People are idiots… when it goes to install updates pick custom install and uncheck the WGA update. It won’t install. That’s what I do.
Windows XP users put at a genuine disadvantage
One in five computers labelled as counterfeit are running legitimate operating systems
Charles Arthur
Thursday July 13, 2006
The Guardian
A spam filter that only correctly identified 80% of spam while mislabelling 20% of legitimate email as junk wouldn’t be very popular. How much worse, then, when the product that’s making such a poor fist of identification isn’t a spam filter, but a Microsoft program that is meant to identify whether you are running a legitimate copy of Windows.
Worse still, the program - Windows Genuine Advantage, usually known as WGA - was forced on Windows XP users as part of the regular software update scheme, but now threatens to disable the machines of users it deems are using illicit copies of the operating system.
WGA has two elements: a validator (which checks the activation key for the version of Windows XP against that held on Microsoft’s servers) and a notification tool which, together with the validator, will bug you with popups if it judges your version of Windows to be pirated.
The program was rolled out in February 2005 and became obligatory in July last year - when an XP machine connected to Microsoft for security updates, WGA was installed as part of the download.
People soon noticed odd things about WGA, such as it connecting to Microsoft’s servers every day without their explicit permission. Ad-hoc tools to prevent this (such as RemoveWGA) quickly appeared but people were annoyed that WGA did not ask for their permission to connect.
Microsoft’s motive? Of the estimated 600m Windows installations, about 219m are pirated, according to Will Poole, a Microsoft executive.
By May, there was an interesting graph showing WGA failure rates in the US where the Windows product “keys” did not match those in Microsoft’s database (see http://tinyurl.com/qlep3). But the ire over WGA didn’t abate. In the past few days more unsettling data has emerged from Microsoft itself, which said that 80% of computers which failed WGA’s check were using pirated versions of Windows.
That almost sounds good, until you consider it - as Ed Bott, a Windows expert, did. He said: “Turn that statistic around: Microsoft said that 20% of all Windows users who fail the WGA validation test are not using leaked or stolen keys.” (See http://tinyurl.com/n6xza.) So why did those one in five fail, he asked Microsoft? Cori Hartje, director of Microsoft Genuine Software Initiative, responded: “While we don’t have specifics to share on other forms [of] counterfeit installations, they mostly result from activities such as various forms of tampering and unauthorised OEM installations.”
That left Bott fuming. He called the response “woefully imprecise”, noting it did not give any breakdown, nor any admission that some might be false positives, except that the number of legitimate Windows users who have had problems indicates that the program isn’t working.
And that’s where the WGA fiasco descends into farce. For a while WGA was listed as a critical update and installed at once if you had automatic updating selected - its purpose is really to fight piracy, which means that it’s not about security at all. The program itself is described (in its end user licence agreement, or EULA, which barely anyone reads) as “pre-release” - that is, beta, or in Microsoft’s preferred adjective, “pilot”.
More importantly, Microsoft hasn’t shaken off the suggestion, repeated widely online, that in the autumn WGA will start to shut down versions of Windows that have not been validated after 30 days.
The problems grow for anyone who is now being told that WGA has been unable to validate their copy of Windows. Was it because it was reinstalled? Or because their supplier installed it wrongly? Or because the computer went in for repair and had some component changed? All could cause an innocent user to spend money on “purchasing” a copy of Windows to replace the perfectly good one that was working until Microsoft imposed a piece of beta - sorry, “pilot” - software with a confusing licence on them.
The latest version comes with an EULA that reads, in part: “Installing this update is optional”. But it’s unclear whether, if you opt not to install it, you can still get anything more than critical security upgrades from Microsoft. Microsoft was asked for a response, but none was received by press time.
