I'm sure that this will not even cause a hiccup in the cracker/hacker community. Just like when xp came out and you had to register online within a month or it would become inactive, this little security measure will quickly be overcome by crackers and any pirate os will already be cracked to avoid this before it ever gets to the ultimate consumer.To go back to the post about updates, you wouldn't be too bright if you were using pirated software but still let Microsoft, or any other software manufacturer, look inside your computer whenever they wanted to.Scarus