A Little HUMOR - Capt Jack Sparrow here. Vista News Discuss A Little HUMOR - Capt Jack Sparrow here. in the Windows Vista forums; "Does them mean that only Genuine Copies were invalidated..." and that ALL Pirated Copies had no problems?" 27th August 2007 Angus Kidman Microsoft, Vista, Windows What is ...

[Snuffy]

"Does them mean that only Genuine Copies were invalidated..."
and that ALL Pirated Copies had no problems?"

27th August 2007 Angus Kidman Microsoft, Vista, Windows
What is the Microsoft Windows Genuine Advantage, exactly? Over the past weekend, some owners of legitimate copies of Windows had their copies of Windows invalidated by Microsoft, while users of pirated copies were unaffected.

However, if WGA identifies your system as suspect, it also disables many features of Vista, including the souped up Aero interface, leaving you with little more than Internet Explorer to play with.

Microsoft engineers eventually managed to fix the problem around 19 hours after reports of it first surfaced, but not before it had to warn users on its forum that swearing wasn't acceptable.

Customers who have been tagged as the Captain Jack Sparrow of the software world have to revalidate their machines again to re-enable the blocked features. (Naturally, being a Microsoft fix, this also requires rebooting your PC.) Some afflicted users have reported that since revalidating, they are no longer able to access the Windows Update service.

The impact of WGA on piracy is questionable in any case. As one poster on Microsoft's forums remarked: "Download a pirated copy of Windows with Activation Cracks and live happily." The criminals stay happy, the genuine users get annoyed, and Microsoft staff seem more concerned about forum usage policies than customer discontent. It's not a pretty picture, is it?

[Snuffy]

Capt Jack Sparrow

Microsoft cites human error in anti-piracy malfunction
by Jose Vilches on August 29, 2007, 5:53 PM |
Microsoft has revealed a few more details on the Windows Genuine Advantage failure which left users of legitimate copies of Windows with stripped down versions of the OS. The company is attributing the problem to a human error:

"Preproduction code was sent to production servers. The production servers had not yet been upgraded with a recent change to enable stronger encryption/decryption of product keys during the activation and validation processes. The result of this is that the production servers declined activation and validation requests that should have passed."

The company stressed that the glitch affected less than 12,000 users and should not be considered an outage, since the servers were never offline. Alex Kochis, senior product manager for Windows Genuine Advantage at Microsoft further clarified that an existing policy will automatically validate all users if the WGA servers are down.

Microsoft said it is implementing some changes to make sure a similar incident doesn't happen again, including new checkpoints that should prevent accidental changes to the servers and improved monitoring in order to find out sooner if there is a problem.

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Microsoft has made progress in China, where the piracy rate has dropped to 82 percent this year from 94 percent four years ago, he said. The piracy rate is a measure of the level of pirated software in the country. China President Hu Jintao last year pledged to crack down on software piracy.