Microsoft Giving Away Vista Ultimate, With a Catch

Opinari writes "In case you haven't heard, Microsoft is giving away copies of Windows Vista Ultimate (32-bit or 64-bit DVD), Microsoft Office Ultimate 2007, Microsoft Money Plus Premium, Microsoft Student with Encarta Premium 2008, or Microsoft Streets and Trips 2008 — you can choose any one. The caveat is that you have to let them monitor your use of the program."

Comments

I'm actually happy with Linux

[pravuil]

not going to do it.

Re:Free...

[Glonoinha]

The NSA can 'presumably' crack 56-bit encryption quickly?
Dude, it's seven bytes. Here is what a seven byte key looks like : ABCDEF - that's it, seven characters. 256 values per character.
Given sufficient encrypted data and even a smidgen of insight into what some of the data contains (ie, the directory structure on a Windows box generally has a lot of similar files in similar places) I can crack 56-bit on my home system in a few days. Granted my home system is six machines consisting of about 26GHz spread across 11 CPUs sharing 9 Gigs of memory, connected by a GigE backbone, but still - in the bigger scheme of things my system isn't really considered that powerful anymore (and I'm actually considering an upgrade.)

Yea, NSA cuts through 56-bit crypto like a puppy on a pork-chop.