Microsoft goes all Big Brother

From the Fort Wayne Journal-Gazette...

The next time you visit the Web site of Microsoft Corp. to download some software, be prepared to let the world’s biggest software company have a look inside your computer.

In a determined strike to quell the proliferation of counterfeit software, Microsoft is now requiring that all customers coming to its Web site for upgrades and other downloads submit their computers to an electronic frisking.

If you use one of the estimated 100 million PCs running pirated software, don’t expect your upgrade. For Microsoft, the new policy is a stepped-up effort to combat the loss of billions of dollars’ worth of software sales every year to counterfeiters around the world. But in ramping up efforts to fight piracy, the Redmond, Wash.-based behemoth already finds itself fending off critics over privacy.

“It sets an extremely negative precedent,” Pam Dixon, executive director of World Privacy Forum, a non-profit public-interest research center in San Diego, said of the company’s initiative. “Microsoft is saying, ‘Before I let you do anything at all, you have to open your computer to us.’ I really object to this.”

Right. Like people need another reason to hate and fear Bill Gates.

Posted by Danny Carlton at August 2, 2005 08:39 AM