anti-piracy

Although Wikipedia completely blacked out its English language Web site yesterday in protest of potential U.S. antipiracy legislation, traffic on the Web encyclopedia was higher than usual, according to research and analysis company Zscaler.

"If you want a quick way of increasing traffic to your website--change or take down portions of your website in protest," Zscaler wrote on its blog yesterday. "At least that is what we have gleaned from today's (1/18) Wikipedia protest against SOPA."

Graphs on the Zscaler blog show that unique Wikipedia visits during the blackout were higher than surrounding … Read more

During yesterday's Web protest against antipiracy legislation, Firefox blacked out its start page and redirected users to Mozilla's anti-SOPA and PIPA action page. It also posted 9 million messages about the two pending bills on Facebook, Twitter, and in its Firefox + You newsletter.

As a result, more than 40 million people were reached, announced Mozilla News today.

"All these steps were aimed at informing and mobilizing millions of people on the poorly drafted anti-piracy legislation--SOPA and PIPA--pending in Congress," Alex Fowler wrote in The Mozilla Blog.

According to Fowler, around 30 million people in the U.… Read more

Google's homepage today shows a thick black censorship stamp across its colorful logo.

And, if clicked on, it leads users to a "End Piracy, Not Liberty" petition that asks people to sign-on to protest the two anti-piracy laws to be voted on by Senate and Congress.

"Millions of Americans oppose SOPA and PIPA because these bills would censor the Internet and slow economic growth in the U.S.," the petition reads. "Sign this petition urging Congress to vote NO on PIPA and SOPA before it is too late."

Over the course of the … Read more

With Windows 7, Microsoft is making some subtle changes to the ways it tries to thwart piracy.

As has been the case for some time, Microsoft's strategy hinges on requiring a user to electronically verify their copy of the software, a process known as activation, and then the software also periodically validates that a copy of Windows is genuine.

In Windows Vista, if a user does not activate their software immediately, they get a warning that they still need to do so. The dialog box offers two options, to activate immediately or to do so later. However, the activate … Read more

Game for Windows - LIVE (GFWL) is an online gaming service for "Games for Windows"-branded PC games. It functions much like an Xbox Live, but for the PC. On Tuesday Microsoft announced a couple of updates to the service.

In an effort to prevent game piracy, Microsoft will be implementing zero-day piracy protection and server-side authentication, that hopefully will help prevent game piracy before a game's street date, and include added protection for publishers and users by requiring authentication for online play.

To help users access additional game content in the most seamless way possible, GFWL … Read more

Microsoft said Monday that it's seeing piracy rates for Windows Vista that are half those of Windows XP.

Now cynical me wanted to write this up as "even pirates prefer XP two to one over Vista," but that wouldn't be fair. In reality, the decline in piracy rates is largely due to the fact that Vista is much tougher to counterfeit than XP.

"Piracy rates are lower because it's harder," Microsoft Vice President Mike Sievert said in an interview Monday.

There are a variety of reasons for that, including the fact that businesses … Read more