Angus Kidman27 August 2007, 5:45 AM
What is the Microsoft WindowsGenuine Advantage, exactly? Over the past weekend, some owners of legitimate copies of Windows had their copies of Windows invalidated by Microsoft, while users of pirated copies were unaffected.
What is the Microsoft Windows
Genuine Advantage, exactly? Over the past weekend, some owners of legitimate copies of Windows had their copies of Windows invalidated by Microsoft, while users of pirated copies were unaffected.
The weekend meltdown of Microsoft's Windows Genuine Advantage (WGA) servers managed to offend the one group of users -- people actually using Vista -- that the software giant desperately needs to keep onside, and demonstrates once again why the company's anti-piracy approach benefits neither users nor shareholders.
On Saturday Australian time, Microsoft's Windows Genuine Advantage servers, which authenticate copies of Windows and Office to ensure they are not pirated, managed to royally screw up and began incorrectly identifying legitimate Vista and XP systems as illegitimate.
For people who've actually laid out good money for Vista -- itself perhaps a questionable strategy given its hoglike hardware requirements, sluggish performance and lack of driver support -- getting fingered as a pirate is offensive enough.
However, if WGA identifies your system as suspect, it also disables many features of Vista, including the souped up Aero interface, leaving you with little more than Internet Explorer to play with.
Microsoft engineers eventually managed to fix the problem around 19 hours after reports of it first surfaced, but not before it had to warn users on its forum that swearing wasn't acceptable.
To date, there's been no word on the actual cause of the problem. The official site for 'Genuine Windows' doesn't even include a reference to the problem, while Microsoft's WGA blog only includes a brief note referring to how to revalidate affected systems.
Customers who have been tagged as the Captain Jack Sparrow of the software world have to revalidate their machines again to re-enable the blocked features. (Naturally, being a Microsoft fix, this also requires rebooting your PC.) Some afflicted users have reported that since revalidating, they are no longer able to access the Windows Update service.
The issue could have been much worse for Microsoft if the meltdown had occurred on a weekday, as many more machines would have potentially being affected. Nonetheless, it still demonstrates the essential stupidity of setting up a system which requires legitimate users to endlessly prove that they're not criminals, shifting the burden of intellectual property protection away from Microsoft and onto its customers.
The impact of WGA on piracy is questionable in any case. As one poster on Microsoft's forums remarked: "Download a pirated copy of Windows with Activation Cracks and live happily." The criminals stay happy, the genuine users get annoyed, and Microsoft staff seem more concerned about forum usage policies than customer discontent. It's not a pretty picture, is it?