bugfox blog

Tracy Kidder’s The Soul of a New Machine was one of the great nonfiction hits of the early 1980s, a gripping blow-by-blow account of how Data General developed the Eclipse minicomputer. Many people originally viewed it as a description of how high-tech projects ought to work.

Later it came to be seen as more of a cautionary tale. The Eclipse was never a great success in the market and the engineers who created it were burned out by the project. Most ended up getting divorced and leaving the company. And Data General itself seems to have vanished from the face of the Earth. I have no idea what happened to it, but I haven’t heard any mention of it for many years.
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Woody Leonhard continues to examine the implications of Microsoft’s product activation scheme from Vista and Office 2007.

If your product key is stolen, part 2 - Office Watch

The obligation falls on you to prove to Microsoft that you bought legally. That can be difficult because Microsoft has already decided that your product key has been used illegally by a number of people and it has no means of knowing whether anyone was a legitimate user of that product key, and it has no clear path for customers to prove otherwise. Microsoft’s recommendations about documentation would not really help.

Since the product key isn’t linked to you by name there is no way for you to prove that you are the legitimate owner of that product key.
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What if Microsoft disables your copy of Vista or Office 2007? You’ve tried to explain to Microsoft that you were the original purchaser but they won’t believe you. How can you appeal?

You can’t. There’s no appeal process.

Microsoft’s decision is final; you’re a software thief, then you’ve lost that software license. You’re expected to buy another copy of the software (and hope the same thing doesn’t happen again).

Woody Leonhard discusses the new product activation features in Microsoft Vista and Microsoft Office 2007, which allow Microsoft to remotely disable anyone’s computer at any time if they decide that the product activation key has been pirated. He asks what happens if your product key is stolen? You, the legitimate purchaser, could easily lose the use of your software if someone else “borrows” your activation key, which could easily happen.

Elliotte Rusty Harold suggests a cool new use of this feature: the U.S. government could lean on Microsoft to shut down all the computers in an unfriendly country, or maybe just the computers of individuals that the govenment doesn’t like. Of course that’s just paranoid and couldn’t possibly happen.

Kurt Cagle argues (and I tend to agree) that the current fashion for AJAX is likely to result in a lot of nasty, unmaintainable code that probably will be full of security holes as well. He thinks that everyone should be thinking in terms of XForms instead: Why XForms Matter, Revisited - O’Reilly XML Blog

But the only implementation that he mentions is the experimental one for FireFox. Clearly we will need more than that. See his comments for some other alternatives.