News

The article basically says that cartels are selling the BS software to fund other activities... but what it says to me is that the cartel is pretty much raking in cash over Microsoft's hard work. Don't get me wrong, I don't like Microsoft, but this is a double strike. The cartels basically counterfeit Windows and sell it for cheap to fund their drug activities. This probably means that a large chunk of their money comes from this. $800 million per year!

Quote

Microsoft Corp., the world’s largest software maker, showed a fake copy of its Office 2007 software found for sale on the streets of Mexico and “brazenly” stamped with the rectangular “FMM” logo of the Familia drug cartel to demonstrate the link between counterfeiting and organized crime.

“This is the real side, the scary side of counterfeiting and it plagues the world,” David Finn, Microsoft’s associate general counsel for antipiracy, said today at the Global Congress on Combating Counterfeiting and Piracy in Paris.]

Not everyone is a freedom fighter when providing software for cheap. In this case, counterfeiting is truly funding terrible crimes.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-02-03/fake-microsoft-software-sold-by-mexican-drug-cartel-lawyer-says.html