[Hodar]

No, this is the stuff of Urban Legends.

Everyone knows of a neighbor's cousin's ex-roommate's son-in-law's friend's ex-classmate that says that he received a threatening letter from MS. The rules of illegal search without a warrant still apply.

Furthermore, in my line of work, we have THOUSANDS of machines, in which we load THE SAME program (OS, Game, Apps, Utilities) over and over. We do NOT register as the legit entity we are, because we want to emulate the user's experience. We do this to find bugs. I personally reload hard drives 3-4x a week with every program you can imagine. We do this on different revisions of Mobo's, chipsets, and such.

How would MS be able to seperate us, from you? We don't register as the company; as that may somehow cause the program to behave differently.

The PC is your property. You have more to fear from the DCMA than from MS.

[Knitebane]

No, this is the stuff of Urban Legends. Everyone knows of a neighbor's cousin's ex-roommate's son-in-law's friend's ex-classmate that says that he received a threatening letter from MS. The rules of illegal search without a warrant still apply.

Not quite

[stanz]

I couldn't imagine a scenario like that occurring, but I have very little experience as a PC owner. Thanks for the advice.

[holymoly]

"The rules of illegal search without a warrant still apply."

Only to government & police agenencies.

[gore3000]

Everyone knows of a neighbor's cousin's ex-roommate's son-in-law's friend's ex-classmate that says that he received a threatening letter from MS. The rules of illegal search without a warrant still apply.

Garbage. They still do it, they even put it in their EULA's where no one will read it. We have all seen MS programs 'call home'. IE does it all the time, so does MS Media Player. This is well documented.