Windows users labeled pirates thanks to DRM
by Ruth Suehle
Some XP and Vista users were sent into “Reduced Functionality Mode” over the weekend when Microsoft’s Windows Genuine Advantage (WGA) servers failed. WGA is Microsoft’s anti-piracy tool that forces users to validate their copies of Windows in order to receive updates. Earlier this year, ArsTechnica reported on WGA’s high rate of false positives.
Microsoft’s answer to its users after this failure? Oops. Try again in three days. (In reality, it was fixed within 12-19 hours, depending on whose report you read.)
The result of Microsoft’s anti-piracy DRM was that people who actually forked over the money for Windows were affected, while pirated copies that had disabled WGA were fine. From PC Magazine:
One aspect of the nightmare scenario should be discussed now. What kind of system is this, anyway? There should be no way that a legitimate user of a product should be suddenly cut off from use of that product because of an authentication server error, ever.
All this proves is that these Web-based applications cannot be trusted. A hacker attack on the WGA servers could shut down literally millions of machines whose users stupidly subscribed to this supposed “advantage,” which does little more than look for pirated copies of the OS. And yes, some users are not stupid but were forced to use the system. Others were hounded or tricked.
If this WGA were designed right in the first place, the computers that found the server inoperative when they checked in to it should have internal code that validates their OS until the server comes back up. Maybe it is too hard for Microsoft’s 20,000 coders to manage this sort of thing. Too logical.
All the chatter on the message boards during the outage slowly got around to the subject of switching to Linux; there is no way such a thing could ever happen to Linux users. This is not what Microsoft wants to read, especially on its own forums. One could only imagine the screeching if the WGA server had still been down on Monday.
