The facts themselves aren't subject to copyright, but the work as a whole is.
So for example, a newspaper can pull facts out of another newspaper and then write their own story based on (and including) those facts. However, they cannot simply re-run the original story without permission. I believe that they can quote the original article in a reasonable way, like pulling out a couple lines from the original article, but they can't quote the whole article.
Ultimately it's not about what's "fact" and what's "opinion". You can't copyright an opinion either, as far as I know. You can only copyright the *expression* of fact or opinion. If I write an editorial expressing an opinion, you can write an editorial expressing the same opinion. You just can't directly copy my editorial. Instead you have to take that opinion and formulate it in your own way.
While meta-logic tricks might seem like a nice way around for a geek
I think part of the problem is that geeks think of laws as programming algorithms. They expect that judges and juries don't have any more ability to interpret laws than computers have the ability to interpret a line of code. It's all if/then statements which result in an unambiguous boolean value.
In reality, courts often use the fuzzier human way of thinking about things. Yes, sometimes a case will get caught up on a technicality, but judges can ignore technicalities if they shouldn't apply to a particular case. In fact, you might say that's kind of their job-- to make decisions about which technicalities apply when.
If it was not copyrightable then there would be no way to recoup the cost of creating 3-D models of buildings.
Right, I think people are forgetting about the part in the Constitution where it says, "The Congress shall make laws ensuring that all business expenses are recoupable in full." IIRC it comes right before, "The Congress shall construct laws to ensure that current business models remain protected from innovation," and "The Congress shall bail out any large companies which are failing."
I mean, we can't let any big businesses fail to be profitable, right? That'd be bad for the economy.
Seriously, though, who wouldn't want Google to roll out fiber in their city? Even if they already have Verizon FIOS, why wouldn't you want competition?
I'm in NYC and can't get decent Internet to save my life. There don't seem to be many places in the country where the Internet doesn't stink, and Google's talking about 1Gbps? Of course they're going to get a lot of applications.
You can find out how many servers your outbound mail always goes through by sending a message to yourself at an external email address and looking at the headers.
Of course, most of the things you mention could change at any time without you knowing about it. Things like whether your recipient uses SSL for IMAP can vary from user to user-- a user may not configure their client to use SSL even if it's available. You can check to see where their email is going from looking at MX records, yes, but you can't be sure where that email finally gets routed. Email gets routed within organizations and sometimes even outside organizations. Email sent to my gmail address gets routed to another mail service, but you wouldn't know that by looking at MX records.
And ignoring all of those limitations, I'd still wonder if you're actually willing to do such investigations for every email recipient you send to.
That works fine all the way up until any kind of private information gets sent outside of the organization. Of course, you can assure your users that email within the organization is safe while educating them that email outside the organization isn't safe. Hopefully they'll understand the difference, remember the distinction clearly, and follow whatever guidelines you've set up.
Of course, if you've ever worked a helpdesk position, you probably don't have a lot of faith in normal users' ability to understand the difference, remember distinctions clearly, and follow whatever guidelines their IT staff puts forward.
Using techniques such as opportunistic SMTP over TLS [wikipedia.org], a.k.a. SMTPS, it is possible to provide link-level encryption of email without requiring any special configuration on the part of the end user.
That definitely helps, but on the other hand you don't know all of what happens to email in transit. If I send you an email, I might know that my server is pretty secure, but I don't really know how many servers the mail will be routed though, what the security policies might be on those servers, or even whether they might be compromised. And then I don't know whether you're using encryption for SMTP/IMAP on your client end.
So while I might say you can secure email within your organization pretty well, once it's going over the Internet, email isn't very secure-- not unless you're using something like GPG.
I agree with most of what you're saying, but this stuck out for me:
They are providing this service for free -- if something goes wrong and they lose a bunch of your data, they'll have a minor public relations black eye and move on. You'll be out a bunch of valuable data. You can't fire anyone,
you can't take tangible measures to make sure it doesn't happen again (or that it doesn't happen in the first place), etc.
First, I'd say that they have more than a "minor" public relations black eye. If they get caught losing significant amounts of data or invading privacy in a way that seems "evil", it's a nightmare for Google. Google's business depends on their reputation.
Second and more importantly, I've heard people complain about hosting business email on Gmail before on similar grounds, i.e. "if something goes wrong, you can't fire anyone." I think this kind of misses the point. Besides the fact that you can fire Google by finding a new host or taking it internally, having someone to fire shouldn't be the highest priority. CYA measures are good and all, but I don't want someone to blame when my mail goes down; I want my mail service to never go down. I'd be more likely to fire someone for sacrificing quality to cover his own ass than I would for someone who made an honest mistake.
On the other hand, if your email security is important to you, then I feel like you have to host it yourself. People should understand that whoever is hosting your email can read your email.
If google provided free software to run a webmail system locally, now THAT's something I could get behind.
Agreed. I'd love to be able to buy a server that gave me a full Google stack of Gmail, Google Talk, Google Apps, etc. I like Gmail, but with security concerns, I can't justify putting my business email on an outside host.
The way I see it, the chief problem with encrypting your email is that it requires that others have the necessary decryptions software installed and are familiar enough with the software to use it.
I'd encrypt all my email if I could have confidence that the intended recipient could decrypt it transparently. In my opinion, we need better support for encryption in software and better public key infrastructure. What we have now works, but it's ultimately it's a bit ugly and unfriendly when really it needs to be virtually transparent. I wish I were a badass programmer so I could fix this sort of thing.
Yeah, I was just thinking the other day about how retarded it is that we can't do this. My phone has WiFi; I assume that the WiFi and 3G are capable of operating at the same time. My laptop has WiFi. I don't see any good reason why I can't set my phone to be an ad hoc network and let the laptop connect. If cellphone carriers are ok with selling you MiFi devices, then I don't know what'd be wrong with allowing users to do this sort of tethering with a phone.
Obviously they want you to buy a separate data plan for every device you want to use, but then why allow the MiFi?
I could see them releasing a small white box with 1 TB of storage, that's also an iTunes/iPhoto/iLife media server, wireless router and has some kind of hdmi like all-in-one cable output for connecting to a surround sound receiver.
They almost have that already. Time Capsule gives you up to 2 TB of storage while Apple TV gives you the rest of what you're talking about. Time Capsule doesn't give you any particular ability to act as an iTunes server and Apple TV doesn't have a whole lot of storage, but they have all the pieces. What's more, you could just buy a Mac Mini with OSX server and hook it up to your TV. It's easy enough to daisy-chain off some Firewire hard drives if that's not enough storage for you.
The site where some members of Anonymous are said to hang out, 4chan...
Yeah, let me know when you see Anonymous on there.
"Anonymous" is on 4chan all the time. He also posts on this site quite a bit, but we've made it our official position to question his courage. "Anonymous" shows up everywhere, and that's exactly the point.
We're not talking about a person or even a group called "Anonymous". The point is that it's a ad hoc collection of anonymous people. Are the anonymous on 4chan or the anonymous on Slashdot the same as the anonymous creating this attack? Well... not as a group. It's not like it's all the Slashdot Anonymous Cowards are a codified group somewhere making subversive plans. But I wouldn't be surprised to learn that someone involved in the Australian attack had posted here as AC at least once.
There's a famous quote, "The graveyards are full of indispensable men." We don't have graveyards for companies, and if we did I'm not sure they'd already be full of "too big to fail" corporations, but I think the point can still carry over.
Companies could fail and human history would carry on. Whole civilizations have fallen while human history carries on. There are consequences, though. The question isn't whether something is "too big to fail", but whether we're better off letting them fail.
the reality is, most people I know that enjoy listening to Pandora or last.fm would be perfectly fine if everything of Warner just dropped off it - they'd just continue listening to whatever it serves up on the various stations they've created and enjoy.
This seems like it should be of at least *some* concern to record labels. People use sites like Pandora to discover new music that they might like. Pull your music from it, and people won't discover your music. They'll discover other labels' music.
They may as well be telling radio stations to stop playing their music, telling MTV to stop showing their videos. Does MTV show videos ever anymore? Is there a channel that does? I don't know. I don't listen to the radio either. If I find new music that I like, I do it over the Internet.
In fact, I think people get too much enjoyment from the cover art of CDs. Labels should insist that record stores not shelve CDs, but require customers to buy them before they can be taken out of the back room. Oh, wait, that doesn't matter because most of us don't buy CDs anymore. But they should definitely pull the 30 second previews from online stores; I sometimes have some enjoyment when I listen to those, and those are FREE!
No, I'm saying I'm the customer. I sometimes buy software that requires activation, though I avoid it as much as is humanly possible. I don't produce any software that requires activation.
I understand you're just trolling, but I'll answer anyway:
I'm not saying I avoid activation as a matter of principle; I'm saying I have various practical concerns, including a belief that software developers who use activation have their priorities in the wrong place. When I have no practical way of avoiding software activation, I use software that requires activation. The only other option is for my business to lose money (or maybe even fail to operate).
At this point, though, I think it's only 2 software products in use that require activation, and both are semi-obscure niche products where I don't really have any other option. I also like to use FOSS when I can, again because of practical concerns. However, again, if there are no viable FOSS alternatives, I use the proprietary software. It's not ideological. In both cases, it's about using the software that's easiest, most convenient, and least likely to screw up my company.
Yeah, yeah, I get that technically/legally I'm "licensing" the software, but let's cut the crap. When I buy software or music or whatever else, it doesn't have a little button that says, "rent" or "license", it says "buy". When I go to Best Buy and pick up a boxed retail version, the salesman most likely tell me that I'm "buying" a copy of Windows. If you ask your average consumer, they think they've bought a copy. Even if you asked a common lawyer, if he's not on his guard and being technical, he'll probably use the word "buy".
All of our conventions and expectations for this sort of intellectual property is that we actually buy something and it belongs to us. In this case, the technicality isn't the reality.
Yeah, I think a big part of it has to be that they still don't want to get into a direct fight with Microsoft. In some ways, it's probably smart for them to keep to specific (sometimes niche) markets and nibble around the edges, building up their strength. By introducing products like iWork and the iPhone and slowly improving their server offerings, they can slowly erode Microsoft's markets over years while improving their technology. iTunes alone did Microsoft a lot of damage without declaring open war.
There's nothing comparable to Exchange server that I know of.
Well Apple does have mail, calendaring, and address books built into their server software. It's comparable to Exchange but not as well fleshed out. They don't have as great control of delegation, for example, no ActiveSync support, and frankly the webmail isn't too hot (it's just Squirrel Mail).
The webmail thing is pretty frustrating to my mind. MobileMe has decent web applications for mail, calendaring, and address books, and meanwhile the included webmail in their server software stinks.
Your car analogy fails because you have to continually pay to keep it registered, even after you buy it.
I don't pay the car manufacturer for the right to own it, I pay the government for the right to drive it on public roads.
Anyway, it's an analogy. You're right to point out that the analogy doesn't fit exactly, but analogies never do. You compare buying software to buying a car in order to illustrate a point, but software is different from cars. The only thing that software is exactly like is software.
And the thing is, I don't even really dislike Windows. Various versions have had various technical issues that have annoyed me, but overall my problems with Windows are not so much about Windows, but about Microsoft. I don't like when big companies harass and abuse their own customers and treat their customers like criminals. The fact that they're big and powerful enough to get away with it only makes it worse.
...there's no chance - ZERO - that I'd ever want to allow something that I have no control over sitting out there possibly disabling computers at it's whim...
This has been one of my arguments about "activation" from the beginning: When I buy a software product, I want to know that the developers spent their time and resources trying to make sure the program *always* works properly. Microsoft should be trying to root out bugs. Instead they're diverting resources to introduce artificial bugs and make sure that your product breaks under certain circumstances. This fact shows that they don't understand their purpose and their priorities are out-of-whack, and I consider that enough of a reason to avoid that software products all by itself.
My company has a couple of products that require activation, but only when we're backed into a corner and have absolutely no choice.
Totally honest and dead serious: I run an IT department. I've tested Windows 7 and Windows Vista. I would considering buying upgrades to Windows 7 (I even put space in my budget for it) if not for all their "activation" and anti-piracy nonsense. For now I'm sticking with the volume licensing version of Windows XP and avoiding WGA as much as I can, while looking to OSX and Linux as possible upgrade routes *largely to avoid activation*.
I don't pirate software, but I view any activation scheme as potentially dangerous, generally inconvenient, completely unnecessary, and even insulting.
Has anyone ever thought that people in business might want to make sure that the copies of Windows they have on their machines are valid and thus would want to install this patch to ensure it.
No. I've honestly never thought that.
I am one of these "people in business" and I personally wouldn't trust this tool for that purpose. Microsoft could do an awful lot to make my software auditing easier, but this isn't one of them.
If this was Microsoft's intention, then they should have included a license manager in their server software that allowed me to control my level of enforcement without reporting back to Microsoft. The fact that they force you to report back to them demonstrates that their intention is not to help users or businesses.
I believe they still have something like a "volume license key" for OEMs that checks against the firmware, and pirates have just emulated the firmware.
Either way, this won't catch sophisticated pirates. It will stop casual pirates (e.g. a home user installing on multiple systems) and it will cause problems for legitimate users.
Well even more than that, one of the "worst case scenarios" is going to be that a valid customer gets an error message saying, "This copy of Windows isn't genuine. Please buy a new copy." and rather than figuring out what's really going on, they'll buy a new copy.
Slashdot Mirror
The facts themselves aren't subject to copyright, but the work as a whole is.
So for example, a newspaper can pull facts out of another newspaper and then write their own story based on (and including) those facts. However, they cannot simply re-run the original story without permission. I believe that they can quote the original article in a reasonable way, like pulling out a couple lines from the original article, but they can't quote the whole article.
Ultimately it's not about what's "fact" and what's "opinion". You can't copyright an opinion either, as far as I know. You can only copyright the *expression* of fact or opinion. If I write an editorial expressing an opinion, you can write an editorial expressing the same opinion. You just can't directly copy my editorial. Instead you have to take that opinion and formulate it in your own way.
While meta-logic tricks might seem like a nice way around for a geek
I think part of the problem is that geeks think of laws as programming algorithms. They expect that judges and juries don't have any more ability to interpret laws than computers have the ability to interpret a line of code. It's all if/then statements which result in an unambiguous boolean value.
In reality, courts often use the fuzzier human way of thinking about things. Yes, sometimes a case will get caught up on a technicality, but judges can ignore technicalities if they shouldn't apply to a particular case. In fact, you might say that's kind of their job-- to make decisions about which technicalities apply when.
If it was not copyrightable then there would be no way to recoup the cost of creating 3-D models of buildings.
Right, I think people are forgetting about the part in the Constitution where it says, "The Congress shall make laws ensuring that all business expenses are recoupable in full." IIRC it comes right before, "The Congress shall construct laws to ensure that current business models remain protected from innovation," and "The Congress shall bail out any large companies which are failing."
I mean, we can't let any big businesses fail to be profitable, right? That'd be bad for the economy.
Seriously, though, who wouldn't want Google to roll out fiber in their city? Even if they already have Verizon FIOS, why wouldn't you want competition?
I'm in NYC and can't get decent Internet to save my life. There don't seem to be many places in the country where the Internet doesn't stink, and Google's talking about 1Gbps? Of course they're going to get a lot of applications.
You can find out how many servers your outbound mail always goes through by sending a message to yourself at an external email address and looking at the headers.
Of course, most of the things you mention could change at any time without you knowing about it. Things like whether your recipient uses SSL for IMAP can vary from user to user-- a user may not configure their client to use SSL even if it's available. You can check to see where their email is going from looking at MX records, yes, but you can't be sure where that email finally gets routed. Email gets routed within organizations and sometimes even outside organizations. Email sent to my gmail address gets routed to another mail service, but you wouldn't know that by looking at MX records.
And ignoring all of those limitations, I'd still wonder if you're actually willing to do such investigations for every email recipient you send to.
That works fine all the way up until any kind of private information gets sent outside of the organization. Of course, you can assure your users that email within the organization is safe while educating them that email outside the organization isn't safe. Hopefully they'll understand the difference, remember the distinction clearly, and follow whatever guidelines you've set up.
Of course, if you've ever worked a helpdesk position, you probably don't have a lot of faith in normal users' ability to understand the difference, remember distinctions clearly, and follow whatever guidelines their IT staff puts forward.
Using techniques such as opportunistic SMTP over TLS [wikipedia.org], a.k.a. SMTPS, it is possible to provide link-level encryption of email without requiring any special configuration on the part of the end user.
That definitely helps, but on the other hand you don't know all of what happens to email in transit. If I send you an email, I might know that my server is pretty secure, but I don't really know how many servers the mail will be routed though, what the security policies might be on those servers, or even whether they might be compromised. And then I don't know whether you're using encryption for SMTP/IMAP on your client end.
So while I might say you can secure email within your organization pretty well, once it's going over the Internet, email isn't very secure-- not unless you're using something like GPG.
I agree with most of what you're saying, but this stuck out for me:
They are providing this service for free -- if something goes wrong and they lose a bunch of your data, they'll have a minor public relations black eye and move on. You'll be out a bunch of valuable data. You can't fire anyone, you can't take tangible measures to make sure it doesn't happen again (or that it doesn't happen in the first place), etc.
First, I'd say that they have more than a "minor" public relations black eye. If they get caught losing significant amounts of data or invading privacy in a way that seems "evil", it's a nightmare for Google. Google's business depends on their reputation.
Second and more importantly, I've heard people complain about hosting business email on Gmail before on similar grounds, i.e. "if something goes wrong, you can't fire anyone." I think this kind of misses the point. Besides the fact that you can fire Google by finding a new host or taking it internally, having someone to fire shouldn't be the highest priority. CYA measures are good and all, but I don't want someone to blame when my mail goes down; I want my mail service to never go down. I'd be more likely to fire someone for sacrificing quality to cover his own ass than I would for someone who made an honest mistake.
On the other hand, if your email security is important to you, then I feel like you have to host it yourself. People should understand that whoever is hosting your email can read your email.
If google provided free software to run a webmail system locally, now THAT's something I could get behind.
Agreed. I'd love to be able to buy a server that gave me a full Google stack of Gmail, Google Talk, Google Apps, etc. I like Gmail, but with security concerns, I can't justify putting my business email on an outside host.
The way I see it, the chief problem with encrypting your email is that it requires that others have the necessary decryptions software installed and are familiar enough with the software to use it.
I'd encrypt all my email if I could have confidence that the intended recipient could decrypt it transparently. In my opinion, we need better support for encryption in software and better public key infrastructure. What we have now works, but it's ultimately it's a bit ugly and unfriendly when really it needs to be virtually transparent. I wish I were a badass programmer so I could fix this sort of thing.
Yeah, I was just thinking the other day about how retarded it is that we can't do this. My phone has WiFi; I assume that the WiFi and 3G are capable of operating at the same time. My laptop has WiFi. I don't see any good reason why I can't set my phone to be an ad hoc network and let the laptop connect. If cellphone carriers are ok with selling you MiFi devices, then I don't know what'd be wrong with allowing users to do this sort of tethering with a phone.
Obviously they want you to buy a separate data plan for every device you want to use, but then why allow the MiFi?
I could see them releasing a small white box with 1 TB of storage, that's also an iTunes/iPhoto/iLife media server, wireless router and has some kind of hdmi like all-in-one cable output for connecting to a surround sound receiver.
They almost have that already. Time Capsule gives you up to 2 TB of storage while Apple TV gives you the rest of what you're talking about. Time Capsule doesn't give you any particular ability to act as an iTunes server and Apple TV doesn't have a whole lot of storage, but they have all the pieces. What's more, you could just buy a Mac Mini with OSX server and hook it up to your TV. It's easy enough to daisy-chain off some Firewire hard drives if that's not enough storage for you.
Yeah, let me know when you see Anonymous on there.
"Anonymous" is on 4chan all the time. He also posts on this site quite a bit, but we've made it our official position to question his courage. "Anonymous" shows up everywhere, and that's exactly the point.
We're not talking about a person or even a group called "Anonymous". The point is that it's a ad hoc collection of anonymous people. Are the anonymous on 4chan or the anonymous on Slashdot the same as the anonymous creating this attack? Well... not as a group. It's not like it's all the Slashdot Anonymous Cowards are a codified group somewhere making subversive plans. But I wouldn't be surprised to learn that someone involved in the Australian attack had posted here as AC at least once.
There's a famous quote, "The graveyards are full of indispensable men." We don't have graveyards for companies, and if we did I'm not sure they'd already be full of "too big to fail" corporations, but I think the point can still carry over.
Companies could fail and human history would carry on. Whole civilizations have fallen while human history carries on. There are consequences, though. The question isn't whether something is "too big to fail", but whether we're better off letting them fail.
It's complicated.
the reality is, most people I know that enjoy listening to Pandora or last.fm would be perfectly fine if everything of Warner just dropped off it - they'd just continue listening to whatever it serves up on the various stations they've created and enjoy.
This seems like it should be of at least *some* concern to record labels. People use sites like Pandora to discover new music that they might like. Pull your music from it, and people won't discover your music. They'll discover other labels' music.
They may as well be telling radio stations to stop playing their music, telling MTV to stop showing their videos. Does MTV show videos ever anymore? Is there a channel that does? I don't know. I don't listen to the radio either. If I find new music that I like, I do it over the Internet.
In fact, I think people get too much enjoyment from the cover art of CDs. Labels should insist that record stores not shelve CDs, but require customers to buy them before they can be taken out of the back room. Oh, wait, that doesn't matter because most of us don't buy CDs anymore. But they should definitely pull the 30 second previews from online stores; I sometimes have some enjoyment when I listen to those, and those are FREE!
No, I'm saying I'm the customer. I sometimes buy software that requires activation, though I avoid it as much as is humanly possible. I don't produce any software that requires activation.
I understand you're just trolling, but I'll answer anyway:
I'm not saying I avoid activation as a matter of principle; I'm saying I have various practical concerns, including a belief that software developers who use activation have their priorities in the wrong place. When I have no practical way of avoiding software activation, I use software that requires activation. The only other option is for my business to lose money (or maybe even fail to operate).
At this point, though, I think it's only 2 software products in use that require activation, and both are semi-obscure niche products where I don't really have any other option. I also like to use FOSS when I can, again because of practical concerns. However, again, if there are no viable FOSS alternatives, I use the proprietary software. It's not ideological. In both cases, it's about using the software that's easiest, most convenient, and least likely to screw up my company.
Funny, when I go to this page, it says "buy" all over the place: http://www.microsoft.com/windows/buy/default.aspx
Even the URL says "buy".
Yeah, yeah, I get that technically/legally I'm "licensing" the software, but let's cut the crap. When I buy software or music or whatever else, it doesn't have a little button that says, "rent" or "license", it says "buy". When I go to Best Buy and pick up a boxed retail version, the salesman most likely tell me that I'm "buying" a copy of Windows. If you ask your average consumer, they think they've bought a copy. Even if you asked a common lawyer, if he's not on his guard and being technical, he'll probably use the word "buy".
All of our conventions and expectations for this sort of intellectual property is that we actually buy something and it belongs to us. In this case, the technicality isn't the reality.
Yeah, I think a big part of it has to be that they still don't want to get into a direct fight with Microsoft. In some ways, it's probably smart for them to keep to specific (sometimes niche) markets and nibble around the edges, building up their strength. By introducing products like iWork and the iPhone and slowly improving their server offerings, they can slowly erode Microsoft's markets over years while improving their technology. iTunes alone did Microsoft a lot of damage without declaring open war.
There's nothing comparable to Exchange server that I know of.
Well Apple does have mail, calendaring, and address books built into their server software. It's comparable to Exchange but not as well fleshed out. They don't have as great control of delegation, for example, no ActiveSync support, and frankly the webmail isn't too hot (it's just Squirrel Mail).
The webmail thing is pretty frustrating to my mind. MobileMe has decent web applications for mail, calendaring, and address books, and meanwhile the included webmail in their server software stinks.
Your car analogy fails because you have to continually pay to keep it registered, even after you buy it.
I don't pay the car manufacturer for the right to own it, I pay the government for the right to drive it on public roads.
Anyway, it's an analogy. You're right to point out that the analogy doesn't fit exactly, but analogies never do. You compare buying software to buying a car in order to illustrate a point, but software is different from cars. The only thing that software is exactly like is software.
And the thing is, I don't even really dislike Windows. Various versions have had various technical issues that have annoyed me, but overall my problems with Windows are not so much about Windows, but about Microsoft. I don't like when big companies harass and abuse their own customers and treat their customers like criminals. The fact that they're big and powerful enough to get away with it only makes it worse.
...there's no chance - ZERO - that I'd ever want to allow something that I have no control over sitting out there possibly disabling computers at it's whim...
This has been one of my arguments about "activation" from the beginning: When I buy a software product, I want to know that the developers spent their time and resources trying to make sure the program *always* works properly. Microsoft should be trying to root out bugs. Instead they're diverting resources to introduce artificial bugs and make sure that your product breaks under certain circumstances. This fact shows that they don't understand their purpose and their priorities are out-of-whack, and I consider that enough of a reason to avoid that software products all by itself.
My company has a couple of products that require activation, but only when we're backed into a corner and have absolutely no choice.
Don't run Win7.
I don't.
Totally honest and dead serious: I run an IT department. I've tested Windows 7 and Windows Vista. I would considering buying upgrades to Windows 7 (I even put space in my budget for it) if not for all their "activation" and anti-piracy nonsense. For now I'm sticking with the volume licensing version of Windows XP and avoiding WGA as much as I can, while looking to OSX and Linux as possible upgrade routes *largely to avoid activation*.
I don't pirate software, but I view any activation scheme as potentially dangerous, generally inconvenient, completely unnecessary, and even insulting.
Has anyone ever thought that people in business might want to make sure that the copies of Windows they have on their machines are valid and thus would want to install this patch to ensure it.
No. I've honestly never thought that.
I am one of these "people in business" and I personally wouldn't trust this tool for that purpose. Microsoft could do an awful lot to make my software auditing easier, but this isn't one of them.
If this was Microsoft's intention, then they should have included a license manager in their server software that allowed me to control my level of enforcement without reporting back to Microsoft. The fact that they force you to report back to them demonstrates that their intention is not to help users or businesses.
I believe they still have something like a "volume license key" for OEMs that checks against the firmware, and pirates have just emulated the firmware.
Either way, this won't catch sophisticated pirates. It will stop casual pirates (e.g. a home user installing on multiple systems) and it will cause problems for legitimate users.
Well even more than that, one of the "worst case scenarios" is going to be that a valid customer gets an error message saying, "This copy of Windows isn't genuine. Please buy a new copy." and rather than figuring out what's really going on, they'll buy a new copy.
I'm sure Microsoft doesn't mind that at all.