I’ve been thinking a lot about cyberpunk, especially the early work of William Gibson, recently. So I was struck by this tale from the LAT. Apparently, at least according to Microsoft (and we all know how trustworthy Microsoft is) the “La Familia” drug cartel has branched out, and is selling…bootleg copies of Microsoft Office 2007.
The LAT article in turn links to this Microsoft blog post, which in turn quotes the Mexican Attorney General’s claim that “the group’s illegal counterfeiting activities involved a sophisticated distribution network of 180,000 points of sale in stores, markets and kiosks, earning more than $2.2 million dollars in revenue every day.”
I’m more than a little dubious about those numbers, and about the survey also mentioned in the blog post: “More than 38,000 consumers in 20 countries participated in the survey, and a large majority said they want the industry (72 percent) and government (65 percent) to do more to protect them from software piracy.”
Assumin the truth of these stories, this does not strike me as being a wise strategy for the drug cartels. I mean, ticking off the DEA is one thing. But ticking off Microsoft? Not smart, though perhaps not quite as dumb these days as making Google angry.
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to my Amazon wish list.)
sitting on the table next to me. And for some reason, I’m reminded of the little interstitial bits of text throughout the novel, especially towards the end (“This product contains a known allergen and a known carcinogen…This is a cybernetic datum imprinted on the wrapper without the manufacturers’ knowledge or consent.”)
would probably be closer to the top, though it looks like that hasn’t been updated until 2005 (and is no longer available on the magazine’s web site, but Amazon has it pretty darn cheap), with the