WGA: Will Microsoft muzzle the software that cries wolf?

Computerworld - Despite the criticism leveled at Microsoft Corp. after the recent rollout -- and rollback -- of Windows Genuine Advantage (WGA), experts say that effort was just the first phase in the company's latest antipiracy effort, dubbed the Genuine Software Initiative.

In fact, the initiative -- which will include a similar campaign in the near term called Office Genuine Advantage (OGA) to fight piracy of Microsoft's dominant productivity software suite -- is tied in the long term with how Microsoft and other vendors will sell and deliver software.

"It's getting to the point where we're getting 'Advantaged' left and right," said Lauren Weinstein, a Woodland Hills, Calif.-based IT consultant and co-founder of the pro-privacy group People for Internet Responsibility. "The issue is, whose advantage is it?"

In early June, Weinstein publicly revealed via his blog that WGA was sending back data about users' computers every time they rebooted their PCs. That worsened WGA's already bad image: Users complained about WGA's tendency to stealthily install itself on some users' PCs, nag others who refused to install it, and falsely cry wolf with legitimately installed copies of Windows.

Despite anecdotal evidence of numerous "false positive" reports by WGA, Microsoft said that those false positives make up a "fraction of a percent" of the 60 million PCs worldwide that failed WGA validation, according to information posted by Alex Kochis, a licensing manager on the Windows Genuine Advantage team, on his blog.

According to outside experts, most victims have been gamers or PC hobbyists who have upgraded their hardware, which Microsoft has acknowledged can confuse WGA. But some have been businesses like S&S Cycle Inc., a maker of motorcycle racing parts in Viola, Wis.

WGA repeatedly identified S&S's 180 PCs as running pirated copies of Windows, according to network administrator Karen Zander. Worse, it sent that data to Microsoft every morning as employees arrived in the office and turned on their PCs.

"Our network came to screeching halt," said Zander, who eventually fixed the bug by working with Microsoft technical support.

Such complaints, along with two class-action lawsuits, forced Microsoft to pull WGA's most intrusive features and make it optional. Having learned its lesson with WGA, Microsoft is likely to proceed more cautiously with its Office counterpart, which it began testing in April.

"Microsoft has almost no competition with Windows," said Joshua Erdman, president of San Luis Obispo, Calif.-based software reseller Digital Foundation Inc. "With Office, it's a lot easier to switch to something like OpenOffice or StarOffice. So Microsoft can't afford to [anger] people as much."

OGA, for now, consists of an ActiveX-based tool that users are invited to download on a voluntary basis the first time they get certain noncritical updates from Office. Like WGA's validation tool, OGA checks to see whether the license key is stolen or counterfeit. If it isn't, the tool stores a special download key on the PC to aid in future verification.