New Microsoft Surprise!

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sbiddle

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#7581 25-Apr-2006 22:12

Microsoft have a little surprise coming for a lot of people tomorrow!

http://star-techcentral.com/tech/story.asp?file=/2006/4/25/prodit/14029720&sec=prodit

Basically if you're running a pirated copy of XP you'll now get a lovely new nag screen and a permanent reminder you're using pirated software!

cokemaster

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#33887 25-Apr-2006 22:17

Its a good idea, but I give it less than one week before a patch is released to override this.

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#33890 25-Apr-2006 22:23

This move affects the six million Windows users in this country, as well as those in the United States, Britain, New Zealand and Australia.

Hmmm. What about the People's Republic of China, India, Pakistan and other countries with a much higher piracy rate?

New Zealand and Australia? Yeah, right...

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#33895 25-Apr-2006 22:40

Targetting Chinese users probably will be counterproductive, considering you can buy software off the street for a few RMB. Buying a new copy with the 'fix' is nothing.

Maybe even pushing effected users away from Windows and towards alternatives.

Windows and Office is fairly well entrenched in United States, Britain, New Zealand and Australia... so there is little need to turn a blind eye to piracy (while its gaining mindshare at the same time). [troll]Look at Masseys website for example, its impossible to update your details, enrol, remove papers, add papers etc online without having a Windows Computer (it uses an activex component).[/troll]

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paradoxsm

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#33902 26-Apr-2006 01:22

I think this is quite funny and rather late.... You'd think they would have denied windows updates and disabled invalid copies of WinXP shortly after release!, not now when it's pretty well coming end-of-life.

Better time than ever to push Linux I thinkk.. Looks like i'll be a burning a pile of copies of Knoppix for friends to try out!

However, like all ani-piracy measures, give it two weeks, Some hackers will make up the patch to "fix" this.

javascript:void(window.g_sDisableWGACheck='all')

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#33907 26-Apr-2006 07:06

I reakon 2 or even 1 week is a bit long, give some hacker with lots of spare time a few days to come up with a way to circumvent this.

And like paradoxsm says, this is a bit late, Vista is (supposed) to be out in less than a year, and XP is reaching the end of it's life (of course, some would say it reached the end of it's life 5 years ago when it was released!)

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#33911 26-Apr-2006 08:20

I too found it ironic that MS were being selective about where the patch would be deployed, maybe they didn't want every PC in China to bring up the warning! :-)

If you don't have a valid PID you already can't access Windows Update but could still use automatic update so a lot of people will get stung simply because this was announced the day before it's deployed! The simple workaround is to disable automatic updates and use the montly 3rd party windows rollup patch but I'm sure somebody would have reversed their system within the next week anyway!

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#33920 26-Apr-2006 09:23

Got the notification update this morning:

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sbiddle

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#33925 26-Apr-2006 09:47

I've just installed it on this PC as well and was slightly surprised that the update isn't a forced one and can be hidden from future updates.

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#33939 26-Apr-2006 11:25

That really seems a bit stupid if it is an optional installation. I guess that users might be forced to install this update for futrue updates or something similar like that.

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mouseydemon

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#34862 4-May-2006 17:59

i honestly can't remember if this copy is pirated or not but i don't seem to be getting the update or the alert. im going to get vista as soon as it comes out anyway though

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#34871 4-May-2006 18:34

mouseydemon: i honestly can't remember if this copy is pirated or not but i don't seem to be getting the update or the alert. im going to get vista as soon as it comes out anyway though

HA! What a crock. Im sure if you "cant remember" if your XP is pirated or not, then it probably is, or you probably have a pirated copy in your possession....

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#34878 4-May-2006 18:54

My XP is a "Pirated CD" with a valid licence so it went through the checks fine, The media server in the lounge (not my machine) was "nagging" this morning and had "recovered from a serious error, please tell microsoft" I ripped it back out and stuck back in my super reliablle, fan free, hacked XPe thin client (valid XPe licence hacked from being just a dumb terminal to an almost full version of XP additions like full DirectX and Codecs)

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#34903 4-May-2006 22:23

I didn't install windows on this computer. we have like 7 computers in our place but only 4 are on the internet. My own personal computer isn't on the net