Microsoft Finally Able to Prevent Piracy through SP1

[Nestersan]

Of course it does, dude, the SOFTWARE is not illegal, it is the KEY that is. If the Software thinks that the Key is legit then it will not fail.

A pirated Vista DVD and a legit Vista DVD share same data checksums. The difference is one has a KEY created by M$ and verfiable by M$, while the other doesn't.

You see how Apple dont even bawl too much when people but Pirated OSX on Wintel boxes, cause is a waste of time. They will mumble, but the WGA foolsishness hurts no one but the legit user and M$ pocket.

[techwizz]

Those people sure are smart. Why does microsoft do something about it. Them just cheating to system, although i'm also guitly of that too, so does most people.

[Nestersan]

They cannot do a thing....waste of resources, when it comes to piracy, the only people u can really stop are casual pirates, who might not really be opposed to buying to software but would not say no to a copy.

The real buccaneers who will never give M$ not even a cent, and will burn software from five different images and extract and replace and inject files into an ISO to do an install, they cannot be stopped. Period.

[pogi_2nr]

lol microsoft sure wastes a lot of money on trying to stop piracy. I think after I saw crackers reverse engineer software to bypass the hardware security dongles all hope was lost.

[danthony]

All of you seem to have valid points which i agree with, but dont you think it maybe possible? Over the years I've learnt never to say never. Wait...........what the hell me a say. That goes for both hackers and Pro programmers. Oh well...... The only way i could really see microsoft locking down the OS is if they constantly monitor your system via the internet.

having hack proof machines is IMPOSSIBLE!! these things were made by man and unless you believe in hollywood (terminator etc) that will never happen! and i endorse these hackers are on both sides....

[SgtMac2]

yo, i totally totally endorse what nestersan has said

The real buccaneers who will never give M$ not even a cent, and will burn software from five different images and extract and replace and inject files into an ISO to do an install, they cannot be stopped. Period.

i remember the young days when you get a version of a game, and all weeks yu sit down with nothing but raw determination that you gonna make it work. search the web for hacks, workarounds, cracks, serials, dlls, regkeys... whatever. and that was just a game. some people are like that 24/7. yall ever read the hackers manifesto? for some people that is a religion. dem naw tap. worse, you can quantify hardware... but how do you quantify zeroes and ones? and dont even get me started on the ones who believe everything should be open source and that media and big conglomerates are stealing from the proletariat.

trust me... Capn Jack come een like a pickney to dem man deh.

but seriously, i been into pcs for a little while now.. is there anything apart from Nuke Launch Codes that you cant get on the internet with google?
naw, microsoft needs to stop stepping on its customers in pursuit of pirates and just innovate. either that or steal more effectively. lest we forget, Vista and Leopard look and act pretty much the same except that leopard actually does what it says for the most part. and leopard costs less. and has only one version i think.
maybe all this is a smoke screen designed to hide the fact that Vistais a commercial failure?

ok ok, i done.

[Nestersan]

Lol, I remember them days...

I hacked a copy of Gunboat using a hex-editor to unlock some rewards back in the old DOS 5.0 days....

Btw Techwiz, you know M$ at one point when they had competetion from Corel (Wordperfect) and IBM (OS2), clandestinely allowed piracy ?

They said that a guy using Office or Windows would use it get to know it, and evangelise it to his friends, co-workers, etc. This would increase profit and market penetration. Compare it to todays 'Viral-marketing'.

Once a product becomes ubiquitous in one area of the market, sales will increase in other areas.

This fact has been accorded tacit recognition by some suppliers, notably Microsoft in China, where the company has turned a covenient blind eye to rampant ˜piracy' to make agreements with the Chinese government in the interests of growing the market. The effect is to say: "Steal all the software you want, so long as it's ours, while putting pressure on China through the World Trade Organisation to adopt western-style copyright legislation. The potential software market in China is huge. Ubiquity, whether achieved by marketing or the result of pervasive copying, will increase Microsoft's future market share and eventual earnings, especially as political pressure forces the Chinese into conforming with even the more dubious precepts of western "intellectual property" law. In this circumstance, it has been argued, it sometimes pays to turn a blind eye.

Bill Gates gave the game away, when sharing a platform with the world's second richest man, Warren Buffet, at the University of Washington as far back as 1998. "Although about 3 million computers get sold every year in China, people don't pay for the software," he said. "Someday they will, though. As long as they are going to steal it, we want them to steal ours. They'll get sort of addicted, and then we'll somehow figure out how to collect sometime in the next decade."

--- http://www.tuxdeluxe.org/node/228

If you're going to be a software counterfeiter, then please copy and illegally use Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT) products.

The above plea isn't from a posting on a hacker forum. Rather, it's how Microsoft business group president Jeff Raikes feels about software counterfeiters. "If they're going to pirate somebody, we want it to be us rather than somebody else," Raikes said.

The remarks might seem surprising, coming from a senior executive at a software company that spends millions each year fighting software piracy and developing copyright protection technologies.

But Raikes, speaking last week at the Morgan Stanley Technology conference in San Francisco, said a certain amount of software piracy actually helps Microsoft because it can lead to purchases by individuals who otherwise might never have been exposed to the company's products.

"We understand that in the long run the fundamental asset is the installed base of people who are using our products," Raikes said. "What you hope to do over time is convert them to licensing the software."

Raikes said Microsoft isn't about to abandon efforts to track down those who illegally copy and use its products. However, he said Microsoft has to balance that approach with the recognition that users of purloined software could one day become legitimate customers.

"You want to push towards getting legal licensing, but you don't want to push so hard that you lose the asset that's most fundamental in the business," said Raikes

----- http://www.informationweek.com/story...SSfeed_IWK_All

[grim386]

The more M$ toot there OSes as "unhackable" the more attacks will rain upon them. Nothing motivate people as much as telling them "they can't".

[techwizz]

Well nestersan i would love to see how they would plan to 'collect'? Looks like there is no way round it then. Only thing microsoft can do is pray that people change for the better. Raikes did seem to have a point when he said people might actually become legit customers rather than switching to another company if not pushed too far. But there will alway be those who try to crack the system.
If microsoft does achieve an anti piracy system it will begin to lose its fan base and potential customers because the majority wont be fascinated with windows anymore.

[apocolypse2000_99]

To be honest after having such a grand time with XP i was willing to buy VISTA ULTIMATE X64 even with the growing pains of it being a new OS. Then crysis came out and it was vista or a second gfx.

I think you know the answer

The opensource community is a movement much like hippies, liberalism, conservatism and so on. And it takes only one rogue programmer to bring the fortress down.

Oh, the only software i know of as being hackproof was this, POS system my cousin introduced me to in the states, where it use a usb key and a parallell key (do computers still have parallel ports nowadays) both had to be in the machine(server) for the thing to work. At slow periods or early mornings he would boot up the pos terminals and log them in, then go to the backroom and use the surviellance system to view the terminals. Then he would pull out one key and all the screens would come up with a warning like reinsert in 30mins, if you pulled out both then the software would just shutdown, That was back in the days of w2k though i don't know if that still goes on cause he said the program was incompatible with xp