thatbloke
Junior Administrator
Hmmm just read a story on Slashdot that's a little disturbing for any gamers planning on upgrading to Vista anytime soon.
The Slashdot story and The Techweb article referenced by Slashdot.
The main points from this (quotes taken from the Techweb article):
As for the second point... I'm not really sure this is going to be enforcable... the whole point of a virtual machine is that the OS installed on it doesn't actually know (or need to know) that its running on a virtual machine and therefore will act no differently at all...
The third point is what gets me. Though not explicitly stated, it seems to imply that an active internet connection will be REQUIRED for activation and validation in some way, perhaps in a similar way to what Valve did with Half Life 2.
What if you are offline for a period when Vista decides it needs validating? What if you do not have a net connection at all? What if (Heaven forbid it) you are on dial-up?
At least if you do have a (real -and by that I mean legitimate) problem validating Vista (for whatever reason) it still lets you get in and on to the Internet so you can try and fix it... Unlike XP.
This looks like some system that could be exploited by malware, however, where if a malicious program could gain access to these restriction "features" then it may end up simply holding your system to ransom, demanding a payment or something to release it. Not nice.
Anyone else got their $0.02 on this?
The Slashdot story and The Techweb article referenced by Slashdot.
The main points from this (quotes taken from the Techweb article):
- The first user of the software may reassign the license to another device one time. If you reassign the license, that other device becomes the "licensed device."
- Elsewhere in the license, Microsoft forbids users from installing Vista Home Basic and Vista Home Premium in a virtual machine.
- Failure of a validation check results in the loss of access to specific features. Also relevant on this bit: The software will from time to time validate the software, update or require download of the validation feature of the software. If after a validation check, the software is found not to be properly licensed, the functionality of the software may be affected.
As for the second point... I'm not really sure this is going to be enforcable... the whole point of a virtual machine is that the OS installed on it doesn't actually know (or need to know) that its running on a virtual machine and therefore will act no differently at all...
The third point is what gets me. Though not explicitly stated, it seems to imply that an active internet connection will be REQUIRED for activation and validation in some way, perhaps in a similar way to what Valve did with Half Life 2.
What if you are offline for a period when Vista decides it needs validating? What if you do not have a net connection at all? What if (Heaven forbid it) you are on dial-up?
At least if you do have a (real -and by that I mean legitimate) problem validating Vista (for whatever reason) it still lets you get in and on to the Internet so you can try and fix it... Unlike XP.
This looks like some system that could be exploited by malware, however, where if a malicious program could gain access to these restriction "features" then it may end up simply holding your system to ransom, demanding a payment or something to release it. Not nice.
Anyone else got their $0.02 on this?
