Excellent article from the Reg about MS’s Windows Genuine Advantage programme. A few things mentioned that I wasn’t aware of (shame on me). WGA collects a lot more information than you think, uses some questionable identifiers to determine the legitimacy of your system (including the harddrive serial number. Therefore if you need to replace the harddrive in your machine WGA will flag you as a pirate. In summary MS is making it more difficult to update a computer OS that they’ve sold you in full knowledge that it has KNOWN security issues unless you enroll in a scheme whereby they gather information about your computer that COULD be used to identify you later on. Quel surprise?
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