Lawsuit Claims WGA Is Spyware

twitter writes "Windows Genuine Advantage (WGA), Microsoft's euphemistically named digital restrictions scheme, is the target of another spyware and false advertising lawsuit. 'Microsoft this week was sued in a Washington district court for allegedly violating privacy laws through Windows XP's Windows Genuine Advantage (WGA) copy protection scheme. Similar to cases filed in 2006, the new class action case accuses Microsoft of falsely representing what information WGA would send to verify the authenticity of Windows and that it would send back information [daily IP address and other details that could be used to trace information back to a home or user]. The complaint further argued that Microsoft portrayed WGA as a necessary security update rather than acknowledge its copy protection nature in the update. WGA's implementation also prevented users from purging the protection from their PCs without completely reformatting a computer's system drive.' There were at least two other lawsuits launched in 2006 over WGA. According to the Wikipedia article, none of them have been resolved. The system is built into Vista and Windows 7."

Comments

My experience with WGA

[NoYob]

For a few years, I manually did updates of my XP system and I actually checked what packages were to be installed. I flagged the WGA to not install. No problem. Then with the rash of assholes writing malware for XP, I turned on automatic updates. One day, I decide to do some maintenance because even with 2GB of memory, I occasionally got the Windows is low in virtual memory warnings even though I was just running Thunderbird, Firefox, and maybe one other program.When I logged into the admin account, a message box shows up saying that I don't have WGA installed and that I should click "Here" to install it or I will keep getting these messages. I didn't. I never got the messages in my user account but only when I logged into my admin account. Interesting - huh? So, one day I relented, and installed WGA to see if in fact it would flag me - I got my XP Pro license through one of those college online programs and I was curious. I came out fine.

I haven't run wireshark to see what evil may lie in the heart of my XP machine - yet.

Re:Nothing will happen

[negRo_slim]

Because the biggest obstacle to any new computer technology just got removed from the equation.

In what way does Microsoft impede new computer technology?
Seems to me by providing a consistent platform on which one can develop new technologies they seem to enhance it?

Or by your viewpoint, is computer technology == operating system?