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

42%

[LinuxGeek]

42%? I guess that is why WGA should be described as "Mostly harmless" rather than "nearly flawless".

Re:42%

[megaditto]

well, I, for one, did not get it until he explained.

Made Up Statistics

[Tama00]

Did you know that 95.4% of statistics are made up on the spot.

Re:Made Up Statistics

[DaveM753]

But the other 3 are telling the truth.

What about false Positives?

[LinuxGeek]

Hmmm, I wonder how long it will be before someone is able to get Wine to run the WGA utils well enough to get accepted as genuine.

md5sum

[Anonymous Coward]

Just compute the md5sum of a bunch of critical Windows files and make sure that they match the genuine values. That will reliably tell if you've got a genuine copy or a cheap knock-off.

Re:The Spin of the Dot

[binarybum]

Honestly, do you think that every person who used this with success went straight to the forum boards and posted "Success! Thanks Microsoft!"?

  actually, I've heard that M$ is encouraging this kind of behavior as they believe it will put less load on their servers if people just post when something they make actually works and they can just assume the rest is total dogshit.

Re:Definite false positives.

[Technician]

After 2 hours on the phone with clueless MS reps, I was "accidentally" disconnected by the tech without being given a resolution. 5 minutes on Google and I "resolved" the issue on my own.

So how well do you like Ubuntu? I have had no problems with it myself.