It would be helpful to leave comments similar to the one below by Richard Stallman any place where you see a story about the "black screen of death" hoax that was recently propagated, with a link to badvista.org. I left one on the Wired blog story.
If anyone wants to write up a short blog post about this and mail it to the list, we'd happily add it to badvista.org. The Microsoft "black screen of death" warning was a hoax. http://blog.wired.com/monkeybites/2007/09/microsoft-vista.html "Reduced Functionality Mode" does exist, and it does shut off the computer after an hour, but it does not render the computer totally unusable during that hour. Unauthorized copying exists too, but calling it "piracy" is propaganda, so please don't. What conclusion should we draw from this? The crucial fact is that Vista is designed for Microsoft to force updates on the user. Microsoft can do whatever it wishes to any computer that runs Vista, if it is on the Internet. Microsoft has not done what was described in the hoax, but it has grabbed so much power that it could do this (or anything else) to users at any time. That in itself is the real problem. -- John Sullivan Campaigns Manager | Phone: (617)542-5942 x23 | http://badvista.org 51 Franklin Street, 5th Fl. | Fax: (617)542-2652 | http://www.gnu.org Boston, MA 02110-1301 USA | GPG: AE8600B6 | http://www.fsf.org _______________________________________________ Advocate mailing list [email protected] http://badvista.fsf.org/mailman/listinfo/advocate
