This is wrong, so very wrong

When you update your computer, get patches, you assume (and this may be the hard part) that the people putting out the patches respect your efforts to keep your system secure. Of course, some like checking every few weeks if your system is “genuine”. You know that they would never, ever waste your time and effort on pushing a marketing program as a patch. Never. Ever.

Because it would be wrong.

Update: So I wonder, with all these checks that the system is genuine, each and every month or three … is there some problem with units suddenly becoming non-genuine? It is fairly easy to get NIC mac addresses, and checksum the bios rom to see if the hardware has changed, and even track these changes in a small db inside. I mean, it really isn’t that hard. Is it. Would make legitimate customers feel less like pirates when their papers are checked. This is an issue for closed source or non-distributable code. They believe their value is in the distribution, and this is what they want micro-payments for. There are no such checks when you patch Linux systems. When I run yum update there is no Linux Genuine Advantage and certainly no marketing coming down the pipes. Just the bits I need. And this reminds me of an old (ancient) and humorous memory. Way way back in grade school, they used to tell us that when people wanted to name their country, if they put adjectives in the name, it was correlated with them being anything but what the adjective indicated. So when I see “Windows Genuine Advantage”, I (with a chuckle) think back to that memory.