Respect Sakura

Update: Microsoft support managed to assist in resolving this for me. Basically, it seems that while Activation considered me genuine, Genuine Advantage didn’t. Through a few troubleshooting steps, I’ve managed to get them both to agree with each other that I am not, in fact, a pirate after all. I’ve been downgraded to Orlando Bloom status, as opposed to Johnny Depp status. The original post is as follows:

 So it was late at night, and I got that old feeling in my pants for some foreign language porn games study, and decided to go download AppLocale to better facilitate this.

Lo and behold, I got slapped with a “Windows is not activated” screen instead of the “Click here to make all your fantasies come true” message instead. In fact, you can find the exact error screen here. One reboot later, and lo and behold, I get the wonderful screen to your right.

A little bit of background may be in order. I am, or was, an official member of the Windows Vista/Longhorn Server/IE7 Technical beta. In fact, I’m still beta testing Longhorn server as we speak. For my efforts in helping them get this out the door, I was rewarded with my very own Vista Ultimate retail key. Very generous of Microsoft, and pretty cool, I have to say. I’m also a Technet Plus Direct subscriber, so I’m in the lucky position of having ”spare” Vista keys, but only for evaluation purposes.

So the problem is that my legit retail key (provided by Microsoft in their generosity) is now apparently marked as being no longer legit. This causes the message you see above to pop up, Windows Update to fail, and most likely means that in 30 days, I’m about to get proper fucked. We’re talking one hour max logons, can only open IE, all that horrible shit you’ve heard about what happens to pirates when their copy of Vista realises it’s not a store bought version anymore.

I’m lucky, in the fact that being a Technet Plus Direct subscriber, I can just grab one of those keys, and I’m back up and running for now. I’m breaking my agreement, because this is my main home machine, and something I occasionally do work on.. but it’s either that, or I’m completely and royally fucked otherwise.

Software protection is just like DRM. It doesn’t fucking work. The pirates still carry on with their illegitimate versions, and the only people hampered by this are the owners of the legit software. In this case, a false positive for Genuine Advantage does more than annoy the shit out of you - it fucks your ability to even use your computer.

Is fucking over your loyal consumer base a small price to pay for putting a slight hamper on the ability for casual pirates to copy your shit? Aren’t most copies of Vista sold with brand new computers from Dell, HP, Toshiba and the like? If software piracy is as big a problem as Microsoft says it is, and that they’re losing all this money every year, then how the almighty fuck did Bill Gates become the richest man in the world?

The problem with Vista isn’t that it’s buggy. The problem isn’t that it costs too much, or there’s too many versions, or that it’s a blatant rip off of OS X. The problem is that there doesn’t appear to be a limit as to how fucking greedy Microsoft want to be, so when some bizarre hardware and software configuration comes along, and accidently trips off the genuine advantage shit, it’s a small price to pay by bricking a customer or two’s machines, when they can hamper the abilities of some 13 year old git who gets all his shit from Limeware, from being the coolest kid in school by handing out copies of 0 day Vista.

Being an IT guy, I’m constantly asked by tons of people whether or not they should upgrade to Vista. My advice previously was it was worthwhile looking into for the home market, but you’re best off waiting a little while for the business market. Unless Microsoft can prove to me that they can resolve false positives in this activation shit relatively quickly, and do some serious work on preventing it from reoccuring in future, then my answer will be a solid, strong, FUCK NO. Stay the hell away if you value anything at all on your computer.