Microsoft WGA bombs again
The Windows anti-piracy measures struck the innocent again. A large number of legitimate Windows XP and Vista users were accused of piracy yesterday and today. The Vista victims weren’t just accused; their systems were partially disabled. Greg Keizer reports:
Microsoft Corp. has blamed an unspecified server problem for a 16-hour stretch during which paying users of Windows XP and Vista were accused by the company’s “Windows Genuine Advantage” validation system of running pirated software. Any Vista system fingered during the episode was stripped of some features, including the operating system’s Aero graphical interface.
The only notification of the problem by Microsoft seems to be on a Microsoft forum, which an ordinary, non-technical PC user would not even know existed. Once more WGA hits innocent home users while probably the real pirates go on. For the possible gain of a few dollars, Microsoft is constantly throwing threats and checks at its legitimate customers. When will Steve Ballmer catch on that piracy is inevitable when the software is overpriced and that whatever money is saved by WGA is not worth all the ill will that it causes?
In the meantime, if you have been caught by this problem Microsoft says:
Please go to www.microsoft.com/genuine and click VALIDATE WINDOWS to resolve this issue immediately.
Update: PC World editor Harry McCracken also thinks that WGA is a faulty concept. He writes:
Microsoft will, presumably, patch up whatever technical snafu was responsible for the outage. But the fact this could happen at all shows that Windows Genuine Advantage is fundamentally flawed. I think Microsoft owes its customers more than an explanation: I think it owes them a copy-protection scheme that doesn’t uneccesarily inconvenience them, never accuses them of having pirated software when they don’t, cannot disable functionality on a legimate copy of the operating system, and isn’t marketed with a patronizing campaign that tells us it exists for our benefit, not Microsoft’s.
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