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[neptunes]

I haven't been keep up on the longhorn news as of late, but I've been talking to a couple buddies who have.
Most of the seem to believe that microsoft plans keeping tabs on your media content (in regards to mp3's, videos and such) invading on your privacy.

Though I don't quite believe their assumptions, I'm curious to know as to what type of new features has microsoft considered implementing into longhorn, and if there are any in particular that we should be worrying about.

 

[SKluck]

That is impossible. No program can correctly and consistently identify "illegal files" (or any other kind of media file) no matter if they are movies, music, etc. There are too many variables like compression ratios, lengths, etc. Filenames are not reliable.

 

[MASB]

I don't know if MS will do this or not, but if so, filenames, compression, length will have nothing to do with it. It'll be DRM and non-DRM. Anything that isn't DRMed would be gone/disabled, whatever. Again, I don't know what MS will do, but that would be along the lines if they did implement something. You're guaranteed at any rate that DRM is the name of the game with Longhorn and the future and anything outside of that will be iffy.

 

[Phoenix]

Microsoft is a business and does not have a legal right to gather any information about your machines contents for any reason without your consent and even if they tried to put that into a license it would be over reaching and illegal for them to do so. Microsoft can take no actions other than those necessary to secure their own software. ANyone who tells you otherwise likely has a case of tin foil in their bomb shelter.

Next, Microsoft couldn't do anything with all the bagillion terrabytes of information they would collect in this manner. Even if they wanted to inventory your entire drive for software and similar, they have no way to actually process every single hard disk in the world that would be attached to a Windows machine and determine the types of content there.

Next, outside of specifically DRM'd software/movies/music/etc., Microsoft would have no way of knowing whether or not you ripped a CD, DVD, etc. All of these activities ARE legal for you to do (under the current translations of fair use by the US Supreme Court)- you just can't share or distribute the content to anyone else.

Microsoft is to be hated a some times and feared at some times, but some of what people say Microsoft is going to do just doesn't even make any sense.

 

[Dylx]

The Digital rights are so screwed right now people dont know what they can or cant do with their media.

If they changet the Digital rights act to microsoft and other companies wishing to stop piracy favor..................i would not be surprized

 

[Freestyler]

They can't legally assume that every user has access to the internet, so how would the whole collecting info thing work anyway? It wouldn't. I mean Microsoft provide a phone number you can call to activate their latest products on your machine, in case you don't have the internet nor access to a phoneline itself.

It's not like it'd be 'Sorry, you can not play this movie because you are not connected to the internet and therefore Windows cannot check the rights of the file' or some crap. I think everyone's getting a tad worked up.

Remember that Microsoft is a business and they want our moneys, so they're not gonna go ahead and alienate the huge userbase that is tech-savvy people who potentially understand fully all of the DRM stuff.