[LINK] Win 2K, Office 2K to ship with new antipiracy devices

[Bob Bain]

On Fri, 18 Feb 2000 23:44:43 +1100, Peter Bowditch wrote:

>> Am I missing something, or is this a unique identification; and just what
>> is the "signature" of the hardware of the machine?

>I am a bit surprised to see that the experts and conspiracists have only 
>just discovered this, since it has been in Office 2000 for the last six 
>months.

 I've already been through this exercise with Front Page 2000 ( I hope
_someday_ to create an interesting Web page ... :-) ).

 Although the sticker on the cover suggested that I would have 50 trials
before I would need to register,  after "installation" (I'm not sure if
it did so entirely successfully, although it appeared to work after
tweaking various things with various versions of Norton's and "regclean"
it decided that it wouldn't run first time unless I registered
immediately !!

 I might add that I have Office 97 Professional on this machine and
Front Page is seemingly part of the Office suite, so it may have decided
that I had run an Office 97 component more than once (which I have).

 I registered on-line and Front Page worked immediately.  I have since
been searching the registry for this mysterious "signature" but can't
seem to locate it.  What I have found however are references in the
registry to every web page I may have bookmarked since 1995.

 This is a concern.  It should be remembered that personal information
_is_ held in the registry, such as "user name" (although this can be
changed).

 An interesting article some time back was "ActiveX Demystified" (Byte
September '97)  which explained what ActiveX is ( does anyone really
know ?). 

 Apart from describing how ActiveX is in reality simply a shifting
marketing ploy it explained how the "registry" on remote machines become
part of DCOM (Distributed Common Object Model) and how machines over a
network (such as the Internet ?), under this model could read the
registry of such remote machines.

 I don't know enough about DCOM or ActiveX to comment, but I note that
it may be that my registry was updated "on-line" and that I know my name
is in the registry along with bookmarks to web sites I bookmarked years
ago and the "signature" of my computer might be in there as well.

 There is nothing to worry about !!

  I might stick with the less "Internet enabled" Office '97 for the time
being though....

    
--------------------------
Bob Bain. Sydney Australia
bobb@alt.net
bobb@acslink.aone.net.au