Cannot activate Office Apps with High Sierra

Please take another look, just updated it with a better flow and some screenshots to help you validate the steps on your side (if you're curious, the system lang is Portuguese BR).

If anyone feels like it, it may be possible to write a mitmproxy add-on to quickly go through the redirection steps and avoid timeouts.

https://gist.github.com/rafaelfonte/56b9fb80daed8c586433e82859ccb876

Please look at the updated Gist, it should be easier to follow now.

Thank you so much for these screenshots and procedure. I spent the better part of today, going through each piece. I'm learning a lot (since I am not tech-saavy at all), and I honestly credit your descriptions and screenshots for helping me to stick with it, because normally I would have given up by now!

I still haven't managed to use the workaround. I'm not sure exactly what the issue is. It might be that I'm not sure which "older version" proxy tool to install that is compatible with my macOS Sierra version 10.12.6 -- I gambled and downloaded one that did open up a terminal with text that looked like this (I cut the top two lines with my data on it):

When I used this article to cross-check with your information: https://medium.com/ios-essentials/how-to-use-mitm-proxy-for-debugging-api-calls-on-macos-6bab9f78c909

it led me to this installation tip: https://docs.mitmproxy.org/stable/overview-installation/, recommending using Homebrew to install mitmproxy. Unfortunately, Homebrew couldn't be installed because MacOS 13 or later was required. I went ahead, hoping that the terminal I'd managed to open would be sufficient.

I enabled the proxy in the computer network settings just as you described (corroborated by that same medium.com article) but I did not see the tool showing flows in the Terminal UI.

I then attempted to install the tool certificates by starting mitmproxy (same Terminal shown above) and configuring my device with the correct proxy settings. I started a browser on the device, visited the "magic" domain mitm.it. but when I did the browser said "No Internet Connection". That's mainly where I stalled. I was following the proxy in the network settings just as described, but no luck. When I tried without those proxies selected, then I got the statement: "if you can see this, traffic is not passing through mitmproxy".

I then tried to install the mitmproxy CA certificate manually, using the guidance on this page: https://docs.mitmproxy.org/stable/concepts-certificates/ but couldn't figure out how. It's all above my skill level I think, despite having learned a lot trying. Or perhaps just my computer is that much older. Not sure if your macOS Sierra was older than the version 10.12.6? but that's the MacOS I'm dealing with.

I've been scrambling to get ready for a class I'm teaching on Friday and was hoping to use both Excel and Word for preparation and as screen-shares, but I might have to borrow someone else's computer to pull it off, since I cannot edit any Microsoft apps at the moment. Not in a position to buy a computer this week!

Anyway, THANK YOU for your help. I don't expect any more assistance, but thought I'd share my process in case anything super obvious was standing out to you (or others) that might be easy enough for me to try before I give up. Thanks again, and I hope others have success with your workaround. It certainly seems like a triumph over Microsoft that you managed to make it work for you!

Hello Bateman,

I think you’re nearly there to get mitmproxy going. Firstly, I don’t recommend you trying to use Homebrew to install mitmproxy due to lack of support for older macos releases. Secondly, please attempt to download it from their downloads page as stated in the steps: https://mitmproxy.org/downloads/

Thirdly, from looking at the Terminal output you shared, it seems like the version you installed failed to run because it’s been built for a CPU architecture different from your computer’s. Notice that for Mac they release two binaries, one for arm64-based cpus and another for x86/64-based cpus. If your Mac runs on an Intel CPU for instance, download and install the x86/64 release for the mitmproxy version you’re installing. The end result should be a Terminal window similar to the ones shown in the mitmproxy tool landing page. Hope this helps!

I thank all of you, including the Microsoft reps who risked their jobs for telling the truth, for the posts here confirming what it took me two afternoons of wasted time to find out: that Microsoft has conned countless users who still have older Macintoshes running Mac OS X 10.13 High Sierra.

The firm fails to make it clear that 365 will not work with this version of OS X. I wonder how much the banks and card companies have made processing cancelled 365 accounts. As a journalist and writer, I dislike web-based programmes.

I am currently posting this on a recent MacBook and am disgusted that I cannot use my old MacBooks with the Office 2016 that I bought in 2018 and which cannot be reactivated because of the 'Blank Screen Scandal'.

Well, it's not a scandal, is it? It's just a load of malcontents like us shouting into a void. But this will cost Microsoft in the long long. And Apple. The two firms have become similar in terms of the contempt they clearly have for customers.

Time was when when someone with my media background could get them to behave better but they know that there is little or nothing any of us can do short of violence against their decision-makers which is of course out of the question as we are civilised.