Vista to Include Stepped up Anti-Piracy Measures

snuffin writes to tell us the Washington Post is reporting that Microsoft announced stepped up anti-piracy measures being implemented in their latest operating system, Vista. From the article: "If a legitimate copy is not bought within 30 days, the system will curtail functionality much further by restricting users to just the Web browser for an hour at a time, said Thomas Lindeman, Microsoft senior product manager." Ars Technica also has coverage available on this new development.

Comments

What kind of draconian bulls**t is this?

[DittoBox]

We don't *think* you purchased our product. Let's cut you off now, mkay?

Re:Guys, just don't buy/download Vista

[Z34107]

Wow - what a piece of work.

Firefox screwed up your web browsing because I'm pretty sure they don't have a "Designed for Vista" version yet. They made a bunch of kernel level changes, such as setting special user permissions just for the browser process that pretty much run it in a virtual machine. Assuming everything works like it does in XP when yanking away a core part of the Vista kernel is a bit dangerous. (Before more FUD starts, I have FireFox working just fine in Vista RC1, thankyouverymuch.)

The deactivation happens when your Vista key is used to activate more than 10 computers. Of course you never "shared" it with anyone, did you? Microsoft shut you down because you were the only one to use a browser other than IE7.

But, I can agree with you that Microsoft phone support is crap. (My friend works at the local WeTech and regularly calls their tech support to unregister customers' copies of XP so he can reinstall them; he reports no problems whatsoever, but that's kind of a special case.)

RC1 is great - the only crashes I had was from my videocard driver (which Vista restarted without even interrupting my game!) and from the standard package not playing nice with Windows Media Player. That and the "extra shiny" takes a powerful PC. Oh well - pressint control+windows+tab is one of the coolest things I've ever seen ^.^

And while I'm plugging Microsoft products, we have the OpenOffice team to thank for making Microsoft innovate just a litle bit in Office 2007. Pretty damn spiffy.