Text 12222, 91 rader
Skriven 2006-07-23 08:29:56 av /m (1:379/45)
Ärende: Windows Genuine Advantage: An Overview and Screenshot Gallery
=====================================================================
From: /m <mike@barkto.com>


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.

[see the article for screen shots]

--Paul Thurrott
July 20, 2006

===

 /m

--- BBBS/NT v4.01 Flag-5
 * Origin: Barktopia BBS Site http://HarborWebs.com:8081 (1:379/45)