Before the invention of the videotape recorder, local broadcast stations controlled your TV. Sure, you paid for the television set; but what appeared on the set was under the control of the station owners. All that changed with the advent of videotape recorders; VCRs took schedule and content authority away from the station owners and gave it to the TV owners.
Now there's Microsoft, which views your computer as an appliance that you own but they control. The lastest manifestation of this is Microsoft's draconian "Windows Genuine Advantage" program, now renamed the "Windows Software Protection Platform."
This isn't a virus protection scheme for your benefit: it's a Microsoft protection scheme. If Microsoft's watchdog software — "spyware" is probably not too harsh a term — suspects your computer is running an unauthorized copy, "Windows Software Protection Platform" automatically disables your system and will even boot you off the computer without warning. And of course Microsoft never makes a mistake, right?
What's most distressing about the SPP [Windows Software Protection Platform] announcement is Microsoft's continued insistence that its anti-piracy tools are nearly perfect and that innocent victims never suffer from errors in their code.I can just see this happening to me on a business trip to Europe or Asia; wouldn't it be fun to scramble and try to fix this problem? Do I get to bill Microsoft for my time as I work to clean up their mess?
Windows Software Protection Platform is another attempt by Microsoft to run the wheels backwards — to reverse the benefits of disaggregation and assert total control over how you use your computer. I stand by my chapter title: "Marx, Lenin, and Gates: Failed Counterrevolutions."
Topics: · computing · microsoft · security
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