Just tell folks about the anti consumer DRM Bill and you need not bother with all the deception and tricks
http://www.pcadvisor.co.uk/news/index.cfm?newsid=8217As of mid-January, more than 100 individual copies of Office 2007 and more than 350 individual copies of Vista were available.
The pirates that cracked early copies of Vista all sidestepped Microsoft’s latest antipiracy technology, the Software Protection Platform (SPP), which is supposed to shut down any copy of Vista not registered to Microsoft over the internet with a legitimate, paid-for licence key within the first 30 days.
Microsoft has quietly admitted that it has already found three different workarounds to SPP. It says it can defeat one, dubbed the Frankenbuild because of its cobbling together of code from beta and final versions of Vista. It hasn’t yet announced success against several other cracks, including one seemingly inspired by Y2K, which allows Vista to run unactivated until the year 2099 rather than for just 30 days.
"Pirates have unlimited time and resources," BayTSP’s Ishikawa says. "You can’t build an encryption that can’t be broken
And at the end of January, the company released statistics purporting to show that users downloading pirated software from P2P networks are at great risk infecting themselves with viruses or spyware.
Some sceptics say that Microsoft’s ‘education’ campaign is primarily an attempt to sow FUD - fear, uncertainty and doubt - in the minds of consumers, a tactic the company has been called out for in the past, and which could backfire.
"Warning customers about viruses and spyware in counterfeit software is a nice PR thing for Microsoft, but for the most part, I doubt that it's really effective," says Paul DeGroot, an analyst at Directions on Microsoft, an independent consulting firm, who applauds Microsoft’s other antipiracy efforts.
So this then is Microsofts policy on software piracy, if you cant defeat it, tell folks its full of viruses and hope for the best :shock:
With the amount of money MS has this all just sounds rather lame and stupid, a simple advertising campaign would be more likly to keep consumers informed and dropping the ridiculously high price tag on what is no doubt a product full of legacy code is likely to acheive the end result of winning more customers.
Greed it seems has its own cost.
