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Subject: (off-topic) Re: Windows XP - a privacy issue?

Author: Dave Gomboc

Date: 20:26:44 10/29/01

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On October 24, 2001 at 15:09:08, Tom Kerrigan wrote:

>On October 24, 2001 at 00:23:56, William Penn wrote:
>
>>I wonder if you considered the privacy issue with Windows XP? You must "phone
>>home" to activate it, and you cannot reinstall it without doing the same.
>>Microsoft accesses and stores in their archives certain private information
>>about you and your computer system, then has the ability to grant or deny you
>>access to Windows XP and your own computer! At least that is what I hear, so I
>>am leary of it.
>>WP
>
>I would stop paying attention to wherever you heard that crap from.
>
>Microsoft does not store private information about you. They can not control
>access to your own machine. The only way you might not be able to use WinXP is
>if you're pirating it, which seems reasonable to me.
>
>-Tom

Hey Tom,

In several years, when WinXP is really old, and as my hardware continues to
change, will MS still be providing activation services for it?  Does the licence
agreement guarantee this, so that licensees have legal recourse if MS fails fail
to do so?

I'm sure it would be easy enough for MS to say "okay, let's not waste our time
with this old WinXP anymore, we'll just put up this patch that activates it for
anyone who still cares to use this anachronism of an OS".  But I don't know that
they'll do that, do I?

Okay, feel free to laugh, but I still have hung onto my licensed versions of
Windows 3.1, DR-DOS 6.0, MS-DOS 4.0, and even my (drum roll...) Commodore 64.
<grin>

Dave



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