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Big brother has you in his sights.
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| technofile Al Fasoldt's reviews and commentaries, continuously available online since 1983
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Aye, spy: Microsoft's 'Genuine Advantages' anti-piracy program phones home every day
June 10, 2006
By Al Fasoldt
Copyright © 2006, Al Fasoldt
From my Syracuse.com Technofile blog of June 8, 2006
If you use Windows 2000 or XP, you might have encountered Microsoft's seemingly harmless authenticity checker, which the folks from Doublespeak -- sorry, I mean Microsoft, of course -- say is part of the "Windows Genuine Advantage" program.
In the last day or so, details about one of those "genuine advantages" leaked out. The authenticity checker, which Windows 2000 and XP users are forced to install and run in order to prove that they are not running a pirated version of Windows -- oh, sorry, I mean in order to allow their genuine advantages to be demonstrated to Microsoft -- checks back with the Mother Ship the first time it is run, as we all knew it would, and then checks again every day the computer is running.
Let's run that past the fog bank again: The duplicity meter makes a new inventory of your operating system every day the computer is running.
This is called spyware, of course, although Microsoft doesn't see it that way.
Read more.
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