As to what this "earth-shaking" announcement is all about, one of numerous rather old articles is at Windows Anti-Piracy Program a Genuine Triviality. By Larry Seltzer, January 26, 2005

Note that this article is more than a year old.

As I know that those who are first to scream, yell, whine, piss and moan will usually be the last to actually attempt to examine a link, a couple of brief samples:

[quote]

Opinion: Confirming you haven't pirated your software is part of the Windows landscape now. Like many landscape features, you won't notice it unless you go looking.

When Windows Product Activation was announced for Windows XP, the predictions from some were dire. Surely, it was argued, this onerous burden and the certain failures of it to operate properly would finally inspire people to move from Windows.

Of course it didn't turn out that way. Activation has been, at worst, a minor nuisance. Such will be the case with awkwardly named Genuine Microsoft Software program, an anti-piracy initiative that has been voluntary for some time but that, it now appears, will be made mandatory some time in the second half of 2005.

[end quote]

From the link within the above quotation:

[quote]

The "Windows Genuine Advantage" initiative, which Microsoft launched in September 2004, is designed to check whether consumer and small-business customers are running legitimately licensed copies of Windows XP. Since September, about five million users have participated in the voluntary validation process, according to Microsoft officials.

Users validate by providing Microsoft-requested system information, including their Windows product keys, names of PC manufacturers and operating system versions, which the Redmond, Wash., software company uses to determine if customers are running legitimate copies of Windows. Microsoft officials have said that none of this information can be used to identify or contact individual users.

Microsoft has been testing the Genuine Advantage program on the Microsoft Download Center, where it has been requesting that users validate their copies of XP before obtaining certain Microsoft programs, patches and fixes for download. If users decide against validating, they are still allowed to obtain the requested downloads.

But starting later this year, Microsoft will require users who want any of the Windows-client-related code from the Microsoft Download Center and Windows Update sites to first validate their software as part of the Genuine Advantage program.

Microsoft has created a loophole for "customers who may require more time to move to genuine Windows software," however: For some undetermined amount of time, Microsoft will allow these users to obtain critical security updates only via the Microsoft Automatic Update site, even if they don't pass validation muster.

[end quote: boldface and italics added for reference]

An indication of how "the evil empire" persecutes users may be taken from the report that as of January 2005 when the last quoted article appeared, there were 5 million users voluntarily participating in the "validation" program. At about that time, the typical automatic update downloads of critical Windows updates were reported to be going to 300 million users. This does not include those who were downloading updates manually by visiting Microsoft update websites individually for each update.

I did, on one occasion, get a question about the "re-verification" of my Windows copy, when I made a significant, if not major, component substitution. I was offered the option of downloading critical updates only, without further action regarding the validity of my software, or of providing additional information to confirm that my software was legal. The only thing they asked for was the name of the OEM builder of my computer and date of purchase.

In this case, the "clinker" was that the monitor I pulled out to replace the one that failed dated back prior to two changes in name by the OEM builder, so the verification routine did, correctly, detect a "significant change." The whole verification process was done in less than about three minutes. (The optional update, for which I did need to do the verification, took a little over 2 hours to download.)

John