Re: [Off Topic] Windows Genuine Advantage

[Harry Binswanger hb@xxxxxxxx]

Patricia wrote:
> To check ONCE would be reasonable. To check every two weeks?
Hmmm. I see your point. Granted that I don't know the business issues, it
would seem reasonable to check once then only prior to sending upgrades.
>  (And I believe the initial release did it more often).
Daily, but MS says that that was because it was a beta and they needed to
get a lot of data on how the software was responding.
>  How, pray tell, would a legitimate copy somehow become illegitimate?
Wouldn't the worry be: you buy one legit copy, then make hundreds of
illegit copies for re-sale. But then that could be (and probably already
is) checked automatically when the pirated copy is installed.
If this is worth pursuing (and maybe not, it's just that I'm a philosopher
so I like to pursue the logic) . . . turn it around: what value, proper or
improper, could MS get from having pointless revalidations of the software
license--hundreds of millions of them?!
> What has a lot of people in a snit is the underhanded MO.
It did look to me like they went about this in a way that was foreseeably
going to raise hackles.
> nobody knows what other information about your system M$ is gathering.
But does anybody really believe MS is going to sell info to advertisers or
something like that? That would be business suicide.
> And the fact that the initial version was in fact a beta, but M$ didn't
> reveal that when it offered to download it. (That came out after the false
> positives for pirated copies surfaced.)

Agreed.


Harry Binswanger
hb@xxxxxxxx