Intel Inside

You have labelled the subject "
Paul Thurrott.... a software pirate." yet this is *misleading*.

Anyone with an ounce of intelligence can read the article & conclude that he
is not a "pirate".

What does your post have to do with Vista anyway?. Nothing.



"MICHAEL" <u158627_emr@dslr.net> wrote in message
news:OkI2Q7TrGHA.4680@TK2MSFTNGP02.phx.gbl...
> 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.
>
>
>
>
> --
> Michael
> ______
> "The trouble ain't that there is too many fools,
> but that the lightning ain't distributed right."
> - Mark Twain
>
>