How Vista Lets Microsoft Lock Users In
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What if you could rig it so that competing with your flagship product was against the law? Under 1998's Digital Millennium Copyright Act, breaking an anti-copying system is illegal, even if you're breaking it for a legal reason. For example, it's against the law to compete head-on with the iPod by making a device that plays Apple's proprietary music, or by making an iPod add-on that plays your own proprietary music. Nice deal for Apple.
Microsoft gets the same deal, courtesy of something called...
Read on:
http://www.informationweek.com/story...SSfeed_IWK_All
After reading this I get the feeling that I want to switch completely to openoffice.. or some other application.
I am getting sick of the DRM, the activation schemes, the proprietary formats, and all this crap. It's getting to the point where it becomes more of a burden to start using the product than it is to create the content or view the content, or use the software itself.
I don't like this Trusted Computing garbage not one iota.
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But now that the format is well understood, Microsoft needs another way to ensure that it only hands keys out to readers that can be trusted to follow the rules that accompany them. Pages or OpenOffice.org can request a set of document keys just as readily as Office can. Microsoft can try to create secret handshakes to make sure it only gives out the keys to authorized parties, but just as the document format can be cracked, so can the handshaking.
Goodbye $600 office, hello openoffice or even WordPerfect. We don't need no stinkin' trusted computing crap.
Maybe I won't "upgrade" to Vista. When will users draw the line? When will Microsoft go too far and drive users off due to clamping down on their precious product? I am quite curious about this.
