Slashdot Mirror
Paul Thurrott's WGA Woes Solved
David Horn writes "Last week Slashdot ran an article regarding the trouble Paul Thurrott had with WGA. It turns out that after talking to Microsoft, he was actually running a pirated version of Windows, legitimately purchased from an online vendor. Paul admits that 'the truth is, I just made a mistake. If we learn something from that mistake, fantastic, but I wasn't trying to set up a life lesson for anyone, let alone myself.'"
He was selling the 'Official' Mandrake CD set, or copies of it, and you have to belong to their little club to get the 'official' CD images.
Similar restrictions apply to direct copies of the 'Official' Release CD of OpenBSD (I've personally bought two releases retail).
And hearkening waaaaay back, I remember in the mid 90's attending a Red Hat Linux event at a reserved hotel meeting room, where I asked the Red Hat marketing woman if I could make copies of my brother-in-laws Red Hat 5.0 retail CD set. She just gave me this uncomfortable look back like it wasn't a sincere question on my part.
I accepted his initial report because it was perfectly consistent with my own experience. I have a system at work that has always validated as genuine. After I installed the update, it displayed the annoying and accusational WGA counterfeit notifications. Re-validating on Microsoft's website and rebooting a couple times made the notifications go away, and their MGA diagnostics tool confirms that it's genuine. Microsoft's WGA notifications update was buggy, and erred on the side of accusing legitimate users (at least myself) of piracy, despite that it was correct in Paul Thurrott's case.