and webcasts, etc. Piss them off at your peril.
I almost forgot – isn’t Windows XP also supposed to screw up your MP3 music files, so you’ll be “inclined” to switch over to Microsoft’s proprietary WMA format instead?
Bet that’s gonna cheese off everyone who’s invested money in MP3 players and gear…
Most Mp3 players can play other forms of music.
Dammit…replied to quickly.
Most Mp3 players play other forms of music. This doesn’t mean I would support MS forcing out Mp3 like that.
Look, I don’t want to give people the wrong impression. I would not support MS at all if they did what people are making conspiracy theories about. I’m trying to say that a lot of what people are afraid of are theoreticals and guesswork. Rumors are as easily false as they are true.
Well, that’s what I was referring to.
And, yeah, hackers will ALWAYS find a way to… well… hack. That’s practically a given. But what I’m talking about are the people who don’t even know how to spell “C++”. Nowadays, any punk kid with a CD-RW drive can go and make a dozen copies of Windows 98 for all his little pals. Obviously, some copy protection is needed to prevent casual piracy.
I’m personally predicting that Microsoft will either abandon WPA in the next Beta release, tone it down, or release an XP version 2.0 that doesn’t have the WPA requirements.
Well, the built-in software to convert Mp3’s is supposedly only able to compress at 56 KBPS (half of CD quality). This has led people to accuse Microsoft of trying to destroy Mp3 in favor of WMA… but I see no reason why other Mp3 compression programs shouldn’t work (I use Zlurp, myself).
I don’t know about current releases, but I heard this accusation hurled about LONG before our Beta version arrived in the mail (6-8 weeks for delivery, ladies and Germans), and it was false then. I see no reason to believe it now.
Chas.E wrote:
Weeeellllll … cookies in and of themselves are just data that remote sites can tell your web browser to store. Cookies cannot contain any personal information that you don’t voluntarily send to other websites. The danger, of course, was that a poorly-designed website could turn around and store personal information you’d given it in your browser’s cookies and not tell you about it. Then, when a pernicious website sent the magic security-hole command to your browser which said “give me all your cookies,” anything any other site had stored on your browser would get sent to the pernicious website.
It was primarily because of this security-hole command that online shopping sites stopped storing the credit card number you’d given them in your cookies.
BTW, are there any such things as “secure cookies” these days? I.e. cookies that are stored in some password-protected mode so that only the site that created the password (and perhaps the browser’s owner locally) can access them?
Personal opinion: Microsoft will shoot itself more and more in the foot with it’s “features”.
Its natural, really… You have a bunch of talented and not-so talented software developers who probably reached more or less the pinnacle of what the current software paradigm can do (say, W2K and Office2K) sitting around a table, thinking “what’s next?”.
They can’t revolutionize, only “evolutionize” ie refine (I’m having a real hard time thinking of something revolutionnary that Microsoft did!)
So what do they do? They think up stupid flutter that result in stuff that flies in the face of good UI design (disappearing menu items anyone?), trying to gather to the people who are in their first few hours of computer experience (and shafting the power user), trying to do checkbox design (everything AND the kitchen sink) etc.
Not their fault, really. Microsoft depends on rocket growth to keep their investors happy, so they have to come up with stuff that looks good on paper (Clippy? Profitable licensing practices? check!)
Windows XP may be a clear symptom of something called featuritis. It will take another Netscape to shake things up, to bring out the next BIG idea…
Yes, I know this is mere speculation, but:
Joe Q. Newuser: “Wow, I really like this CD-ripping software bundled with my new computer. Say, this new WMA format sounds a LOT better than that old MP3 format that they always talk about on the news! No wonder WMA is the default setting - MP3s suck! I’ll use WMA instead.”
(This, of course, is the same person who never knew how to, or could never be bothered to download Netscape because there already was a web browser installed on the computer.)
http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1005-200-6261589.html?
It’s entirely possible that ripping Mp3’s might not be supported in WMP 8 right out of the box.
Microsoft might be pushing it’s WMA format, but it’s not eliminating Mp3 from it’s system. In fact, they’ve designed WMP 8 to be used with third party Mp3 encoders.
I know there’s currently a Pit thread about “Platform Hijacks”… but I swear, this isn’t a hijack to push one platform over the other, but… ::ahem::…
Apple has been adding more and more features directly to their products (video editing software, drafting software, etc.) and they haven’t necessarily been hurting. I’ve often heard the built-in video editing as one of the favorite features that comes with the iMac.
So it’s NOT simply just the fact that Microsoft is adding more and more features to the OS. In fact, it was probably the extra features as the OS progressed that kept it from being a total flop (the jump from 95 to 98 wouldn’t have been worth it without the new fluff, for example).
I agree, that is a possibility… but most EVERYBODY has a computer-savvy friend who’ll hear about it, say, “Why the hell are you using WMA? Go back to Mp3! Hear, lemme give you the software you need…”
True, Microsoft may be pushing their own software… but… isn’t that what they’re supposed to do? Since when is a company obligated to make products for their competitors?
(For what it’s worth, Sony’s been supporting WMA with their memory stick music devices, so it’s not just Big Giant Microsoft trying to take over the world… it’s TWO Big Giants! :D)
Ah, but there are two critical differences here:
(a) Apple’s bundled software has – consistently – remained at “light” versions, allowing room in the software market for other companies to sell more powerful/feature-loaded titles. I know numerous folks who don’t want to use Apple’s iTunes because it doesn’t have an equalizer, or who choose MS Office over Appleworks, for instance. And no video maker worth his rate would choose iMovie over Premiere. All evidence shows that these shortcomings are deliberate (iTunes, in its previous incarnation as SoundJam, had an equalizer), which indicates that Apple is taking active steps to avoid abusing their power while bundling free software with their systems.
(b) Apple is not pushing aside industry standards for their own proprietary standards. iTunes rips MP3s that are identical to those used on other platforms, while AppleWorks lets you save files to cross-platform formats like EPSF. And no one has ever heard of a situation where Apple planted code in their operating system to disable a competitor’s products or file standards. Contrast that with Microsoft’s long-documented trail of leveraging MS-DOS/Windows against competitors’ products.
Pushing their own products is one thing. Squeezing out competitors is another. And given Microsoft’s past patterns of behavior, they have no qualms about doing the latter under the guise of the former.
Well, I only know of two intergrated features of Windows that aren’t “light” versions: Windows Media Player and Internet Explorer, and both of those are arguable. For example, WMP 8, which is integrated with XP, requires a 3rd party DVD player installed in order for it to play DVD’s, and needs 3rd party Mp3 encoders installed (Well, possibly, refer to my post above) to rip Mp3’s.
Other bundled features which can hardly be considered powerhouse apps:
-Notepad or Wordpad
-XP’s built-in firewall (In fact, MS says this is only to provide consumers who aren’t tech savvy with very basic protection)
-Windows Movie Maker (Bundled with ME and XP, not sure about 2000)
-Sound recorder
-Paint
I think you get the idea.