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Microsoft Misrepresenting WGA's Functionality?

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the first-time-for-everything dept.

Legal Ethics writes "According to an article on Groklaw, Microsoft is misrepresenting what the Windows Genuine Advantage (WGA) tool is to pressure people into installing it. It comes with no uninstall, it fails to disclose many pieces of information it provides to Microsoft, and it misrepresents itself as a 'critical update' when it does not address any security vulnerability, although it remains to be seen if it can create one. ZDNet has a series of screenshots so that you can see exactly how badly it misrepresents itself. Oh, and it also checks for updates, so Microsoft can presumably execute arbitrary code on any machine with it installed, merely by making that code part of a WGA update."

4 of 458 comments (clear)

  1. How to Disable the WGA Add-on by Digital+Vomit · · Score: 5, Informative

    If you want to be able to disable the Genuine Windows Advantage Add-on for IE (accessible via Tools|Manage Add-ons... in IE), you might be surprised (or not) to see that Microsoft will not let you do so. It gives you some sort of stupid "disabled by Administrator" message, even when you're logged on as Administrator (I guess MS thinks it's the administrator for your computer).

    To enable the radio button that allows you to disable this worthless add-on, follow these instructions I found:

    1. Open Group Policy Editor (gpedit.msc) go to User Configuration > Administrative Templates > Windows Components > Internet Explorer > Security Features > Add-on Management.
    2. Double click Add-on List and select enabled.
    3. Click on Show then on Add.
    4. In enter name put {17492023-C23A-453E-A040-C7C580BBF700} .
    5. In enter value put 2.
    6. OK, Apply, OK.
    7. Now you can disable/enable the add-on.
    --
    Modern copyright is theft of culture from everyone and it retards the progress of the useful arts and sciences.
  2. Re:Why punish legit users? by mattyrobinson69 · · Score: 5, Informative

    install it
    disconnect from the internet
    open task manager
    kill the process 'wgatray'
    rename the file c:\windows\system32\wgatray.exe to something else (wgatray.exe.bastard, for example)

    There is also a file called wga.dll, or similar, but i didn't do anything with that, if anybody could shed some light on that, it'd be nice. I did the above on a machine that was wrongly reporting as 'pirated', and it worked fine.

  3. That, OR by mobby_6kl · · Score: 5, Informative
    That method sounds good for widescale, corporate deployment, but here's a simpler method:
    • Use Autoruns (everybody should have it already) to disable wgalogon.exe on the winlogon page.
  4. A link for the rest of us. by Frenchman113 · · Score: 5, Informative

    This "genuine advantage" notifier is remarkably easy to disable. Here's a link that documents numerous ways to defeat it. http://labnol.blogspot.com/2006/04/workarounds-to- disable-non-genuine.html