Oh nooo! Unremovable Office antipiracy nag pushed out via WSUS

On April 15, Microsoft unleashed an Office version of its anti-piracy nagging software onto unsuspecting users. The tool is called Office Genuine Advantage Notifications. As you may recall, the Windows antipiracy version, Windows Genuine Advantage (which also has a Notifications tool), has routinely misbehaved, declaring that legitimately installed software is pirated. OGAN (notice, if you rearrange the letters a little, you get "O NAG"), was supposed to be a pilot program for users in Chile, Italy, Spain and Turkey. But whoopsies! Microsoft unleashed it to US users by "mistake," reports Ed Foster in his blog Gripeline.

Foster discovered this when a reader wrote in to him:

"This is not just the Genuine check that happens when you try to download some of Microsoft's Office content from their web page," the reader wrote. "This is the 'always-on, installed permanently into your PC thing' like XP WGA Notifications. This is the first time I've seen it come out via Windows Update, and as a 'critical update.' The reason I'm upset is this is exactly how Microsoft pushed WGA Notifications on people, sneaking it in with security updates. And we all remember how unstable the first releases of WGA were."

The reader was smart enough to decline the EULA and avoid the installation of O NAG, disguised as it was as a security update. (Security for who? Microsoft is the only one that benefits from annoying Office users in an attempt to thwart pirates.)

Microsoft reportedly realized its "mistake" in making O NAG available to everyone on April 15, not just the declared countries where a pilot was supposed to launch that day. It has since stopped pushing the tool to US Office users, the company says.

But, for users who clicked yes to EULA (as we are all trained to do), O NAG cannot be uninstalled. Meanwhile, everyone is standing by for the day when Microsoft forces its Office anti-piracy notifications on all users via Windows Software Update Services. Shortly after that day Microsoft could see a massive exodus of IT enterprises to OpenOffice.org. With the open source software, people may give up features, but they don't have to worry about being wrongly nagged or locked out of their documents. Let's hope that Microsoft won't make that mistake.

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