The mind of an office cracker

[goombawaho]

So, I got this PC to fix and I'm trying to get all the key codes for the new computer (dead motherboard). So as NOT to get anyone hyperactive about my methods, I used my favorite program to reveal the Windows/Office keys and I get no OFFICE XP keys coming up.

Well, the lady swears she has office on there. So, I look in the root of the hard drive and there is this folder "Office XP". "Oooh - juicy", I think to myself.

I look in there and there are some cab files, and setup.exe files and serial.txt file with a nice office key code in it. So, I think maybe I have a legitimate office install directory complete with key code. But, when I open the Fatigue SERIAL.nfo file, I find this interesting bit of text. Click on the link to view the text file. All bad words have been edited out and the key code replaced with garbage.

http://home.comcast.net/~onsitepcservices/FatigueSERIAL.txt

I found it weird, confusing, entertaining, pathetic.

 

[strongm]

Oh dear

 

[ANFPS26]

That is amazing, and a blast from the past. LOL
Thanks for sharing. Crack kiddies can be entertaining to say the least.

Jim

 

[Nelviticus]

I have to ask, what are you going to do? I assume the best course is to leave her dodgy Office folder on her hard drive so she can re-install it herself, but do you report the piracy?

Nelviticus

 

[Noway2]

Nothing good would come of reporting it. If anything, I would just leave it alone and point out that there were no legitimate copies of Office on the machine and leave it at that. We are talking about a program that is, what, 10 year out of date?

Now I am not trying to defend the act of software piracy and wish to avoid the argument(s) about "free" software, but the fact is that for many home users, the historical asking price Office is not justifiable. Most home users need / want to occasionally view an excel sheet, write a decent looking letter, a resume, or a report or something. They "productivity" and utilization in this environment simply don't warrant expenditures that range in the several hundreds to thousands of dollars. In this type of environment, pirated copies are going to flourish. Right or wrong, until rather recently, there haven't been a lot of seriously viable alternatives either: Open Office used to be a joke and Google's cloud service didn't exist.

 

[Nelviticus]

I'll paraphrase your argument to explain why I disagree with it:

"For many city dwellers, the historical asking price of cars is not justifiable. Most city dwellers need/want to occasionally travel to somewhere not reachable by public transport. The occasional nature of this requirement simply doesn't warrant expenditures that range in the several thousands of dollars. In this type of environment, car stealing is going to flourish. Right or wrong, until rather recently, there haven't been a lot of seriously viable alternatives either: public transport used to be a joke and Google's personal teleportation service didn't exist."

Nelviticus

 

[strongm]

>Now I am not trying to defend the act of software piracy

Actually, that is exactly what you appear to be doing.

> view an excel sheet

Microsoft's free Excel Viewer software has been available since about 1995

>write a decent looking letter, a resume, or a report or something

Microsoft's Wordpad has also been around and included with the OS since the mid-nineties.

Neither quite good enough? Microsoft Works has been available for well over a decade (actually dating back to 1986 for DOS versions of the package) for not much money at all (albeit being phased out these days due to the low entry cost of Office Home). Heck, some versions of Works (Works Suite) even included a full-blown version of Word.

 

[BadBigBen]

Well, the lady swears she has office on there.

>>> well, she was right, there is Office on there...



I found it weird, confusing, entertaining, pathetic.

>>> Weird, maybe. Confusing, not at all. Entertaining, by all means. Pathetic, priceless...

most small office workers, that only deal with PC's in the office or so, do not know that the above scenario is quite illegal, and those that do know don't care, or at least that is my experience so far...





Ben
"If it works don't fix it! If it doesn't use a sledgehammer..."
How to ask a question, when posting them to a professional forum.
Only ask questions with yes/no answers if you want "yes" or "no"

 

[goombawaho]

Report it???? I just told her that her former computer guy put a bootleg copy of office on there and she needs to get a legitimate one. Will NOT be reinstalling or even copying the folder to the new hard drive

As said, this is how I feel exactly:
"Nothing good would come of reporting it. If anything, I would just leave it alone and point out that there were no legitimate copies of Office on the machine and leave it at that. We are talking about a program that is, what, 10 year out of date?"


When I said CONFUSING - I meant that whole paragraph in the text file with strange references to people that didn't make it and "HOES". It was like a rambling manifesto. Their site is still up and it is hosted in the Netherlands, so maybe that's why the English is not perfect.

 

[Noway2]

@Nelviticus, point taken, to an extent. However, there is a big difference between cars and M$-Office, most notably in that there are several competing models of cars at various price points. Until recently, Office was a near or at least virtual monopoly. Office, like most other products, was priced such that it maximized the profit margin. Businesses willing purchased multiple copies. Home, personal users, for the most part did not. I would go as far as to say that M$ didn't care about this, but rather that it was still more beneficial to accept the situation as is and turn a blind eye to the practice.

@Strongm, my intent was to explain, not defend the actions. Understanding and analyzing why something is occurring is not the same thing as condoning the practice.

Wordpad is NOT suitable for developing decent documents; please don't even try to claim that it is. I will give you credit on the Works suite, though in my experience it is a clunky pile and I can understand people would pursue copies of word.

I personally, purchased a copy of Office about 6 years ago. It was purchased with a Dell PC that I bought new that came with XP. I think it cost me about $100 at the time, which I felt was worth it. It is a rare occasion that I use it anymore as I use Linux almost exclusively and will unless there isn't a viable alternative. For serious document creation, I tend to use LaTex in a plain text editor, or Lyx rather than Office. Once I got used to it, I found I rather dislike the WYSISYG methodology.

 

[Noway2]

Correction to the above, I mean to say I would NOT go as far as to say...

 

[strongm]

Wordpad is perfectly capable of producing "a decent looking letter, a resume", although it would struggle with any decent sort of report

Complex, multicolumn, text-wrapping, picture-including documents with close to desk top publishing levels of layout control that Word is capable of? No.

So your explanation really boils down to home users wanting Office (and not being prepared to settle for less), and Office being too expensive, hence piracy.

I'm not sure I buy that. I'd argue that in almost any other market the fact that you cannot afford the aspirational, expensive product does not automatically lead to crime. Most people cannot afford a Bugatti Veyron, so they settle for something less that does the job (not as well, not as stylishly, not as fast, not as comfortably and not as jealousy-inducing) such as a Ford Fiesta rather than going out and stealing a Veyron. There is therefore something about the software market (probably the fact that there is physical product involved) that makes the option to pirate somehow more acceptable to people.

 

[Noway2]

There is also the concept of the risk involved versus reward. If you go and steal a Bugatti Veyron, or even an old Chevy your chances of getting caught and paying a stiff penalty, i.e. prison time, are relatively high. Your chances of getting caught with a pirated copy of Office are rather low.

I am also curious as to how many people have bought copies of Windows that they are unable to use even if they wanted to? Is this not theft too? For example, I bought a new PC and paid the M$ tax in that it came with Vista with a certificate for an upgrade to Win-7. I chose to install Ubuntu on that PC. I have still paid for a full fledged copy of Windows and should be able to use it on a machine of my choosing. I also never received my copy of Win-7 and I would have a very hard time obtaining it. In many ways I perceive this as being stolen from me. Granted, two wrongs don't make a right, but it makes it hard to respect their claim of property rights.

 

[Sympology]

Give her Open Office and have done with it.

It's amazing how many people are unaware of it and for 90% of work people and 99.9% of home users it will do the job.

Robert Wilensky:
We've all heard that a million monkeys banging on a million typewriters will eventually reproduce the entire works of Shakespeare. Now, thanks to the Internet, we know this is not true.

 

[edfair]

Given current conditions I would have explained that there were indications that the office program installed on her machine had licensing issues and that I had installed a free program that had all the functionality of office.

Just went through the same picture except I couldn't find an office key since it appeared to be installed on D:. Further digging indicates that there was a C: installed for boot purposes to get around a hard drive problem and that office wasn't reinstalled when the new OS was installed on the new boot drive. Customer did come up with a copy of an install CD and a key code but I'm still wondering if it is legit. She also had at one point 4 legitimate XP install CDs which I've now culled to the one OEM SP2 that matches her key code.

Ed Fair
Give the wrong symptoms, get the wrong solutions.

 

[goombawaho]

Yeah - she had open office on there and I'll mention that option to her, but she said she liked Word better. Her next problem, if she buys Word 2010, will be that she's blown out of the water by it compared to Word 2002.

Wow - how did we get from an Office bootleg to a Bugatti Veyron? Entertaining.

 

[xwb]

Could it have been MS Works that she called office? The latest version of MS Works is quite usable, is pretty cheap and can actually read word docs. Just doesn't do the section numbering.

There are several versions of "office" from other vendors: not just MS. We had a PC 16 years ago with "office" but it wasn't MS. It was someone else's.

 

[troythered]

I've been in that situation before, and I usually just tell them that as a professionally licensed computer guy, I can't install the software since it may be an illegal copy, but I leave it on there and whatever they do afterward is up to them.

 

[webrabbit]

All this moralizing about unlicensed software at home is a bunch of BS. How many of you pay the license fee before singing "Happy Birthday"? Sure, we're talking pennies instead of c-notes, but the principle is exactly the same.

 

[strongm]

The principle is not the same at all. Not least because you do not have to pay a licence fee before (or after) singing Happy Birthday. You only have to pay a fee (to Warner Chappell) if you are publically performing it for profit, e.g if it was to appear on a commercial CD, or to be sung in a movie (and when you do have to pay it, it is not a few pennies)