WGA — Too Many False Positives

An anonymous reader writes, "Microsoft insists that its Windows Genuine Advantage anti-piracy program is nearly flawless. But that's not the impression you get when you visit the company's WGA Validation Problems forum. Ed Bott at ZDNet went through 137 problem reports submitted there during a two-week period, each one accompanied by the output from the official Microsoft diagnostic utility, and found that 42% of the people reporting problems were actually running Genuine software. From the article: 'One large group consists of people who, for some unexplained reason, were displaying cryptographic errors related to digital signatures. The problem is so common, in fact, that Microsoft representatives have a canned response they paste into replies to forum visitors who appear to be showing false positives caused by these errors.' In a related story, the first WGA errors from Windows Vista and Office 2007 have appeared in the wild."

Comments

Re:Shouldn't even exist

[Shawn is an Asshole]

I agree that WGA is a serious pain in the ass*, but it is a good thing as it pisses off users. I really hope that in Vista it becomes more obnoxious and hopefully require more work to circumvent. Even though people who are using it unlicensed (no one is attacking ships) will find ways around it, the harder they have to try, the better. Hopefully this can drive people to look into alternatives and start to demand companies support more than one platform.

Note, I don't hate Windows. I'm just really, really sick of everything being locked into a single platform and a single vendor. Anything that can help to encourage platform independence is a very good thing.

Wouldn't it be awesome if a user could use the OS of their choice?

*In my situation, as I only have Linux servers I have to manually download all updates and then prepare scripts to deploy them to the clients. It's a pain in the ass. Before WGA, the Unattended project was always up to date with all patches and was fully automatic (just run the script-update script, and the download script and it's done). Every patch Tuesday I have to manually deal with that crap and have to use Windows to do it.