"“We have lent a huge amount of money to the U.S. Of course we are concerned about the safety of our assets. To be honest, I am definitely a little worried.” "


Chinese premier Wen Jiabao 12th March 2009


""We have a financial system that is run by private shareholders, managed by private institutions, and we'd like to do our best to preserve that system."


Timothy Geithner US Secretary of the Treasury, previously President of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.1/3/2009

Tuesday, August 26, 2008

Microsoft comes down hard on XP Pirates even though they don't sell it any more - Move up to Vista ?

Microsoft has stopped selling Win XP. Micrososft employ a lot of people on very high salaries. Microsoft want you to buy and use Windows Vista.

In some markets - for example Malaysia - there are about 8.6 million users of Win XP Pro on the internet. Microsoft consider there must be 3 million that are ...er.. unlicensed.

Starting in the morning, users with pirated (unlicensed, borrowed, stolen) copies of Microsoft Corp's Windows XP Professional operating system (OS) on machines that are Internet-capable could will find their computer displays going black and with no screen icons visible.

Easy peasy - reset the machine’s desktop background. Everything will return to normal. Easy peasy except it only last an hour - until the user buys a license ... or decides to move up (?) to Vista. (Exactly what happens when you load the Task Manager under Vista and you get that horrible empty feeling in your stomach)

This blackout will keep happening on the hour, every hour until the user licenses the copy of Win XP Pro on the machine by going to a Microsoft reseller or getting a licence online at the www.microsoft.com/malaysia/genuine. Each licence costs RM580 = US$170.

This initiative Windows Genuine Advantage (WGA), is apparently to "educate" users on the benefits of using genuine software, says K.T. Ng, Microsoft Malaysia’s director of client business group.

Win XP Professional was chosen for the antipiracy blitz because it is the most pirated version of Microsoft’s Win XP operating system , next to Windows XP Home.

Two years ago, it sprang its WGA initiative on local users of Win XP Pro and Win XP Home.

That time, a pop-up message said “This copy of Windows is not genuine.”

It was quite successful. At that time, there were about 5.1 million pirated copies of Windows XP Pro and after the exercise, about two million of the copies were ..er ... validated, said Microsoft Malaysia. Fran Foo @ C Net in April 2001 reported that copies of Office XP were selling for about RM 10 = US$3 on open air markets in KL. Microsoft said at the time that Office XP would cost about US$526 in Malaysia

In September that year ZDNet reported that Imbi Plaza and Low Yat Plaza -- in downtown Kuala Lumpur was a hive of stolen software sales .

On 20 August 2001 Microsoft managed to obtain a court order against Imbi Plaza, forbidding any store or operator in the premises from selling unlicensed Microsoft products.

“Microsoft has stopped selling Win XP in the market, so you have to wonder why it is spending time and money to take down users of pirated copies of this OS,” said a PC user, who asked for anonymity. “Why isn’t it also targeting users who have pirated copies of Windows Vista?”

“So if I’m using a pirated copy of Vista at this time, I won’t be hassled? Got to wonder about that.”

Ng says XP Pro, is widely pirated. “Vista isn’t pirated as much. WGA is continuous and should there be a Vista piracy problem, we will address it down the road.”

Perhaps the lawyers out there might have views on Microsoft's activities and the rest of us wonder why these tactics aren't used in other countries.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Try downloading one of their free developer suites, you'll be forced to install *silverlight* for no reason whatsoever, except its their attempt to keep up with adobe FLEX. DESPERATELY..., they'll lose it just like they will with Firefox.

Who wants to pirate Vista anyway...its a piss of sheet.

(C) Very Seriously Disorganised Criminals 2002/3/4/5/6/7/8/9 - copy anything you wish