MS to OEMs: Get legit on Vista, or the OS is toast

I think this is a lot of crap. Why do pirated versions not expire then. Go and ask on the Asian market if anything happens after 30 days.. Nothing. Nada

Because WGA is totally random. As in http://catb.org/jargon/html/R/random.html

Because they are cracked so that WGA does not see it as an illegal version. What you read here is what happens to uncracked illegal copies. I.e. what happens in WGA does find out you're running an illegal version.

I think at this point we need to make a distinction between a "cracked" copy and a "pirated" copy.

Also there has to be "corporate" edition without the WGA stuff for companies like Dell, etc. who do not want 80,000 copies calling home very few hours or however often it is. Neither does MS want that.

Pirating the corp edition seems to be the easiest of the two strategies.

Aladdin_Sane: There is none. Howver, such big companies can install an MS WGA server that does all the verifying locally. That's how the first Vista's got cracked. Someone reverse engineered the local WGA server protocol and had some local junk server pretend to successfully validate everything.

The thing is Microsoft isn't as serious about stopping piracy as they pretend in the press. The idea is to keep up enough pressure that the majority of non technical users won't use a pirated copy, but not enough pressure to stop piracy all together. The thing is Microsoft has known that they sell more software by having lots of pirated copies out there stopping other better software from succeeding. That strategy works even against Linux.

Agreed. The BSA wouldn't dream of going after Africa or the poorer countries in the east. If they did, those places would switch to Linux overnight and suddenly we'd have 40% desktop share :-)

I agree too. But do allow me to point out that MS has been rebelled against in less affluent parts of the world recently as well.

Off the top of my head, more rural parts of India, Spain, and Russia have recently had debacles with MS that have left a sour taste in many mouths.

And those are just the ones that have made news. Who knows how many other small hamlets and poor regions have found out, before "total domination," that they aren't dealing with angels?