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Microsoft

Ending Harassment from Microsoft and the BSA? 49

Posted by Cliff from the talk-to-the-hand dept.
Big_Joe asks: "Lately Microsoft has put a satellite office in the Grand Rapids, MI area. Because of this I, an end user working for a large contractual company, have been getting harassment mail from Microsoft and the BSA. The information they are using to contact me is information from Chicago's Comdex 3 years ago. Since then I have switch my career direction from Windows to Linux. I would like to get my name removed from any association with Microsoft products. The only systems I use with any Microsoft software installed are owned and maintained by my employer. An earlier story here said not to reply because it is more of a headache. So how do I get them to quit bugging me? Is there any legal action I can take for harassment? How do I tell them that I am no longer a customer and that they have no further right to pester me?" Hmmm... smells like more spam. How should one handle any corporation that does crap like this, especially one that makes backhanded threats toward your workplace?
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Ending Harassment from Microsoft and the BSA? More

Ending Harassment from Microsoft and the BSA?

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  • I don't know if you have this in the US, but in the UK we have a thing called the Citizens Advice Buro.

    In this wonderfull place are Lawers who are prepared to write leagale letters for free.

    If this was happening to me I'd be round to mine like a shot with all the stuf MS had sent me and asking the Lawer to write a Cease and Disist letter.

    The next time I got a letter from MS I'd be down to the local Small Claimes court, or whatever your equavilent is, where I'd start procedings against them.

    • I cannot think of any U.S. equivalent of the CAB, but I believe that this advice is quite sound. –Anybody knowledgable(*cough*lawyers*cough*) who's reading this care to add any details?

      The cease and decist order should be overkill. I know it's Microsoft, but the mere threat of action will probably call off their hounds. They don't honestly want to piss you off.

  • you must request to be removed from thier list (Score:4, Insightful)

    by BroadbandBradley ( 237267 ) on Tuesday May 07, 2002 @11:10AM (#3477270) Homepage
    send a certified letter, make copies for your records. make it clear that you consider this harassment as you are no longer a customer,and that if they continue to send you stuff that you will seek damages. Marketing companies are required by law to maintain a 'blacklist' of customers who asked not to be contacted.

    Don't hide from the evil giant, they prey on fear.

  • You DON'T want them to stop hassling you if you have an MS free office. Think of it as sucking valuble resources out of them!! I think you should request more information from them!! Think of the amusement you can have if they try to audit you!! The money you can make of suing them for harrasment.

    Plus it will distact them from me. ;)
    • This tactic has been done with limited success by some anarchist groups and big food corps franchise offices. You can keep them tied up for weeks coming out and giving you free coupons, samples, and the like trying to get to start a subway. Get M$ to come out and give marketing presentations at your next LUG, just call it an assemblage of IT workers striving for innovation in the industry, so IWSII (they'll like it).

    • http://eri.ca.sandia.gov/eri/howto.html



      I tend to agree with the above post. The best would be if you can get in a protracted legal battle with them over nothing, then sue them back for defimation, lost wages, and pain and suffering. You could retire off that kinda lawsuit.

  • M$ and the BSA (Score:1, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Simple, tell them you're too busy to reply 'cos you're working out what's involved in migrating every department of your new company to Linux
    • it might be more fun if you add that you are migrating from au/x (or beos or whatever you were using). it drives home the point that they had no reason to contact you at all.
  • While it may be frustrating to receive countless emails and promotional mailers from MS and their associated counterparts, think of it this way: it keeps you up to speed with what they are doing.

    Part of the problem with some *nix developers I know is that they honestly don't have a clue what the various Windows platforms are capable of. For all you know, you might come across an MS technology that is perfect for a project you are working on. Granted, this might be a rarity, but simply refusing to use a technology for "ethical" reasons is absurd... it should always be the best tool for the job... even if it is from MS.

    • Granted, this might be a rarity, but simply refusing to use a technology for "ethical" reasons is absurd...

      So, to take an extreme example, you'd have no problem purchasing software made with slave labor? It's not absurd - search Google for "prison-industrial complex". This neoslavery is alread being used for routine data-entry tasks in some places. I could very well see, some years down the road, hackers imprisoned for "War on Copying" crimes being put to work for pennies a day...

      If you're buying a hammer, and you can get an identical one cheaper made by Chinese prison labor, do you argue "it's the right tool for the job"? Or do you engage your fscking brain for a minute and contemplate the wider consequences of your actions?

      Sure, Microsoft may not (yet) be that evil. But if people take your attitude, you're giving the opportunity for exactly that sort of evil to develop.

      • So, to take an extreme example, you'd have no problem purchasing software made with slave labor? It's not absurd - search Google for "prison-industrial complex". This neoslavery is alread being used for routine data-entry tasks in some places.

        Ok... that's a rather extreme example. Maybe I should clarify: not using a software product because you find its license ethically questionable is absurd (to me). Here's an example. I have a client that has hundreds of workstations all running MS. Their entire knowledge flow is based on shared calendars via Exchange.I hate Exchange.. with a brutal passion. However, it doesn't make any fiscal sense for me to change them over to something else just because I prefer the GPL to an MS EULA.

        • However, it doesn't make any fiscal sense for me to change them over to something else just because I prefer the GPL to an MS EULA.

          Ah, but a large portion of the reason one should favor free software is exactly for technical reasons. It's not just a question of the ethics of proprietary vs. free software, it's the technical issues of interoperabilty, repairability, security, persistance of data, and single-supplier dependance.

    • simply refusing to use a technology for "ethical" reasons is absurd

      Damn right. Screw ethics. Who needs 'em?

    • Re:Staying Informed (Score:3, Insightful)

      by rw2 ( 17419 )
      Granted, this might be a rarity, but simply refusing to use a technology for "ethical" reasons is absurd.

      No. It's the foundation of a market driven economy. In many many cases absurd purchasing decisions (aka boycotts) are the only thing that can cause change in american industry.
    • Part of the problem with some *nix developers I know is that they honestly don't have a clue what the various Windows platforms are capable of.

      Part of the problem with Microsoft employees and Windows developers is that most of them honestly have no clue about non-Windows platforms, and never have had any either.

      As someone who has been in the industry for nearly 30 years, I assure you, there is nothing, and has never been, anything novel or innovative on the Windows platform. Windows is a "me too" system, a collection of technologies copied and bought from others, and at that, it is mediocre at best. UNIX/Linux developers simply don't need to bother looking: they get the same old stuff on their own platforms.

  • Microsoft's actions buy bad feeling. (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Futurepower(R) ( 558542 ) on Tuesday May 07, 2002 @11:59AM (#3477625) Homepage

    One thing is good to keep in mind about Microsoft. By its anti-customer actions, Microsoft is buying itself an unprecedented amount of bad feeling. At present feelings against Microsoft are so negative that the company has business only because it has a virtual monopoly. If there ever becomes a real alternative to MS software (like the Open Office [openoffice.org] suite, for example), Microsoft will rapidly collapse.

    (I have written this comment so that it includes information that most readers here already know, but that the average computer user needs. That way, if you like the comment, you can pass it on to your less knowledgeable friends.)

    The first paragraph may sound like an exaggerated opinion, but collapse of a computer company's business has happened before. IBM had, at one time, almost 100% of the personal computer business. But it was surprising at the time how much people didn't like IBM. People who supplied cement to the building industry and people who ran dry cleaners and students who played with Basic all knew that IBM was in court for anti-trust violations. It was often shocking how much negative feeling toward IBM there was among people who had little understanding of the technical issues behind the violations.

    As soon as an alternative to buying PCs from IBM was available, IBMs business dropped rapidly. The magazine articles at the time exaggerated IBM's percentage of the market because they failed to count the computers that were made by very small businesses. The alternatives to IBM PCs were called clones, and thousands of companies built them. IBMs business quickly dropped to 8% of the market, and then below that.

    Now history is poised to repeat itself, this time with software. Linux is still not easy enough to configure. Open Office has, for the needs of many people, arrived. The Mozilla browser [mozilla.org] will soon be released, but it doesn't have a calendar or a spell-checker yet, and these are important to many people who use Microsoft Outlook. Events are moving fast, and it won't be long before the selfless love of the open source programmers overthrows the world's most abusive software dictator.

    Often people with little technical knowledge don't understand that underlying the negative feeling toward Microsoft are strong technical failings. For example, Windows XP, Microsoft's newest operating system, has a file called the Registry. This file contains settings for the operating system and almost every other program that is installed. The registry file is a single point of failure. If something goes wrong in the registry, as it sometimes does, the only method of recovery is to re-install Windows XP, all the programs, all the drivers, and all the patches again. This can take days, during which the user is not able to work normally.

    Why does Microsoft have such a flawed design? Why put information for many programs in one file? Why not put each program's settings in separate files, so that one cannot destroy the others? Apparently because having all the settings in one file accomplishes a kind of copy protection. Someone who copies a program's folder will not be able to operate that program on another computer because the settings are hidden in Windows XP's registry file. So, all the honest customers suffer because of Microsoft's desire to extract the most money from the world. That kind of offensive defensiveness actually lowers long-term profit, something the company executives have not learned.
    • Why does Microsoft have such a flawed design? Why put information for many programs in one file? Why not put each program's settings in separate files, so that one cannot destroy the others?
      Because back in the day of .ini files, users complained that files were all over the place, inconsistant, and all that sort of stuff. The registry, like so many other things, is a tradeoff.

      • Back in the day of INI files, they were all over the place. They were inconsistent. That was because Microsoft had inadequate standards.

        The registry is a trade-off, but a different trade-off, in my opinion. The registry (which is in all versions of Microsoft Windows from 95 to XP) works perfectly as copy protection. It also causes all versions of Windows to be unstable.
        • Also, if you look at Mac users, there's no prob. You see how they can do stuff. Installing a program usually is little more than extracting a folder. SOMETIMES, you have to extract a couple of files into the System Folder.

          But you want to uninstall? Delete the folder and you're done, unless you've made the program a startup item, and that's easy to nix, too.

          Registry is not necessary anymore. It's stupid to keep it, except for copy protection.
      • The registry, like so many other things, is a tradeoff.

        Indeed. And this tradeoff is worse than the disease it was trying to cure.

    • Just the facts... ...IBM lost business because the computer clones were cheaper, not because people didn't want to buy an IBM computer due to poor public perception over an old antitrust case. Also, IBM had an open architecture that was easy to copy for a startup company. ...IBM's antitrust problems were unrelated to the personal computer business. Microsoft's are direclty related. IBM did not suffer the same negative perception by consumers. ...Microsoft's .NET strategy removes any need for the Windows registry for applications. If this strategy ever sees the light of day that is. Granted the registry was a bad idea but then steps are being taken to correct this over time.

  • For the record: (Score:4, Informative)

    by flikx ( 191915 ) on Tuesday May 07, 2002 @12:30PM (#3477847) Homepage Journal

    Grand Rapids, Salt Lake City, Tulsa, and Milwaukee are being singled out for a May 1 - 31 "grace period".

    If you hurry up and register with the grace period program, they come and audit you this summer, and the promise not to prosecute you for 'pirating' that occured before May 1.

    BSA 'grace' [bsagrace.com]. Two of my offices are already getting warnings, and there are obnoxious advertisements in the paper, and on the radio.

  • Simple answer. (Score:3, Informative)

    by AtariDatacenter ( 31657 ) on Tuesday May 07, 2002 @12:32PM (#3477860)
    You want them to stop contacting you. You don't want to contact them. The answer is simple. Set up a filter rule on your mailbox. Divert their messages to the trashcan. End of story.
  • About a month ago, I got a really nice looking form letter from the BSA (bad software authorities?) telling me I'd better make sure my company was using all licensed software. I checked. My Linux desktop and server were both happily running Debian 2.2. My Sun Ultra 30 was running a free-to-use copy of Solaris 8. My SHN fileserver was running FreeBSD 4.5-STABLE. I laughed and spent a while figuring out interesting ways of igniting the letter.

    Two weeks later, I get another mail addressed to me (misspelled last name and all) from Microsoft themselves. The same basic form letter, warning me of the dire, scary consequences if I don't license all my illegal pirated Linux warez. I don't even bother burning this one; I just toss it.

    I'm now waiting for the Software Police to show up with a battering ram and a bullhorn, waking me up at 4:15 AM on a Saturday morning and demanding to see every little piece of documentation in my house proving that I didn't steal that copy of Microsoft Bob back in 1994 or give my aunt a computer with a burned copy of Win98 installed on it.

    They won't get too far up the stairs, because I have a particularly vicious dog, but it'll be fun to watch, anyway.

    - A.P.
  • Just start turning in companies all over the place, say you work there and know for a fact that they have pirated M$ software. Either they'll be too busy to mess with you or, if you really go ballistic, the entire city will backlash against them.

    t.

    • The following should not be considered as appropriate or moral advice, but rather as ethically questionable pettiness. You have been warned.

      Make a list of your company's top competitors. Take full advantage of the BSA's anonymous whistle-blowing system. Be a little paranoid, and use public telephones to telephone and libraries to email. Be specific. "At least X copies of Win2000, only one licensed Photoshop being shared by both the web designers and marketing, etc." If you are an activist, report your city government, then send them some appropriate literature when they get audited. (Yes, an audit wastes your tax dollars, but they are already wasting your tax dollars, so make them pay for their lack of vision.)

      The preceeding unethical material has come to a halt. You may open your eyes now.

      :Peter
  • I have been getting the letters approx every 2 weeks for the last 5 months...1 from MS, and 1 from BSAA.

    I actually rang Microsoft to ask them to take me off their list and they said they'd have to take all my details etc and then they'd find out why!

    I told 'em where to go! Last thing I need is more threating letters!
  • "Return to sendah,
    Address Unknown"
  • Semi-offtopic, but I've got a bunch of carcasses laying around (computer, not human). If the BSA thugs come and blow the door off its hinges, are they going to drag me in for all the unlicensed software sitting on the hard drives of these old machines? Not that I will ever USE the machines, they're here for parts and parts only. I'm just too lazy to deformat the hard drives.

  • Use a US Postal Prohibitory order (Score:1, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward
    File a US Postal Prohibitory order against them. It is a crime to send mail to an address for which you have received a Prohibitory order. This was orignally intended to stop pornographic junkmail, but it was ruled by the Supreme Court that the filer is the sole arbitor of what constitutes pornographic. If you think BSA mailings are porno - the US postal office can't argue with you.

    http://www.junkbusters.com/dmlaws.html#form

  • Were you talking spam or postal mail? If its spam, a simple filter should work. If its postal mail, try the postal service. I'm sure they'll have a way for you to stop getting it. Perhaps have each one returned to sender? I now in my company if they are returned from the postal service they get taken off the mailing list as an invalid address.

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