Say Goodbye To Cheap Pirated Windows
When Vista ships, the days of getting a working copy for $1 will go with it.
For years the pirates of Panthip, a technology superstore in central Bangkok have been making their living burning copies of Windows for sale to both locals, and bargin hunting tourists. Those days will be coming to a close with Vista’s new anti-piracy features that will severely limit the functionality of any installation that doesn’t authenticate. The self-satisfied who brag about their one dollar Windows purchase will now be restricted to older versions of XP as Windows 98, ME, and soon 2000 reach their end of life and no longer recieve vital security updates.
While anti-copy protection advocates complain about false positives, one has to wonder why Microsoft hasn’t done this before. How long were the law abiding going to have to pay a hundred times more but get the same product?
True, Microsoft’s pricing in much of Asia is out of step with with the realities of local economic conditions, where a copy of XP Pro can go for as much as a month’s salary for an office worker, but this should be a boon to the open source community, not the pirates. Ubuntu Linux goes as far as providing free CDs, and free tech support along with a lightweight OS that can be used on less expensive computers, so why bother with Windows at all?
Easy. It sells, and pirates are interested in sales, not promoting alternatives.
The often unreported problem with rampant software piracy is the amount of computers running it who can function fully enough to become spam sending zombies, but not fully enough to get the security updates from the manufacturer needed to secure the machine against malware that hijacks it.
In case there are those of you out there who think that your BETA copy of Vista will be good enough to keep you going, those will expire and stop functioning late next spring, so have a few hundred dollars saved up, because there will be no joy in Singapore, Shanghai, or Bangkok. That i unless you find joy in paying for software that won’t work.