I’m back to posting after a long hiatus. Lots going on now so posting will be light; however I’ll try to keep posting once in a while.

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I was in the beautiful city of Sofia on a business trip. Even after years of Communist rule, it has managed to retain its old world charm. Some photos:

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Windows XP SP2 is out. This is a must-have upgrade; now Windows users have no excuse for letting spyware all over their systems. MSFN notes that even users with pirated copies should have an easy, hassle-free upgrade:

There have been a number of discussions on this newsgroup regarding whether SP2 will install on non-genuine (aka “pirated”) versions of Windows. Here is the official Microsoft position on this topic:

We expect that nearly all Windows XP users, running genuine or pirated Windows, will have access to the security technologies in SP2. The same users that were blocked from installing SP1 – those that have used a small set of legacy pirated product keys – will be blocked from installing SP2. We believe that there are very few systems in use today that use these keys — in other words, the pirates have moved on to other keys which we are not blocking.

So how do we characterize our policy?

We want to make sure that the broadest number of people can install SP2. The nature of malicious attacks on computer users is constantly changing and we will continue to evaluate how we deal with security updates for pirated versions of Windows to best protect our genuine Windows customers.

Thanks,
Gary Schare
Microsoft

Given the number of users running pirated XP and jamming up the net with trojan traffic, this is great news for the net at large.