InPost locker caught shipping unactivated Windows

BORK!BORK!BORK! "What's in the box?" Windows, that's what. And it's a copy of Windows that hasn't been activated. Today's bork in the wild was spotted by an eagle-eyed Register reader in the English town of High Wycombe, and it looks like an InPost locker unit has joined the legions of the undead, at least as far as Windows is concerned. InPost, for the uninitiated, is a logistics company headquartered in Poland. It's most famous for the banks of lockers that have sprung up around the UK in recent years (more than 14,000 of them, according to the company). The process is simple: scan a code, and a locker door opens. Either pop in a parcel, or collect one. It beats queuing at a post office to do parcel-related stuff, where the information screens might have had their own visit from the bork fairy. However, as with many processes that are seemingly simple and straightforward, Windows makes it less so. As our reader saw, the operating system is lurking behind the scenes, ready to receive jabs from customers' fingers on the touchscreen. Windows is probably a little hefty for an edge case like InPost lockers, and is showing customers an activation warning. The watermark appears when something has upset Windows. Perhaps someone shoved a parcel containing a Linux distribution into one of the lockers. Or a stuffed penguin in another. More likely, there was a hardware change that threw the operating system into a spin, and someone in the back office hasn't yet clicked the OK button that would make the problem go away. The locker screen in front of our reader looks distinctly grubby, and we'd think twice before applying a finger to it, but it does look relatively new. InPost lockers have been on the streets of the UK for well over a decade, with hardware updates rolled out over the years. It's unlikely that updates are being applied to this particular set of lockers. While Windows won't stop working simply because it wasn't activated, the flow of updates might be restricted. Frankly, this isn't a bad thing these days. Imagine a borked update causing a locker to spring open its doors and violently disgorge its contents onto passersby. A feeling all too familiar to Windows users waiting nervously as the month's security update does its thing... (R)