I have tried to activate new machines but to no avail. I sent off an e-mail asking Microsoft how to deactivate older machine and authorize new ones but they have not responded.

Is there anyway to resolve this and not lose several hundred dollars of ebooks?

haha – this is a 2005 article and the situation has gotten worse, not better. I’ve been trying for 3 days to activate Reader and the process just times out. I wonder if the new iPad with have these hassles? I know Kindle doesn’t.

This is just one more in a long line of Microsoft’s great ideas that they just couldn’t execute properly.

This time I have been trying for 6 days now. Every time I go to the activation page, I get message that quota is exceeded and to request another. It states specifically that someone will call back. If you believe that, I have a bridge to sell you. Finally when I submit a request (via their webpage) it won’t allow me to do it stating I have a request pending and to call MS Product Support (read that to mean at least 2 hours wasted if you can get someone who speaks English). Called last night and after an hour they told me that the people that need to act on the request would call me. I gave them a window ot 6 AM to 10 AM MDT. Alas, 10:45 came and went and no call. I called them again and went through the same exercise. Then again they needed a phone number (which I’d given to 3 different folks as I climbed the phone tree) and a time window they could call me. I refused and told them I wouldn’t give them one as they won’t call anyway. That seemed to give the agent pause as he said he would escalate. I did get an email from the agent and he said if I didn’t get this resolved in 2 days to email him.

I’m not very hopeful.
If I did not have several hundred dollars of MS Reader ebooks, I wouldn’t even be going through this.

I have a new philosopy as of today. I will never buy another ebook that uses Microsoft Reader. If I can’t get it in another format, eReader/Mobipocket, I’ll order the book in hardcover from Amazon.

I’m using a USB-to-IDE cable so that I could use additional hard disks with my notebook – I have about 10 hard disks from my old desktop PC. Every time I plugged in an additional hard disk, I was asked to activate my MS Reader again. At first, I didn’t realize that there was a maximum of six activations per Passport account. I only got to know this when there was a failure with notebook’s primary hard disk and I was unable to activate my MS Reader after replacing the faulty hard disk. It took me months to get a new activation.

Now I stop purchasing e-books in MS Reader format. I prefer e-books of Adobe format. Adobe allows you to deactivate devices that you don’t use anymore. Do you know that MS Reader does not have a feature to rotate the page making it difficult to read material printed at 90-degree orientation. Adobe reader does have this feature.

There is no way to de-authenticate a device.

From what I can tell each “download capable” authenticated device (desktop/tablet) gets its own key and all content that device can read has to have been encrypted with that key. I’ve always had to go re-download content from Amazon/Fictionwise after authenticating a new “download capable” device.

Since all of the content is permanently encrypted with that devices key how would Microsoft de-authenticate the content?

The X.509 security certificate designers forgot about this issue too.

Their hack was to add revocation lists. But for that scheme to work the clients have to run out and check with the certificate issuer to see if the certificate has been yanked. (hence the use of the word “hack”.)

So imagine if Microsoft implemented that scheme.

Each time you go to purchase a new secure eBook the spiffy new MSReader DRM would inquire of Microsoft as to whether it had been de-authenticated. If so, it would commit suicide. All content encrypted with its key would no longer be accessible.

If you were crafty and backed up your DLL’s you could continue to read content you had previously downloaded, but you would never be able to purchase new content. Plus the MSReader could run out every so often, when it noticed the ‘net was available, and check it’s authorization and commit suicide as needed.

If Microsoft implemented this scheme they could provide us with a simple self help desk that would allow us to zap authorizations at will. The “stick” would be that each time you re-authenticate a system you would be forced to re-download all your titles for that system, so you’d want to think carefully. But you would never be locked out of your content unless the bookshelf providers (Amazon/Fictionwise) denied you the ability to download the titles you had perviously purchased.

Unfortunately, Microsoft has been legally found to be a consumer harming monopoly so based upon that legal determination we can safely expect they won’t do anything about implementing something like this.