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Written by Daniel
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Monday, 26 November 2007 10:23 |
Microsoft "learning" from WGA failures, but the lesson should be: kill it ARS Technica By Jeremy Reimer | Published: November 26, 2007 - 10:03AM CT
The introduction of Microsoft's Windows Genuine Advantage (WGA) anti-piracy program was met with emotions ranging from indifference to outright anger by legitimate Windows users. Certainly those who were falsely accused of pirating Windows had something to be upset about, as did the people who suffered from the service being unavailable earlier this year. Even those that have not been caught in the WGA snare are uncomfortable with it: the idea of a low-level system process watching your system for signs of piracy so it can reduce the functionality of your system is just a little Orwellian.
Microsoft's Alex Kochis, a Senior Product Manager on the WGA team, has posted an apology of sorts on the official WGA blog for this summer's failures. While stopping short of delivering an absolute promise that another WGA outage will never happen, Kochis said that the team had been "taking another hard look at our operations" and that they have been "taking steps" to prevent a similar outage in the future.
Kochis explained again that the WGA availability issue in August was caused by a faulty upgrade to the system. Because of this, the WGA team has changed the procedure by which they roll out updates in the future (those of you who work in enterprise environments where there are already processes to test new Windows patches before rolling them onto production servers may be permitted a slightly smug grin about now)... More Comment in the Forums |