Colin Barnhorst

I consider Paul Thurrott the Michael Moore of Windows journalism. I hear
he's doing a documentary on Microsoft titled "Fahrenheit 1024x768."

"Frank" <fb@nospamm.cmm> wrote in message
news:e7jz5xUrGHA.3380@TK2MSFTNGP04.phx.gbl...
> 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