Hmmm
But hardware vendors also want Windows licenses to include with their hardware, so it's pretty easy to say "do the hardware program certification if you want the discount" and that's exactly what they did in the early days, and it worked fine. Even the peripherals (which are increasingly rare now anyway) still want to be able to put the Windows logo on their product.
At which point we still have the same question: Why are they harassing the WireGuard developers, who have their own reputation for not being inept at software and therefore shouldn't need a Microsoft certification program to assure their users that their code is trustworthy to install?
I would guess this is just large organizations Seeing Like a State whereby they "seek to force administrative legibility on their subjects by homogenizing them".
Consider being less cryptic, for the sake of those with English as a fourth language.
Wordplay are exactly the kind of stuff that LLMs excel at, so I asked Gemini flash, and I got
> snarky play on words by suggesting that the answer to AnthonyMouse's question is "Money."
> Here is the breakdown of how they arrived at that:
> The Username: AnthonyMouse
> The Letters: The word "Money" can be formed using the letters found in M-o-n-t-h-o-n-y M-o-u-s-e
(Gemini's answer is actually longer, I just kept the interesting bit)
Amusingly, this answer exhibits a similar problem to the "how many r in raspberry" problem (it forgets how to spell correctly), since
AnthonyMouse != M-o-n-t-h-o-n-y M-o-u-s-e
But it seems that it got to the correct answer (or an incorrect but plausible :) ) despite that
Let's save a tree and ask bash:
$ grep ^.....$ /usr/share/dict/words|grep -i ^[AnthonyMouse]*$
From the more than 300 possibilities we can then consider the context. We're talking about Microsoft here, and the problem suggests we're the sort of people who expect anagrams to have secret meaning, so we should prefer an answer implying some kind of conspiracy or kabbalistic nonsense. The obvious candidates are therefore mason and Satan. Between these, Satan would require reusing a letter the candidate set only has once, and one of the other words on the list was stone. We can form two five letter words if we're allowed to reuse letters and thereby get stone mason.
This is the most irrefutable possible proof that we're being pointed to a masonic conspiracy rather than Microsoft's usual popular association with the antichrist.
Plausible candidates include "asset", "enemy", "homes", "mates", "moats", "money", "nasty", "state", "stunt".
We do need to recognise, a long history of "windows always bluescreens" was somewhat reigned in by this policy with a lot of crashes coming down to third party drivers.
Security and attribution is great, but the default assumption of everyone will sign up and do what we want doesn't work.