http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/news/0,4586,2674261,00.html

sounds like nothing new. just needs a keygen now instead of a serial

Heh, well.. the "latest" kind of serial (5x XXXXX- as it is with win98/2k/me/office2k and so on) has never been keygenned while I heard (never even looked at it myself) it is impossible. So that might be a small problemo ;P
But when I hear that m$ is implementing protection in whistler I can only LOL.

Heh, well with 'problem' I referred to making a keygen. A patch of somekind would be the other option, probably the only one.

It's true that not all whistler releases will have this protection; I'm not sure what why they are implementing it for that reason..
The release without protection will be all over the web, copied like all other m$ stuff..

Only thing this protection stops are the ppl who never heard of cracks and therefor can't copy their store version of whistler

watch out here, don't give m$ all the tricks to defeat the whistler scheme ! or they will stop selling the cd and will oblidge us to buy the
preinstalled version on the computer, with an auto rebuild of windows in case of system failure with windows update; asking you to pay a fee of $100 for this ...

hehe, oh well.. if they do the iso image is all over the net before it ships ..

don't worry ;P

if you've been following this thread at all, you'll definitely want to check out http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/4/16223.html