Oh, the humanity: Windows 7's draconian DRM?

[DaBees-Knees]

http://arstechnica.com/microsoft/news/2009/02/oh-the-humanity-windows-7s-draconi

The popular technology website Slashdot plumbed new depths on Tuesday with a post about the terrible DRM situation in Windows 7. Proving that some sites will publish just about anything as long as it's anti-Microsoft, the post enumerated the DRM restrictions that Windows 7 apparently inflicts on the honest and upstanding computer user.

What was claimed? Well, some guy decided that he wanted to crack his (legally purchased, no doubt) copy of Photoshop on his Windows 7 install. Windows 7 then sprung into life to break his crack, defend Photoshop's virtue against his unwelcome advances, protect a load of random DLLs from deletion, and open up the firewall so that Adobe could see that he was up to no good. Yup yup. To add insult to injury, Windows 7 then crippled the dude's sound card. Or something. As is so often the case with this kind of story, the truth is more prosaic. The most likely reason that Photoshop broke is that either the crack didn't work or was the wrong version. Windows doesn't actually know what Photoshop is—it's just another application, no different from any other—and the operating system certainly doesn't contain special programming to detect and destroy Photoshop cracks. Nor, for that matter, did Windows 7 magically open up the firewall. The Photoshop installer did that. And it only had permission to do that because the person installing the software gave it Administrator privileges so that it had access to the firewall configuration.

So now you know