The “Black Screen of Death” from Microsoft

Heard of Blue Screen of Death? What about the “Black” one?

Microsoft just launched yet another Windows Genuine Advantage (WGA) update to take action on pirated users on October 21th. This was considered “The biggest action ever done to fake software users”. Users of Ingenuine copies of Microsoft Softwares will receive some kind of “punishment’.

On ingenuine copies of Windows XP, when the user turns on the computer, there will be no desktop images at all, but only a blank, solid black color background with a short note from Microsoft saying “You suck” “You are not using a genuine copy of the software”. Users can change the background back to whatever they want, but every hour it will become black again.

Rumors from the internet also tells us that on pirated copies of Microsoft Office, every single work will have a watermark of “Microsoft” on them.

Although these “punishments” do not effect the functionality itself, but it still give users a lot of troubles. Some people even point out that this might be the largest “hacking” action done in the world. Since Microsoft can change a user’s desktop so easily, It wouldn’t be so hard for them to look at users’ information, control what they do, etc., right?

One of the major complaints from the users was “too expensive”. Indeed, the price for a copy of genuine Windows System costs at least US$200 (including Windows XP). It is not a price that everyone can afford.

On the other side, because of this action from Microsoft, a local Chinese company that also makes softwares like Microsoft Office but for free, has 50% more download counts than usual.

Ubuntu 8.10 is about to release in a few days, while Openoffice.org 3.0 just realesed a few days ago. Both are free and opensource softwares, and of course. Is it fate or did Microsoft decided to cast this action on this date on purpose? Who knows.