Tag: software

Posted on

Unenforceable Clauses

Marilyn Shafer of the New York State Supreme Court has just issued a ruling that all of us should celebrate.

Network Associates, a software company that makes anti-virus software, had a little clause in their customer purchase agreement that should sound familiar to most of us, in tone if not exact content.

The clause states that no customer may review the product purchased without the prior consent of Network Associates.

I know from my experience arguing with people on the internet that a lot of people firmly believe that a company can force you to agree to anything as a condition of buying and using their product. These people believe that there is some kind of absolute right of private property out there, that companies have no obligations to society other than to provide the product they promised on the terms they specified to the customer who agrees and pays.

But companies do not exist in a vacuum. Like you and me, they are part of a complex of relationships and obligations that constitute membership in a society. If you live in America, you have to obey the law, pay your taxes, and shoulder your share of the burden of providing roads and schools and policing for everyone– unless, of course, you are a rich person under a Republican administration.

In return for meeting your obligations, you receive enormous benefits. You receive protection from the police, medical care, education, roads, assistance in times of natural disaster, military protection from foes abroad, and so on.

If you don’t like that deal, you can, as they say, go live elsewhere.

Network Associates benefits from all of these and more. Their employees acquired their skills from publicly funded schools and universities. Their products are delivered on our roads and through our airports. They are protected by laws and police, from arbitrary search and seizure (until the Homeland Security Act was passed). They benefit from the enormous structure of laws and procedures that constitute our economic system. As a result, they have an obligation beyond the simple power of setting conditions of sale, to observe generally agreed upon rules of conduct in our society.

The Supreme Court of New York State has struck a blow for freedom of speech and consumer rights, and simultaneously raised the issue of whether these myriad conditions imposed by vendors upon customers are actually “enforceable”.

Not only did Judge Shafer rule that the clause was unenforceable. She indicated that there will be fines in the millions of dollars. She is going to punish Network Associates for trying to trick people into obeying a rule they had no business imposing on people.

I like this judge, and I hope you do too.

Posted on

Eula Boola!

A woman, Brenda Avery, in rural New Brunswick, was charged by the police with piracy after Microsoft spies claimed to have found pirated disks of their applications in her computer store.

The RCMP entered her home and arrested her and her husband even though he had no involvement in the computer store. Brenda Avery defended herself in court and won. The article in the Canadian Press does not describe her defense. Was the software not pirated after all, or was she unaware of the illegitimate source of the disk? It doesn’t say.

But the Crown urged her to plead guilty. Why?

Because it’s more efficient that way. The RCMP charged her in the first place at the request of Microsoft. What I want to know is, if I charge Microsoft with marketing defective products and, through their negligence and incompetence, costing me hours and hours and hours of work, and possible job promotions, and money– can I get the RCMP to burst into Microsoft headquarters and seize the relevant documents and arrest Belinda Gates?

Well, maybe if I wear a suit and wave around some documents.

Why is it that the police didn’t investigate the issue? They didn’t– obviously. They simply took Microsoft’s word for it. That’s outrageous.

In any case, I took note of the case because I have said here before that the standard End User License Agreement that we all pretend to assent to when we install software is worthless and unenforceable and this looked, at first, as if it might prove me wrong. It didn’t. First of all, the charges were laid against a store, not an “End User”.

Secondly, the charges failed.

Posted on

Lions and Tigers and Hackers– Oh My!

What is it with you people out there? A few years ago, it was Ouija Boards. Then it was Satanic Ritual Abuse. Then it was Backwards Masking. Then it was subliminal messages. Now it’s hackers.

I have a simple solution for the hacker problem. It is very, very simple. It is completely effective and feasible. My solution is this. If you are a big company who wants to do e-commerce over the internet and you are afraid of hackers—get off the internet! That’s it. Couldn’t be much simpler could it?  You’re welcome.

To understand my solution, you have to understand one thing about the internet. To Amazon and eBay and Yahoo and all the other so-called high-tech start-ups: who asked you here? Who invited you? Who wants you? Get out. Go back to television where you belong.

Posted on

Pushy Annoying Software Turning the Internet into Television

I just installed Music Match, an MP3 ripper and player. It’s a nice piece of software. I got it for free off the internet. No, I didn’t steal it: they’re giving it away. Of course, you can buy an upgrade for $29. But the version you get for nothing actually does pretty well everything I want it to do. Thank you.

However… after I installed it, it started harassing me about upgrading. But, okay, there is a little button I can click to tell it to stop harassing me. However, then it started bugging me about going onto the internet to download more information about the artist whose CD was in the player– Leonard Cohen. Go away. Then I ripped some MP3’s. It did not ask me where to put the files. Why not? If I ordered a pizza, do you think they would hang up before I gave the address? Right. And then they would deliver it to My House in My Neighborhood in My City. And I would have to go out hunting all over town until I found that house, so I could have my dinner.

No, I prefer to say: deliver right here, this place, this location– so I can find it. Put it in this drawer, so I can keep things organized. But Windows wants you to store your pictures in My Pictures because it thinks you are incredibly stupid and haven’t the slightest idea of how to organize anything.

Music Match crashed, by the way, on a Windows 2000 system. Windows 2000 crashes– don’t believe people who tell you that Microsoft has finally put out a reliable product. Microsoft products are full of bells and whistles. They make a lot of noise as they crash and burn. I have had Windows 2000 crash while running Windows Explorer, a Microsoft program. Nothing else.

When I did humor Music Match and told it to go ahead, find some information on the internet for me, what did it do? It called up Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. I don’t use Explorer. I use Netscape.

Music Match is by no means the only software out there pushing you around. Almost everything you install nowadays starts trying to sign you up for Internet access or spam or web portals or whatever. How convenient, right? How nice. It does it all automatically, even if you don’t want it to. Quicken has been harassing me for three years to use their investment services. Go to hell. Sorry– I got mad, after the 1,477th time.

Microsoft, by the way, doesn’t think “spam” is a word. It highlights it with a squiggly red line, as it does words like “honour” and “labour”– legitimate British English spellings.

Anyway, my point is this: we are getting inundated with rude software that knocks on your door offering a valuable service and then takes over your cyber-house. In the process, it uses up valuable resources on your computer, including drive space and CPU cycles, and wastes your time clicking on messages boxes you did not ask for. And if you do accept any of their offers, you are likely to get either spammed or ripped off.

This is all part of a concerted plan I identified years ago: the plan to turn the internet into television. Television invites you to be a passive moron, watching with a vacuous expression, buying whatever they sell you, blithely accepting vulgar interruptions of every program every few minutes to hawk some valueless piece of junk to you.

The internet used to be different. But the corporations have taken it over. They see it as a true wonder of the modern world: a new way to sell things. A new way to manipulate people. A new audience of suckers for these vampires to sink their teeth into.

Posted on

Microsoft Word Still Sucks

Normally I sit down and collect details for this kind of rant, but I’m too enraged to do it right now.

The subject is Microsoft Office and Front Page 2000.

Microsoft has had a monopoly on office “suites” since they intentionally destroyed Word Perfect for Windows by finagling the settings on the links to the operating system so that Word Perfect crashed frequently. Word Perfect never recovered. (Does anyone still remember when Word Perfect had a huge margin on MS Word, in the DOS world?)

Office has a lot of nice functions, a fairly nice interface, and some intriguing capabilities. You can’t avoid using it because almost every office has standardized on it. Employees request it. And it does have some slick features.

But it has a number of very, very large annoyances, all of which serve to profit Microsoft at the users’ expense.

1. What kind of idiot wants to store all his documents in a directory called “my documents”? Well, an idiot. You get a computer. You don’t understand anything about directories or files. You create something in “Word”. Where is it? Where is my document? Oh! Eureka! It’s in “my documents”. How convenient. Convenient, of course, until you have about 200 documents and you need to sort them into logical directories.

And guess what– Microsoft is carrying this absurdity even further! I just noticed there are two new directories on my computer called “my photos” and “my web pages” and “my music”.

And, after reading Bill Gates’ personal web page, I now understand what the meaning is of “my” in those directory names: your files belong to Bill Gates.

2. I have a lot of documents. I store them in many directories. In order to find what I want quickly, I have a list of “favorites”, which narrows down the search considerably, and quickly. Then I installed Front Page 2000 and Internet Explorer. You know what these incomprehensibly stupid programs did? They added my internet bookmarks to my “favorites” list. Does Microsoft honestly think that I now want to keep all my files on web servers all over the globe? And just try to get rid of the extra “favorites” that refer to web sites like “Amazon” (just where I want to store my personal letters, of course). Does anyone know how to get rid of them?

3. I used to create a certain file in Excel and then save it and then import it into Front Page to convert it to a web page so I could adjust the décor, install some images, and fine tune it for my web page. Well, after installing Front Page 2000, whenever I open the file, it opens Excel! Look, you morons, I want to open it in Front Page, not Excel! You can’t even “import” it into Front Page. Are you people incredibly stupid or what?

4. We have an application in the office where I work that runs on Access 95. When we installed Access 97 (as part of Office 97) on our computers, the application could no longer run. So we tried to install Access 95, while leaving the rest of the Office suite alone. Access 95 killed off Access 97. For what reason, pray tell, can you not run both Access 95 and Access 97 on the same computer? Well, the obvious reason is Microsoft’s desire to bully you into upgrading everyone in your office to Office 97.

5. For that same application, we needed some kind of module from the Developer’s Tool Kit for Office 95, which cost about $1000. We bought it. We installed it. Then we found out the application will not work with Office 97. So we went looking for the Developer’s Toolkit for Office 97. Microsoft didn’t offer it anymore. Tell you what though– if you upgrade everyone in the office to Office 2000, you can buy some other combination of stupid modules for $2000 that might give you the same functionality. But then again, it might not. Nobody knows for sure. And just think: right at this very moment, Microsoft is probably hatching their next evil plan to make your life miserable until you buy some new, expensive Microsoft application, which only make your life even more miserable.

6. I invest a lot of work in templates. They save a lot of time, if you create web pages that essentially require similar formats and images. So where are the templates for Front Page? Where are they hiding? In a directory called “templates”? Damned if I know. Where are the Office 2000 templates now? Here’s a history of where templates used to go:

 

  • Word 6.0 c:\msoffice\msword\templates
  • Office 95 c:\msoffice\templates
  • Office 97a c:\program files\msoffice\templates
  • Office 97b c:\program files\Microsoft\office\templates
  • Office 2000 c:\program files\Microsoft\office\templates\??????

When I tried to find my Front Page templates, I ended up in a directory called:

..\..\..\windows\application data\Microsoft\chromehorse\images\rotw.jpg

Now the “chromehorse” and “rotw.jpg” are mine. They belong in c:\chromehorse. What is this file doing here? Why is Microsoft continually hiding stuff all over the place on my humungous hard drive, so it is almost impossible to figure out what files belong where and what they do? Well, it’s not some weird sort of complex system of preserving your data. In fact, this ‘system’ is designed to embed defaults into Windows that make you wholly and utterly dependent on the operating system (Microsoft) to manage your data. And the aim of all of this is to make it less and less conceivable or possible for you to use any product that doesn’t understand these secrets intimately. In other words, any product other than those made by Microsoft.

7. Do you use the power save functions of Windows? Then your system has probably crashed. It probably went into power save mode and wouldn’t “wake up”. It went into a coma. And guess what? If you shut off the power switch on the back of your computer so you can reboot, you might very well lock the system into a permanent coma. You might have to pull the battery off the motherboard to get it to wake up again. If they can’t make the power save functions work properly, why do they even bother to put them in?

8. Wow. Even as I was writing this, I discovered a new incredibly irritating “feature”. In order to get around the other idiotic defaults of Office 2000, I decided to import my favorite Front Page template into Word and save it as a Word template. Then I can use it to write my rants in Word and save them in HTML for transfer to my web page. But guess what? When I try to import the template, Office opens Front Page instead of Word, even when I try to open the document in Word!

Whoa nelly! I just found out where Microsoft is really storing my Office templates! It’s in:

c:\windows\application data\Microsoft\templates

So we can add this to the list.

And you can think about how efficient it is to keep moving your files around like that. It’s as if every six months, your company moved their head office to a different building in a different town, and hid all the office supplies in various new locations, and changed all your user names and passwords, and won’t tell you where the parking garage is.

Wow.

As for my templates….

I’m not sure where my templates are actually. There are some bizarre file names at the tail end of that directory, none of which tell me where my laboriously designed and crafted templates are.

So, never forget that Microsoft’s goal is to put a computer into every trailer in every trailer park in America. Never forget that customers can be broken down into three categories.

10% all smart people

44% all educated people and smart people

90% people who live in trailer parks and smart people and educated people

And Microsoft probably understands that 90% very well.

“Honey, where the hell are my documents?”

“You don’t have any documents, dear. You are illiterate.”

“Oh yeah. I forgot.”

By the way, Microsoft isn’t the only evil empire out there. Netscape stores your precious e-mails and bookmarks in a directory called:

c:\program files\communicator\users\mail

And your e-mail files are huge. Why? I don’t know. What are they storing in there? One of my email files is about 80 megabytes and contains about 500 messages. What on earth are they storing in there? Every address of every web page on the face of the earth in every message? Details of the merger with Warner Brothers?

Folks, it’s like TV. When TV started, in the 1950’s, we had some first-rate plays and dramas sponsored by Hallmark and other corporations looking for prestige.

Within ten years, we had “The Beverly Hillbillies”, “Green Acres”, “Mr. Ed”, “Petticoat Junction”, and “Gomer Pyle”.

 

Posted on

Software Police

All over the civilized world, the software police– at taxpayer’s expense– are invading homes and the offices of Internet Service Providers, warrants in hand, to shut down those evil, pernicious, dangerous, malevolent software pirates.

That’s the way the world works. The lawyers for a big company like Microsoft or Lotus calls the police. They say, “arrest that man– he’s stealing our software!” The police say, “yes sir!” and throw on their flak jackets, arm themselves to the teeth, hop into their paddy wagons, and go racing out to courageously fight for justice and truth and all that.

It should tell you something about the nature of our economy and our politics that if you called the police and asked them to arrest Microsoft or Lotus or Compaq, for the same crime, they would laugh in your face. You just know, don’t you, that the police would assume that a lawyer for Microsoft represents the forces of justice and truth, while a mere consumer represents… well… the average person. And the law, my friend, has become a tool of the rich, by which they exploit you and me.

Case in point. Do you own a computer? What does it mean to own? If you own your couch, that means that no one can sit on it without your permission. If you own a house, in the U.S., that means you can pretty well kill anybody who tries to enter it without your permission.

You own this computer. So why is your hard drive loaded with parasite programs that suck the breath out of your CPU? Why is your e-mail flooded with SPAM? Why can’t you delete certain directories like “My Documents”? Why does Office 97 exterminate your copy of Office 95, without giving you a choice? And when Windows crashes for the umpteenth time, costing you hours and hours of precious work, why is nobody accountable for it? Why is Compaq allowed to sell laptops with fake modems? Why can a software company sell a check-writing program that doesn’t work and refuse to give the purchaser his money back?

This is theft, of your time and your property.  It is robbery.