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

My Experience with a WGA False Positive

[Kelson]

Back in July(?) when Microsoft issued an update to the WGA tool, I figured I may as well install it (I'd be forced to eventually) on my one Windows box. So I installed it, and rebooted, and the login screen proclaimed loudly that Windows was not genuine. (Well, not literally loudly, it didn't shout over the speakers or anything -- which would be an interesting deterrent, now that I think about it.)

This came as something of a surprise, given that:

1. This was a Dell, not some no-name computer.
2. It still had the original OS install, and no hardware had been changed.
3. The previous version of WGA had reported no problems.

I logged in, did some searching on Microsoft's knowledge base, and found a link that said something like "Validate here." I clicked on it.

To my surprise, it told me my copy was perfectly valid.

I eventually concluded that Norton Internet Security had blocked the initial validation attempt. Because there was no desktop shell, there was no opportunity for it to pop up a notice and ask me if I wanted it to let the data through.

After that experience, I can't say I'm surprised that Microsoft found many of their false positives to be the result of security software. Admittedly, they were looking at registry changes, crypto problems and McAfee, rather than a transient error with Norton.

The Question Is...

[TheGreatHegemon]

How many false copies of windows pass as authentic?

What's counted as false positive

[dtfinch]

That's when WGA says the copy is non-genuine, and Microsoft's Genuine Advantage diagnostics tool disagrees and says it's genuine.

What I don't get is why they don't just take the flawless detection code from the diagnostics tool and put it into WGA.

Re:The Spin of the Dot

[popeye44]

Well I handle 400 pc's on a single floor of a building and we use corp licensing. We haven't installed it on a single pc as of yet. However I personally on the side take care of 5-6 pc's running windows Xp pro. the 1 machine I allowed this software to be installed on now tells me I have to go get a license. I uninstalled their "criticial piece of bullshit software? NAGWARE!" and haven't looked back. This is a dell purchased machine that hasn't even been rebuilt once and it's telling me I'm not legit. If only I'd stuck with nix back in 97 but alas.. someone has to support the corp.

Why I'm running Linux on this PC

[rts008]

Here at home, out of my 3 PC's connected to the network and internet, 2 of the 3 PC's are currently running pirated copies of XP and have safely passed WGA and currently get their updates flawlessly via AutoUpdate at MS. The reason that is not 3 out of three, is last month I had to replace my HDD, reinstalled my legit, retail WinXP Pro cd, went to MS updates only to be barred from updates and activation because they determined my retail cd was pirated- have had it running on old HDD for 3 years prior with no problems.

The reason the other two are running pirated XP was an experiment after the legit pirated fiasco on this PC.

I decided I had had enough, booted into FC5, repartioned the drive to all Linux and haven't looked back.
Don't care what Vista is like, as I will not even reinstall XP anymore. This weekend, both of the other PC's will get their XP partitions deleted and go back to dual boot Win98se and Ubuntu only. The XP partitions are too small to be more than barely functional, so no sense in trying to leave them running.

So here is 3 sales/upgrades that MS won't get.

Re:No point whining

[JymmyZ]

Start pestering the makers of these programs to start working on porting them. The more people start making a racket about being tied to one OS and demanding that their money be given a choice, the more software companies will listen up and start working on giving us all freedom of software