The Bryan-College Station Eagle > Associated Press Headlines says:
“Microsoft Corp. plans to severely curtail the ways in which people running pirated copies of its dominant Windows operating system can receive software updates, including security fixes.”
On the one hand, this is completely irresponsible because Microsoft’s security flaws, as exploited by worms and viruses, are dangerous and costly and waste untold internet resources every day.
On the other hand, you have to admire the creativity involved — now, Microsoft’s bug-ridden crapware is its own “DRM”! It’s like shareware which cripples itself if you don’t pay, but it’s pre-crippled at the factory!
I thought about this for a bit. Why SHOULD MS support pirated copies? If you wrote software to sell, and someone called you and said “Hi, I stole this from you, will you help me with it?”.
A better idea is to just not use MS software.
If you sold products which, it turned out, emitted toxic waste in a six block radius, hurting both the people who use them and those around them, then you have a responsibility to make the situation right, and make sure your bad products stop hurting people — EVEN stolen products. You’ve made a product that hurts innocent bystanders, and so you need to make fixes available to everyone, for the sake of the innocent bystanders.
But yeah, nobody should use Microsoft products anyway.