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Black Screens For Unauthorized Copies of Windows
arcticstoat writes "In a bid to deter people from using pirate versions of Windows XP, Microsoft is now updating its Windows Genuine Advantage (WGA) tool to introduce a few uncomfortable niggles for users of pirated versions of Windows. These include replacing the desktop wallpaper with a black screen every 60 minutes, although you can still replace it with your wallpaper of choice in the intervening period. As well as this, copies of Windows deemed to not be genuine will also have a translucent watermark above the system tray, which Microsoft calls a 'persistent desktop notification.'"
Too close for comfort.
Some one I know just doesn't download the the WGA notification (tells it never to download when it shows up in system updates) I... I mean he wants to know if that will still work?
If you could reason with religious people, there would be no religious people
I'm impressed with Microsoft's forbearance.
Black Screen of Death
Oh crap, get ready for another wave of "omg where is the start button" questions on the Ubuntu message boards.
/whisper/ Thanks for the candy!
The first thing I do after installing XP is turn the wallpaper to black.
Apparently, pirating it saves me a step after install.
WTG, MSFT!
You can have it if you want.
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
now microsoft has officially left it's users black and blue
Thank you Dave Raggett
Question: People who annoy you?
I wish Ubuntu would do this, instead of having that ugly orange bird looking thing by default. Ugh. That's the first thing I change on any new system; all my backgrounds are plain black.
Maybe it's just me, but I usually set my desktop to black anyway as one of the first steps after an install. This sounds to me like a feature rather than a deterrent.
Paying taxes to buy civilization is like paying a hooker to buy love.
They need to get more creative. Here's a few ideas:
1) Cause the NIC to drop random ammounts of packets at random times.
2) Change the wallpaper from Black Screen to one with a letter ending with "... The police are on their way".
3) Every 2 minutes all keys on your keyboard get randomly swapped around.
4) Swaps the mouse buttons. Or moving the mouse left, moves it right, up, down, etc.
5) All print jobs only result in large words in upper case saying "PIRATE ALERT!"
6) Boot sequence and shutdown sequence get 5 minutes added on to them. Hey MS, don't forget to make sure you cause the hard drive light LED to flicker a lot while the users wait around so they think it's something going on. While you're at it, randomly flicker that HD LED every few minutes for 20 seconds at a time.
7) Every 10th web page visited would be redirected to goatse (is that site still around?)
You get the idea... now hurry up so that people get fed up faster and switch to Linux.
No trees were killed in the making of this post; however, many trillions of electrons were horribly inconvenienced.
Can someone remind me why Microsoft wants to chase people off to other platforms again?
They're increasing their users' pain thresholds so that they'll find Vista's annoyances tolerable.
Yeah, that'll turn the h4xx04z away. Want to really make it worthwhile? Force a pink-on-pink color scheme, license the theme song to "My Little Pony", and play that in an uninterruptable background loop on all available sound devices. That'll do a lot more to keep a kid honest than would making his desktop look 1337.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
Because they're hoping one or two might actually end up buying Vista.
The Vista Drake Equation
N = R x fp x ne x fi x fe x L
where
N is the number of Vista sales
R is the number of reported WGA unlicensed XP install hits.
fp if the fraction of those that care about a black screen & bit of text
ne is the number of users with PCs that can actually run Vista
fi is the fraction of XP users who dont have the brains to use Ubuntu
fe is the fraction of XP users who dont use a tool to kill the WGA app
L is the fraction of XP users too lazy to get Windows Update to skip the WGA app
S - Number of sales
X - Number of illegal XP copies
I am a free slashdotter. I will not be modded, blogged, DRM'd, patented, podcasted or RFID'd. My life is my own.
What requires WGA anyhow?
* Microsoft Marketing
* Microsoft Sales
* Microsoft Legal
* Bill Gates' wallet
* Steve Ballmer's wallet
I'm sure there are more that you can think of.
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
I was going to make a lame sort of funny reference to your lack of imagination, but I'm all out of ideas.
Why bother
Get it here
I'm confused, Microsoft claims great sales of Vista. which is it? We have a bus service where I live that's has a big Vista on the side of the bus, kind of reminds me of the Microsoft product, large lumbering and hardly used because it doesn't go anywhere useful.
Why bother
I'm trying to figure out what all the fuss is about but I can't find this WGA thing. Does anyone know what repository it's in?
load "$",8,1
P L E A S E R E G I S T E R
How we know is more important than what we know.
The more you tighten your grip, the more systems will slip through your fingers.
It was a tossup between that quote and "Governor Tarkin, I should have expected to find you holding Vader's leash. I recognized your foul stench when I was brought on board."
More of the same. Just let go.
It's too bad that WGA never recognizes genuine copies of Windows given to students at my university. I think it is due to the fact that the disks are produced on campus under a distribution license, or, The Pirate Bay is hosted inside the dark cave on campus. Just a thought.
Now you have to install Linux Genuine Advantage and pay your $699 licensing fee, you cock-smoking teabaggers!
And the answer is none. None more black.
It's a tough job handling the ubuntu IRC channel. The other day some guy was asking how to maximize firefox. We told him to click the box in the upper right corner, and he didn't understand. So someone asked what version he was running, and he gave the output of firefox -v (or whatever command it is for version). It was baffling that he could use the command line but not maximize the window. I think (hope) he was joking. Or maybe it was Richard Stallman.
Were you a victim of Linux Genuine Advantage scheme to make millions? Linux Genuine Advantage Crack will restore free as in speech rights to what should have been in the first place. Down with the man!
Wow, that is copy protection. Guess what, my default screen is black. Even though OSX does not allow it, I just set a black gif (10x10 pixels) as the BG image.
I know, many of you like (just as me scuba pictures, cars, babes, bikes, nersy images, superheroes) but at the end I WANT TO SEE MY DAM ICONS, so the best is a black background.
OK, Working as a programmer in the sportsbetting industry today (kickoff day) is a bit stressy, and after coding 12 hours at my (8 hour a day) consulting job pretty much kicked my arse, and I drank some rum from the Dominican Repubic ( ie I am kinda drunk).....
Anyway, black BG is best, that is the ultimate oldscshool, and working in the *NIX environment this is the best you can set.
So does MS expect to scare people with this mean black BG ?
"Every time you operate one of these weird black controls, labelled in black on a black background, a little black light lights up black to let you know you've done it"
"The dew has clearly fallen with a particularly sickening thud this morning"
If this stops my screen going blue every 15 minutes I'll be happy
Karma: Bad. (As in Good?)
My wallpaper is a screenshot of the entrance to that giant space cigar Doomsday Machine from Star Trek and I like to sit in front of it, squirming in my chair making faces-of-horror and sweating while singing "da-da da-da DA-DA DA-DA".
But look at who I'm telling! Of course most of you reading this do the exact same thing! Ha ha ha.
What?