Microsoft: Don't work around our bugs

Picking apart the Vista EULA (PDF) would be unsportsmanlike, too easy. Rather than taking pot shots, I'll settle for one well-aimed shot.

You aren't allowed to "work around any technical limitations in the software." It's impossible to guess what this is supposed to mean. If you aren't satisfied with the way something in Vista works, are you prohibited from buying a third-party utility that makes it work better, or from writing your own? It would seem so, even though that's insane.

Microsoft likes this restriction; it's found in the Silverlight license, the Zune license, and probably others. I've seen it in a third-party posting of the XP license, though it's not in the XP home edition license.

I suppose the original idea was to prohibit users from doing things which the software intentionally keeps you from doing, such as spamming, unlocking full functionality in free trial software, and running Vista without authenticating online. But in ordinary usage, "technical limitations" are features that are buggy, badly implemented, or just missing. Converting files to a different format, writing scripts to facilitate a task, changing Registry values directly when there's no other way to do it, doing something the long way around because of a bug, and writing utilities to extract information that's otherwise not easily available are all workarounds of technical limitations.

Windows has an anti-security feature in which a file-structured device (such as a disk, a thumb drive, or a digital photo frame) can execute an auto-run application as soon as it's plugged into a computer. Sleazy outfits, including not only secretive criminal organizations but companies such as RCA and Sony, have used this trick to install malware in your machine. There's no documented way to work around this misfeature. Several sites (e.g., Engadget) have provided instructions on how to work around this technical limitation. If you follow their advice in order to protect against malware, you're violating the Vista license.

Don't assume companies that includes such license terms aren't serious. SunComm, which produces the aforementioned malware, threatened to sue a Princeton graduate student for revealing that holding down the shift key disables auto-run. SunComm asserted that "those who own property, whether physical or digital, have the ultimate authority over how their property is used," and therefore you don't have the right to hold down the shift key on your own computer in order to listen to recordings which you bought. But I digress. The point, as always, is that you can't assume that ridiculous language in a license agreement is harmless or will be interpreted to make it reasonable. (Update: This comparison was actually rather sloppy on my part, since SunComm doesn't even pretend to have obtained its victims' agreement. But if they can claim that holding down a shift key is an illegal workaround, those whose license agreements prohibit workarounds might assert the same.)