Microsoft: Pirated Vista may be useless

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I'm thinking smoke and mirrors. I'm sure they will be able to prevent the majority of the pirated builds from updating, but I think this is mostly an exercise in FUD.

:P
I played with vista for about 5 minutes and during that sidebar crashed, explorer crashed and thing refused to shut down. Again, just about 5 minutes !
Yes I am really eager to begin using it.

They would first have to stop your computer from contacting microsoft.com. If not once there Microsoft could push a program down to your computer to check for a valid install. If a hack tried to block that then maybe there would be something internal that would shut down Vista. Other than that maybe staying off the net would be safe. How could Microsoft get to your computer then? Of course there is no way Microsoft can force somebody to connect to the net. However they can force somebody to call them for activation. Even if one chooses to stay off the net what fun would that be?

It would be kind of devious of Microsoft to put major bugs in Vista to force somebody to need updates. The kind of bug I am talking about would cause the computer to start crashing a lot. Kind of a timebomb. If somebody found the bugs then Microsoft could point to a particular update that fixed it. That would be kind of obvious but it would be effective. Of couse that would assume Microsoft is clever enough to pull something like that and get away with it.

If Microsoft put something onto a computer with Vista like what your talking about. They could get a lawsuit on their hands on the findings of spyware and forcing people to hook to the net just like how they had a lawsuit in Europe over Media Player as it is illegal to ship a media player with software

Maybe Vista might be useless

Like I said are they clever enough to hide something? I doubt they could hide somthing like that very long from the hackers of the world who would love to let the world know if MS was doing something illegal.

They could put something in Vista to shut it down if it thought that the copy was not legal. What could somebody say or do if that copy really was a hacked one. The problem comes in if somone with a legitimate copy of Vista has it mistakenly shutdown by Vista thinking it was not a good one. Microsoft would catch a lot of bad press and maybe some lawsuits over that.

Ok seriously why doesn't Microsoft just have a serial key registration. Someone goes and buys a copy of Windows. 99.9% of the pirated software has its roots as one legit copy someone went and then distributed. The person goes and registers with Microsoft and then Microsoft has that person in the database. This would also work for companies. They register with Microsoft with x number of licenses and Microsoft knows that they key is legit for x amount of licenses. This plan would dramtically cut down the number of pirated versions because Microsoft could more easily track the pirated versions to their roots.

What prevents someone with say, five computers in his house from using that same key five times? That was part of the issue with Win9x.

Because they register that copy and if they go on the internet Microsoft can see there are several computers that are registering with that same key when there's only 1 license. It's just an idea. It would be pretty complicated to implement because you would have to put in computer identification numbers and a way to transfer them from computer to comptuer if they're not OEM but I could definately see this system working.

<edit>Think of it as a title for a car. The person (specific hardware) is legally entitled to and owns the car (software). Now if the person tranfers the ownership of the car by selling it or giving it away the title is transfered. If Microsoft could do something like that they could eliminate a good amount of piracy. It's like say a car were stolen (software pirated). If they find the car they can positively identify it by its title, VIN, ect. The same would hold true for software which would be even easier to track down if it got "stolen." </edit>

If I remember correctly Intel had toyed with the idea of embedding a unique identifier into the processor to help with identifying piracy. This did not go over well, and Intel backed down.

What you're asking for in terms of 'computer identification numbers' would have privacy experts screaming bloody murder. Neither Microsoft nor Intel would ever try such a thing.