Quote Originally Posted by nihil

As I see it the "security" that has been hyped is the system and user security angle? The question of piracy is a whole different ball game IMO.
I take the point. However, you have to wonder how well a company can ensure that their system is secure, when copies of their latest all-singing-all-dancing OS are doing the p2p rounds less than a week after being sent to manufacture and before even being released to businesses!

I am not too surprised that the betas have been pirated as I probably wouldn't want my DRM out there for the pirates to practice on
These aren't the betas, they're the final versions, the Ultimate versions at that, ie what businesses will get on 30th November. The only snag is that (so far at least) there are no activation keys. The ones included are all just RC2 keys which would be no good at all. Anyone subscribing to MSDN will get a key with 10 activation attempts, but I don't see these allowing pirated copies of Vista to become rife - by definition. Probably only a matter of time till a cracked key is released, but I haven't found anyone with an activation key of any type at the moment, so even if you don't morally object to using an illegal copy of Vista, the fact that it won't work after 30 days should be deterrent enough.