M
MICHAEL
Paul Thurrott, one of the most important Microsoft advocates, has been bitten by Windows
Genuine Advantage. http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/07/21/1252221&from=rss
http://www.winsupersite.com/showcase/wga.asp
I've found Microsoft's recent forays into customer relations with Windows Genuine Advantage
(WGA) to be somewhat amusing. I mean, after all, Microsoft is a huge company just brimming with
really smart people. How could they do something so silly?
If you're not up on the WGA saga, here's a recap. Microsoft announced its Genuine Advantage
software initiative in March 2006. It's designed as part of the company's wider assault on
software piracy (another infamous part of this fight, Product Activation, won fame and fortune
for Microsoft went XP was released in late 2001). The Genuine Advantage initiative is comprised
of three parts: Education (customers should understand the risks of pirated software),
Engineering (Microsoft's ongoing investment in anti-counterfeiting technologies and product
features), and Enforcement (Microsoft is helping law enforcement agencies go after the world's
worst software pirates).
WGA is a component of the Engineering part of that unholy triumvirate. It's a bit of software
that gets installed on Windows XP (it's part of Windows Vista right out of the gate, naturally)
and is comprised of two components. The first, dubbed WGA Validation, determines whether the
version of Windows on which its running is legitimate. The second component, WGA Notifications,
displays annoying alerts on pirated Windows copies and provides a way for the user to pay for a
legitimate copy of Windows.
Aside from basic trust issues--Apple, for example, does not burden users with Product
Activation or any similar anti-piracy technologies in its Mac OS X operating system--Microsoft
made two major mistakes with WGA. The first was to silently post a beta version of the tool to
Windows Update as a Critical Update, thus ensuring that it was quietly and underhandedly
installed on hundreds of millions of customers' PCs: I mean, seriously. Is Microsoft honestly
making guinea pigs out of its entire user base?
The second mistake was that WGA Notifications was also "phoning home" information to Microsoft
on a regular basis. That's right: Not only was the software secretly installed on your PC, but
it then regularly contacted Microsoft servers and provided them with data about the instances
of pirated and nonpirated software out there. Customers and security experts reacted with
alarm, as well they should: Microsoft had literally shipped spyware to its customers.
Microsoft, meanwhile, reacted as they often do when something like this happens: They made as
if nothing serious had happened and acted shocked that anyone could think otherwise. So much
for the Glasnost of the consent decree.
After a few days of freaking out customers, Microsoft finally changed WGA in mid-June 2006 so
that it wouldn't phone home every single time a PC rebooted, which is how frequently it had
been doing so. Now, WGA will still send back piracy data to Microsoft the first time it tests a
system, and then it will only sporadically phone home after that. The company also released a
set of instructions for disabling or removing the "pilot" version of WGA though Microsoft
contends that the final version of the software, due soon, will not support these activities.
After the dust had settled, sort of, I was still sort of curious what WGA looked like on a
system that was suspected of being pirated. This week, I got my wish: A copy of Windows XP
Media Center Edition 2005, installed in a virtual machine, came up with various WGA alerts
after I installed a bunch of updates from Windows Update. Screenshots of this machine can be
found below.
You're probably wondering how it is that I'm running a pirated copy of Windows. It's a
legitimate question.
We're all friends here, right?
Truthfully, I can only imagine what triggered these alerts. The software was installed to a VM
a long time ago and archived on my server. I no doubt used a copy of XP MCE 2005 that I had
received as part of my MSDN subscription. If the WGA alerts are to be believed, it's possible
that Microsoft thinks I've installed this software on too many machines, though that seems
unlikely to me. I can't really say.
Anyway, that's what it looks like to be a suspected pirate. Like many people who will see these
alerts, I don't believe I did anything wrong. I'm sure that's going to be a common refrain in
this new era of untrusting software and companies. Ah well.
--
Michael
______
"The trouble ain't that there is too many fools,
but that the lightning ain't distributed right."
- Mark Twain
Genuine Advantage. http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/07/21/1252221&from=rss
http://www.winsupersite.com/showcase/wga.asp
I've found Microsoft's recent forays into customer relations with Windows Genuine Advantage
(WGA) to be somewhat amusing. I mean, after all, Microsoft is a huge company just brimming with
really smart people. How could they do something so silly?
If you're not up on the WGA saga, here's a recap. Microsoft announced its Genuine Advantage
software initiative in March 2006. It's designed as part of the company's wider assault on
software piracy (another infamous part of this fight, Product Activation, won fame and fortune
for Microsoft went XP was released in late 2001). The Genuine Advantage initiative is comprised
of three parts: Education (customers should understand the risks of pirated software),
Engineering (Microsoft's ongoing investment in anti-counterfeiting technologies and product
features), and Enforcement (Microsoft is helping law enforcement agencies go after the world's
worst software pirates).
WGA is a component of the Engineering part of that unholy triumvirate. It's a bit of software
that gets installed on Windows XP (it's part of Windows Vista right out of the gate, naturally)
and is comprised of two components. The first, dubbed WGA Validation, determines whether the
version of Windows on which its running is legitimate. The second component, WGA Notifications,
displays annoying alerts on pirated Windows copies and provides a way for the user to pay for a
legitimate copy of Windows.
Aside from basic trust issues--Apple, for example, does not burden users with Product
Activation or any similar anti-piracy technologies in its Mac OS X operating system--Microsoft
made two major mistakes with WGA. The first was to silently post a beta version of the tool to
Windows Update as a Critical Update, thus ensuring that it was quietly and underhandedly
installed on hundreds of millions of customers' PCs: I mean, seriously. Is Microsoft honestly
making guinea pigs out of its entire user base?
The second mistake was that WGA Notifications was also "phoning home" information to Microsoft
on a regular basis. That's right: Not only was the software secretly installed on your PC, but
it then regularly contacted Microsoft servers and provided them with data about the instances
of pirated and nonpirated software out there. Customers and security experts reacted with
alarm, as well they should: Microsoft had literally shipped spyware to its customers.
Microsoft, meanwhile, reacted as they often do when something like this happens: They made as
if nothing serious had happened and acted shocked that anyone could think otherwise. So much
for the Glasnost of the consent decree.
After a few days of freaking out customers, Microsoft finally changed WGA in mid-June 2006 so
that it wouldn't phone home every single time a PC rebooted, which is how frequently it had
been doing so. Now, WGA will still send back piracy data to Microsoft the first time it tests a
system, and then it will only sporadically phone home after that. The company also released a
set of instructions for disabling or removing the "pilot" version of WGA though Microsoft
contends that the final version of the software, due soon, will not support these activities.
After the dust had settled, sort of, I was still sort of curious what WGA looked like on a
system that was suspected of being pirated. This week, I got my wish: A copy of Windows XP
Media Center Edition 2005, installed in a virtual machine, came up with various WGA alerts
after I installed a bunch of updates from Windows Update. Screenshots of this machine can be
found below.
You're probably wondering how it is that I'm running a pirated copy of Windows. It's a
legitimate question.
We're all friends here, right?
Truthfully, I can only imagine what triggered these alerts. The software was installed to a VM
a long time ago and archived on my server. I no doubt used a copy of XP MCE 2005 that I had
received as part of my MSDN subscription. If the WGA alerts are to be believed, it's possible
that Microsoft thinks I've installed this software on too many machines, though that seems
unlikely to me. I can't really say.
Anyway, that's what it looks like to be a suspected pirate. Like many people who will see these
alerts, I don't believe I did anything wrong. I'm sure that's going to be a common refrain in
this new era of untrusting software and companies. Ah well.
--
Michael
______
"The trouble ain't that there is too many fools,
but that the lightning ain't distributed right."
- Mark Twain