Microsoft targets Windows pirates with pop-ups

MICROSOFT is to enhance the product-activation programme in its Office software to make it more like that in Windows.

And it will extend its 'Windows Genuine Advantage' (WGA) programme to send alerts directly to users of pirate software, the company said yesterday.

Under a Volish scheme - the Genuine Software Initiative - Microsoft said it will provide "notifications" to consumers using non-genuine Microsoft Windows XP.

"Customers" who are running a non-genuine copy of Windows, get to have the notifications beamed "directly to their desktop" to inform them that, "the copy of Windows they are running isn't genuine".

The initiative extends to Office, which gets its own Genuine Advantage programme (OGA) that, said the Vole, will operate almost identically to Windows Genuine Advantage (WGA).

The company has begun piloting OGA in seven languages: Brazilian Portuguese, Czech, Greek, Korean, Simplified Chinese, Russian and Spanish. It wants to get them onside before dealing with the English-speaking world.

Microsoft said software piracy is a blight on the landscape. It will extend the Genuine Advantage programme to as many products as it can, as quickly as possible.

In the United Kingdom, "more than 21,000 suspected illegal sales were halted on eBay in the second half of 2005," said the Vole. One group that even sought to trade millions of pounds worth of counterfeit software to consumers," it said.

This'll learn 'em. µ