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http://www.goehner.com/piracyru.htm

First paragraph:

In Russia alone, with an estimated 94% software piracy rate...

Ok...so I was off by one percentage point.

http://www.chinatechnews.com/2009/05/14/9758-bsa-software-piracy-rate-down-to-80-in-china

So China is down to 80%, according to the BSA. Not that I trust their figures, but anyway...according to the same article,

there are seven countries where the software piracy rate is still over 90%, including Georgia, Bangladesh, Armenia, Zimbabwe, Sri Lanka, Azerbaijan, and Moldova.

Now we look at the list of countries MS is providing free software to, according to the article:

Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan — as well as China, Malaysia and Vietnam.

At least a couple of countries appear in both lists. So a good portion of these countries are over 90% piracy. Maybe not all of them, but a significant amount.

• Windows product key
• PC manufacturer
• Operating System version
• PID/SID
• BIOS information (make, version, date)
• BIOS MD5 Checksum
• User locale (language setting for displaying Windows)
• System locale (language version of the operating system)
• Office product key (if validating Office)
• Hard drive serial number

It may be a tad bit disturbing to have all that information being broadcast, but some of it makes sense. Windows Activation is tied to a computer and its hardware, and what WGA is supposed to do is verify that the activation is legit, they'd (presumably) need to broadcast the same information to the WGA servers to verify that activation (since we all know activation can be faked/bypassed).

Microsoft also needs to create a disincentive for people who pirate their software. WGA, besides nagging the user that they have an illegal copy, also prevents optional and recommended updates from being installed, prevents Office users from downloading templates, and prevents the download of certain products/services that would be free to paying customers.

So why is "phoning home" okay? Why not do it once and be done with it? Every day crackers find ways to get around Windows' copy protection. As a developer, Microsoft needs to stay ahead of that and tailor their systems to counter-act innovation on the crackers' part. The opposite is also true: falsely-flagged copies need to be unflagged, or customers will suffer due to them being marked as a false positive. Either way, Microsoft has not kept this a secret, and even promised to reduce checking to once every two weeks (and that was way back in 2006).

I know a lot (probably most) of you guys on here will disagree with me, but I see this as a necessary evil that Microsoft has to perform, and if I were in their shoes, I'd go about it similarly (perhaps be a bit less intrusive). The fact of the matter is, WGA only negatively affects people who either pirated software, or were the victims of software piracy. The privacy argument, in my opinion, is a strawman. If you buy a PC from Dell, it's most likely they already have all that information (save for BIOS MD5 checksum, probably) linked to your customer account. If you buy a PC from Best Buy with a credit card, that purchase information is already linked with the product serial number, which is probably linked with all the serial numbers of the hardware that went into the thing. I don't see how this can be any different than that, other than the fact that Microsoft has it instead of Dell or Best Buy.

why troll? check out a Blizzard press release stating it, and according to this site they are paying ~5c/hour.

Yes, Dell, these things do make a difference!

Red color means loyal and patriotic, so black color do not meet the market and also CHina worry about the hack/backdoor inside the blackberry.. More news on: http://www.chinatechnews.com/index.php?action=show &type=news&id=3776

China Tech News has great articles about the hotbed of activity there.

And Kylin is supposed to be a windows, linux, unix and *BSD and MacOS beater ! Interesting stuff!

After the 2008 Olympics people will wake up to a reality, how advanced China is! I think it is great! Lets hope China becomes a huge adopter of linux! :-)

How many Chinese /. do we have? To keep up, I suggest we all Learn chinese characters!

Looking forward to 2008. See you there!

China Tech News has great articles about the hotbed of activity there.

And Kylin is supposed to be a windows, linux, unix and *BSD and MacOS beater ! Interesting stuff!

After the 2008 Olympics people will wake up to a reality, how advanced China is! I think it is great! Lets hope China becomes a huge adopter of linux! :-)

How many Chinese /. do we have? To keep up, I suggest we all Learn chinese characters!

Looking forward to 2008. See you there!

China is already testing IPv9, something which promises to consume IPv6.

Link to article - China's New Generation Of IPv9 Network Technology Ready

;)

When China banned Wikipedia, however, the usual happy NPOV talk was invoked:

Last week, for about 48 hours, Wikipedia.com, a multilingual online open-content encyclopedia, was inaccessible to users throughout China. On June 17, around 6:30PM Beijing time, the site opened up to users in China.

Though it is still unclear why the site was blocked, the ban does come on the heels of a new circular issued by the Chinese government asking for Internet Service Providers to show patriotism and refrain from "inappropriate material", which includes contentious political and social commentary. James Wales, in an interview with ChinaTechNews.com, claimed "By policy, Wikipedia is not a political site in any way. We are a general reference encyclopedia with a strong neutrality policy. Articles are carefully researched and reviewed by Chinese people in Taiwan, Hong Kong, as well as mainland China. Therefore, Wikipedia is an excellent test case. When Wikipedia is blocked, it can not be claimed that only lies or propaganda are blocked, because we are neither. When we are blocked, it is information itself that is being blocked."

The new government circular issued last week recommends that Internet Service Providers only allow "wholesome online information" and news that conforms to "fairness and trustworthiness". Apparently Wikipedia doesn't conform.

Wales says, "By policy, representatives of the Chinese government would be welcome to edit our articles in conformance with our [Wikipedia] neutrality policy." He said nothing about how to deal with an influx of millions of such funded trolls. But most telling was this comment by Wales:

"It is one thing to block gambling sites, or pornography, or political opinions, but it is another thing altogether to admit that it is information itself that is the enemy. I doubt if they will continue that. Probably some administrator will be reprimanded." So, according to Wales, political opinions are like pornography or gambling, and only his own methods lead to fairness or trustworthiness. This is literally self-worship, unsurprising in a GodKing.

"Wikipedia's founders hope that by 2025, Wikipedia will be a standard reference work used by children and adults all over China, in both paper and electronic editions." This is of course naive. Whatever happens to the GFDL corpus by then, it will require other GFDL corpus access providers to be running things, as Wikipedia will be destroyed by its own stupid self-worshipping ideology.

The ISPs are unresponsive to emails, some don't have abuse@ addresses and of course there's the language barrier. So, hopefully, a spamhaus setup in China will get the chinese ISPs to remove the spamvertised sites quickly.

The effectiveness of this idea, of course, remains to be seen. I can see the temptation of taking hard currency when you're happily ignoring complaints about the "Make big penis" web sites hosted in your IP space.

Now if only Russia would do something about the paypal, ebay and bank phishing spammers they host, then I might consider lifting some country blocks.