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Removing “Annoying” Windows 10 Features Is a DMCA Violation, Microsoft Says
- dvfjsdhgfv 6y agoSo much for Microsoft's professed "love" of open source. They love it only if it works in their interests making them money. Otherwise, not so much. I love this infringing feature they mentioned: "– Protect your privacy by tweak and customize Windows 10." So basically they openly admit you have to give up your privacy in order to use their product. Neat.
- p_l 6y agoThe project got hit for providing an ISO with license check removed, not for customizing windows. Over the last ~25 years I don't recall any of the windows customization tools getting hit with DMCA... because they didn't provide a technically illegal copy of the OS with them.
- thomaslord 6y agoThis is incorrect - the license check is not removed. (It's still a violation of copyright laws because they're publishing a derivative work without permission.)
- close04 6y agoNinjutsu OS appears to be a full ISO file containing a tweaked Windows installation source. Why not release everything as a tool that applies all the customizations on an installation from the official ISO? The tools that are used to implement that customization (Win10-Initial-Setup-Script and O&O ShutUp10) were always available. So why not just publish the recipe? Do people still download OS and antivirus software from random sources, like a Yandex drive?
- switch007 6y ago> Ninjutsu OS appears to be an ISO file containing a tweaked Windows ISO. If I wanted to attract Microsoft's lawyers, this is exactly what I'd do.
- dTal 6y agoWorth a historical note that this method of distributing more and more invasive software patches was how BSD was born.
- close04 6y agoIs this the Research Unix derivative Berkley Software Distribution from 1978 or the current day descendants?
- dano_news 6y ago> So why not just publish the recipe? Agree! However, apparently some things can't be changed after installation?
- henearkr 6y agoMicrosoft hasn't changed after all... I used to like what they were doing with WSL, but now on the contrary it starts to worry me, because it can become an avenue of evil behavior against users/devs/open-source/...
- lmilcin 6y agoMicrosoft did change. But then it looked how Apple and Google did the same thing, successfully, and sailed away in terms of market share and now it wants to replicate the success. The thing is, I don't think it is going to succeed. The likely thing that is already happening is that power users are leaving Windows and once power users leave the platform will die.
- theonemind 6y agoI don't think Mac has moved in a direction to win over power users, and Linux has a slipping desktop market share. I don't see a power-user exodus from Windows, really.
- realusername 6y ago> I don't see a power-user exodus from Windows, really. The power users outside of the MS ecosystem already left Windows a while ago you mean. A lot of mainstream tech tools & languages only have a medium support on Windows which is not really prioritized that much compared to the Mac & Linux versions. WSL is a big move to try to win those power users back.
- close04 6y agoPower users customize their own installation, they don't download a modified ISO from Yandex. This isn't aimed at power user but at regular users who don't understand what was done to it or the risk of downloading your OS from an untrusted source. It's so easy to turn them into rootkit encrusted ISOs and just call them "NEW! Updated Ninjutsu OS v2.0".
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- choeger 6y agoInteresting case. If Microsoft really demands that a user does not disable features, I am looking forward to some taking this to court. The thing is, software licenses are still largely uncharted territory. If I am not allowed to modify the system as my hardware executes it, will Microsoft take liability for any damage, material or immaterieal that could be caused by it? Think of an upgrade bricking your device (happened to a kindle of mine once) or a security hole that gets exploited. On the other hand, there is this whole discussion about the legality of ad blocking. Often, publishers claim that it is a copyright infringement to disable ads on their site. I think the cases are pretty much the same: A party offering software to you under the condition that you execute it exactly as they want. I wonder what the closest thing in non-software law would be to such a stipulation.
- p_l 6y agoThe case is that the tool included a full copy of Windows, modified, and apparently with activation removed. So it got hit like any other site providing "cracked" windows.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- dathinab 6y agoNo activation was not removed, a license is still required. Is still a modified version being distributed but license activation was not circumvented.
- arkades 6y ago> No activation was not removed, a license is still required. This was even explicitly stated in the linked article, but for some reason people keep asserting in this thread that it was a cracked version of windows. Am I missing something, or are people just making big assumptions and not reading the article?
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- f1refly 6y ago"Giant corporation that was evil before is still evil" Oh no, how could this happen? This is so unexpected! I'm shocked!
- ReptileMan 6y agoQuestion since the article doesn't make it clear - if they distribute ISO-s - this is clear DMCA violation. But tool that modifies iso you have obtained legally is definitely not.
- tonyedgecombe 6y agoIt's an interesting question, what if your tool removes the DRM from the ISO or turns Windows 10 into Windows Server.
- wvenable 6y agoDCMA specifically covers the removal of DRM, etc. But a tool to remove or modify anything else would be perfectly legal.
- close04 6y agoThey call it "a software tool that modifies Windows" but the tools that do the actual modifying are Win10-Initial-Setup-Script and O&O ShutUp10. Judging from a video tutorial linked in the article this is a customized ISO.
- BLKNSLVR 6y agoIs this evidence of how Microsoft now monetises Windows? – Protect your privacy by tweak and customize Windows 10. – Disable many of the annoying features built into Windows. – Unwanted Windows components removal. – Remove/Disable many Windows programs and services.
- hajile 6y ago15 years ago, a piece of software that downloaded user data and forced ads onto them was considered evil. The pot with the frogs is boiling quite fiercely these days. Too bad they don't notice.
- svntid 6y agoas the saying goes you cant teach an old dog new tricks - or better once a criminal always a criminal. Shame on you Micro$$$oft
- spzb 6y agoHang on. So this is the Business Software Association acting on behalf of Microsoft issuing a takedown notice to Microsoft-owned Github? Sounds like this could have been solved with a couple of internal emails. Or more likely BSA are just going off on one without Microsoft's input.
- tomxor 6y ago[edit] Not so blatent abuse, apparently the repo included windows iso derivatives... > Business Software Association acting on behalf of Microsoft. Oh wait a sec... Another BS third party Github DMCA complaint? This sounds very similar to the "REACT" Github DMCA complaint last month also covered by TF [0]. Where someone was (not) using Casio's software on an ARM SBC inside a plastic Casio case. "REACT" [1], "BSA" [2]... they are both non-profit, why are they both so comfortable using blatant DMCA abuse as a means to silence content their members disapprove of? [0] https://torrentfreak.com/hacker-mods-old-calculator-to-access-the-internet-casio-files-dmca-complaint-200523/ https://torrentfreak.com/hacker-mods-old-calculator-to-acces... [1] https://www.react.org/about-us/ https://www.react.org/about-us/ [2] https://www.bsa.org/ https://www.bsa.org/
- winkeltripel 6y ago"BSA, is a trade group established by Microsoft" [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BSA_(The_Software_Alliance) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BSA_(The_Software_Alliance)
- jeroenhd 6y agoThe website is down, but yeah, offering customised ISO files with Windows and some tools is clearly a breach of license. You can't just take a paid OS distribution, add some config and plonk it onto github. There's been people patching and customising Windows for many years, but most of the time that was done in the form of gaining an official ISO, patching it with a program on your computer and then using that to install. With that model the user is the one violating the license, not the distributor, though often these configurations used the official Windows API for OEMs so it was legally grey enough that I've never heard of any lawsuits. If these people just provided an exe and some patch files to turn an official ISO into the same thing as they offered on their website, they'd likely be in the clear. I'm not entirely sure what the point of the project is though, loads of pentesting tools only run well on Linux and there's plenty of Linux pentesting kits already. Why not just run Kali in a fullscreen virtualbox and be done with it? Or load Kali into WSL2, assuming Microsoft has fixed the hardware access limitations in WSL1?
- lostgame 6y agoI’m not sure, but is Windows 10 not slightly different from previous releases insofar as you can directly download the ISO for Windows 10? Unless you had an MSDN subscription it was a little more difficult to grab an ISO back in the day. Of course, it’s still illegal to modify and upload the modified version...but you’d think the patcher would be an even more obvious route than normal these days if it’s so easy to download an ISO. I’m not a Windows person, could somebody explain this a little bit better for me?
- alkonaut 6y agoIt's not quite clear what is published here. What copyrighted material is it that is accessed through somme kind of "circumvention" and what is the circumvention?
- dogma1138 6y agoI’ve tested this OS a few times as an alternative for Kali/BBL for environments where Linux hosts would raise flags. The distribution was a fully fledged ISO install of Windows 10 with the activation feature disabled. I don’t think the authors here have a leg to stand on.
- alkonaut 6y agoHaha and the discussion here sounds like it’s ms being angry about scripts removing ads/telemetry. HN gonna HN.
- StreamBright 6y agoThanks Microsoft for helping me to decide that I will never even going to use Windows again.
- nickjj 6y agoI would consider things like automatically searching Bing for typing anything into the Windows search bar a pretty annoying feature. Especially when 99% of the reason to use such a search is to find a local program or Windows setting to open. Problem is with the 20.04 edition of Windows, there's no user friendly way to do turn that feature off. Putting all of the privacy settings to the most restrictive values doesn't disable it, nor does turning off internet search in search in the policy editor. You have to dig around and create manually named registry keys. IMO that's unreasonable behavior. But that makes you think there's likely dozens if not 100+ other things like that. I hope Windows tool makers don't stop uncovering these things. I wonder if anyone will call out MS for having an option in the policy editor to disable internet search when using Windows search, while it doesn't actually disable it. What would the legal action be there? Maybe a GDPR violation since now the personal things I type into my computer are sent to Bing without my consent.
- unicornfinder 6y agoIf memory serves the group policy setting does work but only on the Enterprise version of Windows 10.
- nickjj 6y agoRight, but this should be on the purchase page of the OS. No one would know such a thing beforehand. It's a combination of a purposeful lack of information and a sketchy UI decision because the option in the policy editor is there to interact with on the Pro edition of Windows. It should be at least greyed out like other Windows settings are when you can't use it for your edition of Windows. You shouldn't have to pay $84+ / year (Enterprise edition) to disable having everything you type into the Windows search menu get searched on Bing. It used to be something you could turn off on all editions of Windows in earlier versions of Windows 10. If MS were more open about user privacy, users wouldn't need to develop third party programs to discover and disable all of the traps MS lays in their OS to spy on folks.
- jedieaston 6y agoJust checked: in Windows 8.1 (and therefore, all versions of Windows 10), the "Don't search the web or display web results in Search" Group Policy works fine in Pro/Enterprise/Education/Business. The "Disable Microsoft Consumer Experiences" one only works in Enterprise/Education, however. If you are on Home, and don't have gpedit.msc, make a new DWORD in "Computer\HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\Explorer", call it "DisableSearchBoxSuggestions", and set it to 1. Upon reboot Bing will no longer appear in your start menu.
- anonymfus 6y ago> At first view, some may conclude that Ninjutsu OS amounts to a heavily modified yet pirated version of Windows 10. However, a video explaining how the software works suggests that users will actually need their own license for a genuine copy of Windows 10 to get the modifications up and running properly. Ninjutsu’s creator informs TF that’s indeed the case. That is literally opposite of how it works. As Windows EULA does not give you rights to distribute derivative works, sharing practically any kind of modified Windows image is illegal, ever if you only change default desktop background image. But circumventing activation for yourself can actualy be legal in some specific scenarios.
- quyleanh 6y agoThe title is incorrect, imo. The website offered tweaked ISO Windows 10, which is commercial product. Why don't they offer a script, a software for all of these tweaks?
- LeoNatan25 6y agoPeople should use NTLite to customize their own ISO files (downloaded directly from Microsoft). You can never trust a customized ISO from the internet.
- smolder 6y agoNTLite can theoretically be compromised just like an externally sourced .iso.
- LeoNatan25 6y agoNTLite comes from a trusted company, in the business of the administration of Windows installations. Still much more trustworthy than some random website allowing ISO downloads.
- gruez 6y agoIs that still a thing? How much can you gain from customizing your ISOs using that tool? A few hundred megabytes?
- LeoNatan25 6y agoIt’s not about disk size. It’s about being in control what processes and services are running and spying on you.
- malikNF 6y agoMicrosoft being Microsoft, its such a shame so many video games still only support MS. Over the years MS has become really user hostile (well may be not as much as my samsung android phone I guess) with constant forced updates, forced adverts for their products. And now a DMCA for a project trying to help folks customize windows? Sigh! Few days ago there was an update on Windows10 and my computer was restarted forcefully, upon booting back up I was greeted by a massive "in your face" type of advert for their Edge browser, couldn't quit it and had to see a big advert from MS about their stupid Edge browser. After I managed to close it, it decided to pin the browser to my task bar without asking me if it should.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- gbear605 6y agoThis is pretty different from that. It’s not just that they modified Windows, it’s that they provided a cracked version of the iso. If they just provided the tools to do it, it’d be one thing (and that probably wouldn’t have been attached by Microsoft). But given the evidence, this is perfectly reasonable for Microsoft.
- smolder 6y agoWhy are others saying it wasn't cracked and didn't disable activation? Cracked implies copy protection or licensing measures were circumvented.
- wvenable 6y agoWhy does it matter? No company is going to do nothing if someone else distributes a modified versions of their software -- regardless of the modification. The fact that it's cracked or not is inconsequential to the discussion.
- pbhjpbhj 6y agoYou still have a point, but isn't what you declaim precisely what companies like RedHat, Canonical, etc., do. Mozilla, and Google too, to some extent.
- meeebooo 6y agoIn this thread: 90% of HN cannot read.
- nana- 6y agoGood looking us, if it's art or remix does it violate ?
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- quijoteuniv 6y agoThe amount of telemetry that gets block by my DNS sinkhole when running the windows 10 maschine i have for work is insane. Even with the settings on maks privacy. In a way i think Microsoft should be happy someone is using windows for pentesting. Or that windows is not to o bad to use with a few tweaks. Everytime I have an important meeting I have to make sure i am not going to get one of those force starts that can take hours.
- romanovcode 6y agoThe title is just plain wrong. Sensational and wrong. Someone took a Win10 ISO and modified it to redistribute. It is piracy that Microsoft has a problem with, not disabling features.
- FactolSarin 6y agoHow does something like this get to the front page? Someone provides a cracked copy of Windows and calls it "Ninjitsu OS" and then cries foul when it's taken down because of course it was. Is there that much of an anti-Microsoft sentiment that people upvote something like this uncritically?
- chenzhekl 6y agoI bet lots of people who upvoted the post didn't even read the main text.
- user5994461 6y agoI read the text and it says nothing like it. It's all about DMCA takedown for removing telemetry, not a single mention of distributing cracked ISO of windows.
- wvenable 6y agoWhichever legal assistant at BSA (not known for their subtly) wrote that take down was clearly confused but it's plainly clear that was targeted because it they distributed a modified Windows ISO. There have always been tweaking tools for Windows unless we suddenly see a huge crackdown on the hundreds of other products that remove telemetry, etc, I would consider this overblown.
- toyg 6y agoPeople often read only the headline. HN is the new newspaper, but still a newspaper.
- dathinab 6y agoBecause Microsofts claims where not about a illegal distribution of windows and it's a modified copy but not a cracked copy. (Still illegal). This means it was just a easy way to run a modified windows which still required a working license key. Or at least that is the point the article is making.
- deleted 6y ago
- dancemethis 6y agoIt is a DMCA violation to remove what Microsoft calls "Windows features" from its proprietary operating system. It tells a lot about what DMCA and Windows are. It tells even more about whose side they are on: the common people or the enterprise. I can only hope the answer is easy enough to figure out, but I'll leave a tip just in case: not on the side of people.
- gbear605 6y agoThis was not a instance of DMCA not allowing tweaks, but rather DMCA not allowing people to distribute minorly changed isos of Windows.
- hajile 6y agoWhat about fair use? The transformative factor seems rather clear. People want the many altered things and consider it different enough to go out of their way to find it (despite it not reducing their out-of-pocket cost). The nature of the work is that it is a tool rather than a work of fiction which is also in favor of fair use. The amount taken is substantial, but it has already been ruled that even 100% taken can still be fair use. It also contributes a great many man-hours of work though which means it wasn't just a blind copy/paste either. The effect on the potential market is the big thing here. MS would claim they lose money by not being able to spy on users or show them ads. However, their licensing scheme remains untouched which seems to indicate that theft is not a motivating factor. Considering the use of the new work, it could be argued that ads and telemetry would be blocked by a DNS filter anyway and no actual profit would be lost. Further, those people would have moved on to the free alternative Linux which is already the defacto standard for a lot of pen testing and event the license profit would be lost. Then there's the question about if collecting that data is even legal (I don't believe it has ever been tried in court) and how that would interact with the DMCA. It really doesn't seem like a case MS would really want to go to court over.
- gruez 6y agoThis is a very charitable interpretation of fair use. >The transformative factor seems rather clear. People want the many altered things and consider it different enough to go out of their way to find it (despite it not reducing their out-of-pocket cost). Is it really that transformative? It might be from a user-privacy point of view, but if consider all parts of the operating system, it's negligible. >The nature of the work is that it is a tool rather than a work of fiction which is also in favor of fair use. This seems to be a misinterpretation of the law. That part of the test (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use#2._Nature_of_the_copyrighted_work https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use#2._Nature_of_the_copy...) was intended to prevent copyrighting of facts. In this regard, an operating system is probably closer to fiction than non-fiction. I'm not aware of any exception for "tools". >The amount taken is substantial, but it has already been ruled that even 100% taken can still be fair use. It also contributes a great many man-hours of work though which means it wasn't just a blind copy/paste either. Again, if you consider the entire operating system, even weeks/months of effort by a single person would be dwarfed by the millions (tens of? hundreds of?) of man-hours that went into making the entire OS.
- zeepzeep 6y agoSo if a modified ISO is illegal, how about a binary diff?
- jrockway 6y agoHere is a take from the early 2000s: https://cr.yp.to/softwarelaw.html https://cr.yp.to/softwarelaw.html Not really sure how much of this is still true. Since cloud services and locked devices took over most of the software that people use, it doesn't come up much anymore.
- lucb1e 6y agoInteresting question and answer, thanks for the link. To save others a click / searching for the relevant parts, these seem to be it: > since it's not copyright infringement for you to apply a patch, it's also not copyright infringement for someone to give you a patch. > For example, Galoob's Game Genie, which patches the software in Nintendo cartridges, does not infringe Nintendo's copyrights. ``Having paid Nintendo a fair return, the consumer may experiment with the product and create new variations of play, for personal enjoyment, without creating a derivative work.'' For the EU, merely this is said: > The European Software Directive (adopted by the UK in 1992) gives users the freedom to copy, run, modify, and reverse-engineer lawfully acquired programs. Given the reasoning "if it's not copyright infringement to patch, it's also not infringement to give you a patch", which I honestly don't quite follow, this ought to mean that the law works the same way in the EU. (The reason I don't follow that logic is that copyright doesn't dictate what I can do with information I already have: it's about distribution as far as I know. So of course it's okay for me to apply a patch when not considering any law other than copyright (at least from my not-a-lawyer and European perspective), but that doesn't mean I can make what might perhaps be argued to be a derivative work and spread that around.)
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- 7thaccount 6y agoHas anyone here used Cortana for anything? I really hate to see it using CPU/RAM.
- charliebrownau 6y agoFinally willing to migrate to Open Source and Linux OS yet ?
- blaser-waffle 6y agoAll the more reason to move to linux. Here's to the year of the linux desktop!
- 1MachineElf 6y agoWe knew a day like this would come after Microsoft acquired GitHub. Glad to see a great alternative, SourceHut, is moving forward as evidenced by the HN submission made earlier today. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23485290 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23485290
- josephcsible 6y agoThis isn't related to that, and the same thing would have happened no matter where it was hosted. It was a DMCA issue, not Microsoft giving themselves special treatment with GitHub.
- wvenable 6y agoThis is the opposite since it clearly went through normal DCMA channels and wasn't a back-ended removal.
- scoot_718 6y agoJust admitted that their OS is subpar and they dislike customers. Good move Microsoft.
- chadlavi 6y agoShout out to all the people who had been fooled into thinking MS was different under current leadership.
- HissingMachine 6y agoI have no opinion about Ninjutsu OS because I'm not the target market. But I would have never even heard about it without this DMCA complaint, and I presume many who might be interested in it heard about it first from news about this DMCA complaint. Just pointing this out.
- beervirus 6y agoThis is dumb clickbait. They weren’t distributing some script to tweak a Windows installation. They offered a download of the whole Windows package, with their tweaks added. Of COURSE they got a takedown notice.
- BLKNSLVR 6y agoI disagree that it's clickbait. The wording of the BSA, clearly specified in the article, makes it interesting and worthy of highlight. Article TL;DR: "the complaint goes on to highlight several features of Ninjutsu OS that are claimed to be infringing. As advertised and specifically highlighted by BSA/Microsoft they are: – Customize Windows 10 with powerful tweak and optimize. – Protect your privacy by tweak and customize Windows 10. – Disable many of the annoying features built into Windows. – Unwanted Windows components removal. – Remove/Disable many Windows programs and services."
- jessaustin 6y agoMeet the new M$, same as the old M$.
- Apofis 6y agoIt's 2020, what else is new Microsoft?
- Mikhail_K 6y agoIf somebody still wondered, why Microsoft acquired Github, this article provides the answer. They bought the ability to control major distribution point of non-proprietary software and shut down at will any perceived threats.
- pixxel 6y agoThey paid $7.5B to delete code repositories? What about all the other non github repository hosts, not forgetting self-hosted, torrents etc.
- Mikhail_K 6y ago> They paid $7.5B to delete code repositories? As the article shows, yes. > What about all the other non github repository hosts, not forgetting self-hosted, torrents etc. They are harder to find and can be closed without difficulty, unlike a github repo
- detaro 6y agoWhat makes you think pre-aquisition Github wouldn't have taken this down?
- sloshnmosh 6y agoThere are several companies and even security companies that modify Windows 10 and remove unwanted programs. A couple that come to mind are Malwarebytes "Adwcleaner" and FireEye's "commando-vm" (found on Github). But I do see a problem with Ninjutsu OS offering an preconfigured Windows ISO as others have mentioned. I think Ninjutsu OS will be allowed to continue if they just offer some tools and scripts to modify a "normal" Windows10 iso instead like FireEye does. Also, I hads never heard of Ninjutsu OS until now. I will be looking forward to playing with it. (Streisand Effect)
- tenebrisalietum 6y agoThe emulator community developed .ips files to allow distribution of modifications to ROM files, without having to worry about the legal issues of distributing modified ROM files themselves. I'm surprised there aren't tools to use this or something similar with .ISOs.
- macpete 6y agoNo more spyware, telemetry, ads or forced/unwanted remote software modifications - I call it „self defense“
- nix23 6y agoAhhhh, i love it when Microsoft shows unwanted his real face. DEVELOPERSDEVELOPERS!!! #whelovelinux ;)