I'll give you a little hint about Microsoft: Time is on their side. Microsoft has forever to find someone violating a copyright, and Microsoft is not stupid. Arrogant fools, know nothings underestimate Microsoft. Microsoft can look the other way, and allow a hack to get away with something, but you know the only reason Microsoft does this is to compile a list of who violates copyrights.

I'll give you an example. Using your internet connection, Microsoft can alter the bios, MBR so it is impossible to boot from a CD. Or, so you can only boot from a CD. And, it can make this so you'll never get it off the machine. It's like PC poison.

This is an interesting discussion. Please can you continue without the personal attacks and jibes. Cheers.

Wow. You say MS can hijack a connection to tamper with the BIOS; do you have any evidence that it actually does that? It would lower MS from the merely obnoxious and arrogant to the literally criminal. I'd be more justified in wanting MS destroyed.

That's a little paranoid IMHO. On the former, nobody - not MS, not the MPAA, nobody - is capable of watching everyone on every P2P network, especially since the legality of using IP addresses as evidence, etc. is very contestable. And to the second, number one, as a public company they would never do that (especially with the number of people keeping a careful eye on them, and hobbyists poking through leaked code and reverse engineering other parts), and you could use a hardware BIOS flasher or a new BIOS chip (or a backup BIOS if your mobo has one) to fix it. That's even if MS can do what you say, which I find a _little_ doubtful. ActiveX is a pile of insecure crap, to be sure, but I don't think it's _that_ open.

If you want a real reason to be paranoid, talk about how MS's (and the NSA's) backdoor entrance to its crypto API: http://www.cnn.com/TECH/computing/99...indows.nsa.02/

No, it's NOT criminal; there are in fact already provisions in place OUTSIDE of US law, and RECOGNIZED BY US law (USDOJ) for protections of intellectual property, by means which you might find VERY surprising.

See for yourself; NAFTA, CAFTA, FTAA, WTA. See sections in each on 'barriers to trade'/intellectual property rights. There's a reason that they're all 'Agreements', instead of Treaties'.

I think there might very well be a list, and I think what AM describes is fairly accurate. The provisions described in those trade agreements make EXTREME associations of physical property used in license agreement violations by an end-user.