bye bye Billyboy

[MeDeFe]

You can keep your windows, your overly expensive programs that I never payed for in the first place anyway *finger*, your system crashes, and most of all your "genuine advantage", it's bad enough that you keep track of every website I visit, but telling my computer to send information to your company every 2 weeks was the last drop. Market your system elsewhere, because this user has gone Linux.

[InkL0sed]

You can keep your windows, your overly expensive programs that I never payed for in the first place anyway *finger*, your system crashes, and most of all your "genuine advantage", it's bad enough that you keep track of every website I visit, but telling my computer to send information to your company every 2 weeks was the last drop. Market your system elsewhere, because this user has gone Linux.

Are you talking about Bill Gates?

[MeDeFe]

You can keep your windows, your overly expensive programs that I never payed for in the first place anyway *finger*, your system crashes, and most of all your "genuine advantage", it's bad enough that you keep track of every website I visit, but telling my computer to send information to your company every 2 weeks was the last drop. Market your system elsewhere, because this user has gone Linux.

Are you talking about Bill Gates?

Exactly that one.

[Guiscard]

You can keep your windows, your overly expensive programs that I never payed for in the first place anyway *finger*, your system crashes, and most of all your "genuine advantage", it's bad enough that you keep track of every website I visit, but telling my computer to send information to your company every 2 weeks was the last drop. Market your system elsewhere, because this user has gone Linux.

Are you talking about Bill Gates?

Possibly Billy Bob Thornton?

[jecko7]

So Bill Gates was spying on your computer, or is this some new Microsoft scandal I haven't heard about?

And Linux is overrated (when it's mentioned at all )

[hecter]

Congratulations! I hope it works well for you, as Linux is a bit of a learning curve and can be a bit time consuming at times (you have to download a lot, depending on how you use your computer...) but I'm sure it'll be worth it!

[MeDeFe]

So Bill Gates was spying on your computer, or is this some new Microsoft scandal I haven't heard about?

And Linux is overrated (when it's mentioned at all )

Not very new, but it only became obligatory to have it installed here recently so it passed my attention for some time, I was only told to install it around new year when updating then. I'll quote

Windows Genuine Advantage checks the following components:
* Computer make and model
* BIOS checksum.
* MAC address.
* A unique number assigned to your computer by the tools (Globally Unique Identifier or GUID)
* Hard drive serial number.
* Region and language settings of the operating system.
* Operating system version.
* PC BIOS information (make, version, date).
* PC manufacturer.
* User locale setting.
* Validation and installation results.
* Windows or Office product key.
* Windows XP product ID.



Spyware accusations

The notification tool has been accused of spyware-like behavior, "phoning home" on a daily basis. Microsoft subsequently admitted the behavior, but denied that it amounted to spyware. Following pressure, Microsoft announced that in future the tool would only phone home once every two weeks, instead of every day. Microsoft has also provided removal instructions for the pilot version of WGA.

Despite this, Microsoft is currently being sued under anti-spyware statutes over WGA's non-disclosed "phone home" behavior. The outcome of the lawsuit has not been determined.

All my attempts to remove the problem failed, so I decided to remove the root of the problem.

[jecko7]

So, is this only for this WGA program, or for the OS in general? Sorry, I'm not a real tech-savvy person, so I think I might've missed something...

Also, what can they really do with all that info? Seems to me they just know the ID of a computer, is this really malicious?

[InkL0sed]

We have Linux at school, and it is awesome. I don't see how you could overrate it, honestly...

[ignotus]

George "Billy" Bush?

[Nickbaldwin]

I used to run Fedora Core and XP dual booted.... I soon went back to XP.

f*ck Vista!

[MeDeFe]

So, is this only for this WGA program, or for the OS in general? Sorry, I'm not a real tech-savvy person, so I think I might've missed something...

Also, what can they really do with all that info? Seems to me they just know the ID of a computer, is this really malicious?

That's just what WGA does. I'm not a very tech-savvy person either, but that doesn't matter since it's more of a philosophical problem. I bought this computer, it is mine to do with as I please and unless I explicitly tell a third party differently they have to bloody well stay out of it. I don't see Microsoft doing that, there have just been too many things that all add up. There's the index.dat file which you cannot normally delete and which tracks every webpage you've ever visited. There was some controversy about the WMP as well, apparently it had been built as an integral part of the system and might interfere with other media players. Add the blatant attempts at achieving not just market domination but 100% market ownership. I read about a lawsuit against some developers of a free OS, Microsoft claimed they had infringed on their copyrights and used code "owned" by Microsoft, they wouldn't disclose what exactly this code was though so the defendants could have worked around it. It's the whole company that has started to piss me off, I wouldn't even want to use their programs for free anymore.