"Trustworthy Computing"?
April 17th, 2003
Some versions of Microsoft Office 2000 have started demanding that the user enter a registration code, a couple of years after the user's employer bought a site license for the software in the first place. This is the result of a bug in the Office Registration Wizard, and so far the only solutions seem to be to a) not shut down Office, b) set your PC's clock back two years (thereby screwing up the timestamp on all your files) or c) take a deep breath and manually edit some Registry settings. Naturally, Microsoft say they're "working on" a better solution.
Irritating as this turn of events would be for an individual Office user, it's (literally!) a thousand times worse for a business with licensed copies of Office on every user's desktop. Next time Microsoft, or anyone else, suggest that Digital Rights Management software is a good idea, we should all remember this story as an illustration of the effects of software which treats the user as guilty until proven innocent.
[Via Slashdot]
