Posted by Migo on Oct 20th, 2006
Lots of stuff this week, especially bad news for Sony.
Part I
- Part II
- AT&T’s backroom lobbying at FCC
- Mobiles ’should not be banned in hospitals’
- Bush Signs into Law Online Gambling Transaction Ban
- Microsoft ODF Plug-In Nears Completion
- National e-waste legislation to keep hardware costs lower
- FCC opens up "white spaces" to consumer electronics
- After patches, Microsoft warns of PowerPoint attack
- Vista Licenses Limit OS Transfers
- Sony denies rumours of further PS3 delay for Europe
- Citywide Wi-Fi comes to Bay Area
- McDonald’s MP3 players ship with trojan horse
- Boot Linux, BSD, and OS X from Vista
- NVIDIA Binary Graphics Driver Exploit
- MySpace Predator Caught by Code
- Google to create largest U.S. solar-powered campus
- TomTom sues Garmin
- Daily Kos dumps Google News
- Sony to recall 300,000 batteries
- TV Really Might Cause Autism
- US population reaches 300 million
- GameTap Expands Into Canada
- Human species ‘may split in two’
- Oracle plugs 101 security flaws
- FBI director wants ISPs to track users
- Flat-panel price war looms, courtesy of Sharp
- Internet Bubble version 2?
- IE7 Final Vulnerable to Old Exploit
- US internet addicts ‘as ill as alcoholics’
- These bacteria use radiated water as food
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Devin de Gruyl
October 20, 2006 at 11:50 am
Here’s my favorite bit from the Vista-license article:
“Under the new program, a copy of Vista that’s judged to be in violation of its license, or is counterfeit, is disabled after a set period, leaving the user access only to the default Web browser, and then only for an hour at a time.”
Naturally, they’re purposefully vague on exactly what constitutes “violation of its license”; while it’s safe to assume piracy issues, the line about the web browser is veeeeery interesting… The paranoid in me screams something about how MS might eventually decide using, say, Firefox instead of the default IE constitutes a license violation (and if you scoff, remember how MS’s security tool used to flag FF as malicious software, or how Norton and McAfee each gripe about its opposite being on your system). Don’t think it hasn’t crossed their minds up in Redmond.
Is it just me, or does it seem to anyone else that the only people being punished by these anti-piracy measures are the ones who do use Windows legally? Hackers, after all, can find ways to circumvent anything, and this will be no exception. End users, however, are more or less forced to let Big Brother monitor their every move and to keep shelling out the cash.
The truly sad part is that the licensing/WGA crap wouldn’t be as much of an issue if Windows wasn’t as expensive as it was. I’m sorry, but no one should be forced to pay $150-200 for the operating system itself… that’s just greed there. It seems so arbitrary to decide this ephemeral product or service (say, the multimedia codecs) costs that much money, and not a penny less. One can only wonder how many more people would be willing to go along with MS’s attitudes if it meant only having to pay, say, $50-75 per copy/license of Windows. I feel the same way about Photoshop, which has no business retailing for $600+ - if it was even half of that, piracy of that software would go way down, I think.
But the industry doesn’t see things this way, clearly, being content to punish the offenders rather than have to deal with the root cause of the issue - that being, software costs too freaking much money - because that means, in their logic, less money for them in the long run.
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