I rather like this tag line about DRM: Defective By Design. It sums up what's wrong with DRM in 3 words. Nice, neat, simple. I guess we'll have to expand those three words over to "Windows Genuine Advantage" now as well.

Ed Bott has been all over this story, and I caught the latest twists on another ZDNet story, by David Berlind, who quotes a news.com story:

Windows Vista will have new antipiracy technology that locks people out their PCs if the operating system isn't activated within 30 days after installation….If Vista is not activated with a legitimate product registration key in time, the system will run in "reduced functionality mode" until it is activated, said Thomas Lindeman, a senior product manager at Microsoft. In this mode, people will be able to use a Web browser for up to an hour, after which time the system will log them out, he said….The new technology is part of Microsoft's new "Software Protection Platform," which the company plans to announce on Wednesday.

As David says, you better hope your doctor's pc doesn't get flagged as non-genuine on operating day. The problem with this kind of *cough* feature *cough* is the triggering conditions - any false positive is a disaster waiting to happen, and anyone who's been around software for the last few decades knows that no hardware/software test is 100% reliable.

Microsoft is trodding the well known path followed by most mature companies: they got big, their initial visionaries have left, and they're getting increasingly stupid about preserving existing revenues.

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