Troy seems to like the latest Microsoft "anti-piracy" measure - a Windows update that will do various hostile things to non-valid systems:

Last night I saw a first report on Microsoft's releasing an update to Windows that causes desktops to go black. I've heard a couple of different descriptions from just forcing the background to black (and that's my default wallpaper, obtw) to blanking the screen hourly to turning the system off hourly.

There are two problems with this approach:

• The well known problem of false negatives. How many valid Windows licensees are being blown out of the water because the latest iteration of "Genuine Advantage" thinks it's found an illegal copy? If your version of Windows has this happen to it, what recourse do you have? Worse, if a mission critical version of Windows "goes dark", how much damage gets done?
• Piracy is a totally overblown problem anyway. One of the things I like to bear in mind when people yell at China (or India, etc) about "stolen IP" is to look at how much "stolen IP" the US used in the 19th century during our "developing economy" phase. To me, this is very much a "do what I say, not what I did" sort of campaign

Ultimately, these sorts of problems tend to solve themselves. As a country like, say, China, grows, the companies there that have been happy to steal software will start needing actual support. Which means that - *gasp* - they'll have to go and buy valid licenses. Before they reach that point, what do you suppose the odds are of getting them to pay? This is like using lawsuits as a negotiating tactic. I know some companies do that, but those are deeply stupid companies, and the people in those companies who favor that approach should be gotten rid of. In the meantime, what do you suppose the PR hit will be from doing damage to their software systems? When the Windows systems they have start behaving badly, do you think they'll:

• Atone for their piracy sins and go seek a license?
• Blame the vendor for creating crappy software?

If you need to think longer than a second or two about that, you're thinking too hard. Automated approaches to dealing with software piracy are very much the wrong approach, and will end up building nothing but bad will. I understand the motivation, but it's a really bad idea.

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