Black screen coming for pirated Windows users, compliments of WGA

Microsoft has always been notorious for its efforts against stopping pirated use of its Windows software, as its some of the most pirated software around.  A new initiative in Malaysia, aimed at educating user of the "benefits of fully licensed and legal" versions of Windows, will begin initiating black-screens to users with internet-connected machines running pirated versions of Windows XP Pro.

Starting on Wednesday, roughly one third of the nearly 8.6 million Malaysian Windows XP Pro users will experience the blackouts, according to The Star Online.  Once one of these "blackouts" occur, a user will need to reset the machine’s desktop background to regain access.  Only problem is- when 60 minutes are up, the black screen will reappear and the user must go through the whole process again.

To stop the madness, a user will have to go online or to a reseller and purchase a licensed copy of Windows, which we all know is not cheap.  This isn’t the first time Microsoft has done such a sweep against piracy- two years ago, it ran a similar campaign where a pop-up error message was presented to users that read "This copy of Windows is not genuine," which was aimed at shaming users.  Since nearly two million of the estimated 5.2 million illegal copies were subsequently registered, Microsoft deemed it a huge success. 

Microsoft’s antipiracy campaign, dubbed Windows Genuine Advantage (WGA), will hopefully help in the cause, but overall it’s an uphill battle that will likely never be won.  Especially now that hosted (and free) services are popping up from respected companies like Google, as well as the looming advantages with cloud-based computing on the horizon.

Another question that has been raised, is why is it going after users of pirated versions of Windows XP when the software isn’t even available any more.  Wouldn’t they have to go with Vista now instead?  It looks to me like it’s more of an initiative to get Vista in the hands of users than anything else.

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