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Wednesday, January 26, 2005

McDonald's: Want VOIP with That? - "A hungry consumer pulls up to the drive-through window in a California McDonald's restaurant and places a dinner order. The person taking the order points out that the caller placed only three drink orders for four dinners and reminds the diner of a special that day on apple pie.
This might be a fairly typical fast-food—or, in industry parlance, QSR for quick-service restaurant—exchange were it not for the fact that the customer and the order-taker are dozens of miles apart, connected through a VPN-secured voice-over-IP hookup. "
1:46:06 PM

National ISP Offers Firefox to Customers - "The Mozilla Foundation's popular open-source Web browser Firefox took another step forward in mainstream acceptance with the announcement that Speakeasy, a Seattle-based national broadband ISP, is offering a customized version of Firefox 1.0 to its customers. "
10:53:10 AM

Microsoft to Make Windows Anti-Piracy Program Mandatory "Microsoft is planning to make its currently voluntary Windows anti-piracy program mandatory some time in the second half of 2005, company officials said on Wednesday.
So far, however, Microsoft has no timetable for broadening the program to other Microsoft products, such as Microsoft Office, server software or games, company officials said. But they did not rule out such an expansion at some point. And Microsoft representatives hinted that the company might also allow Microsoft partners to employ the Genuine Advantage methodology and techniques in the future."

That's all fine, but the issue remains that at the end of the day unpatched Windows boxes will be zombifies all over the Internet, creating all sorts of problems. MSFT does need a plan for dealing with pirated software on the network that goes beyond pointing a finger and saying 'Bad'.

10:52:15 AM