07-22-2006
|
#2 (permalink)
|
|
|
Re: Paul Thurrott.... a software pirate.
MICHAEL wrote:
> Paul Thurrott, one of the most important Microsoft advocates, has been
> bitten by Windows Genuine Advantage.
> http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?s...52221&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.
>
>
>
>
Please don't post any more links to trash dot.
THX
Frank |
My System Specs | |