arstechnica.com — Windows Genuine Advantage is a controversy wrapped in an enigma buried inside a migraine headache. Or at least that's what it is for the millions of users who have been falsely identified as software pirates as a result of WGA's attempt to root out piracy. Since July 2005, one in five computers running Windows have failed so-called WGA tests.
Jan 24, 2007 View in Crawl 4
brnewsJan 25, 2007
I have never met anyone amongst my countrymen who have paid for a copy of windows. May it be XP, 98, 95 or 3.1. Why would anyone pay so much for such piece of crap?
en7ropiaJan 25, 2007
If you pause at 2:29 and 2:30 in the animation, you see some kind of subliminal image? What the hell is that?<a class="user" href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K1H7omJW4TI">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K1H7omJW4TI</a>
grumpyrainJan 25, 2007
"So you would say those being falsely accused of piracy actually passed the WGA test...I would not!"No, that is not what I said. I said that of those relative few accused, way too many people were falsely accused - MS get your act together.Say 1% are accused (actually I am overestimating here, from the article, it is *under* 1% and unless you have some other better way of measuring).20% of those 1% are actually innocent. So 0.2 * 0.01 = 0.2 %So the worst case is a fifth of a percent of users are falsely accused. The problem is that 0.2% of a really big number is a big number.Personally, I think that there should be some financial compensation when a false positive occurs, a bit like a costs order may go against the police if they can not show reasonable suspicion for making an arrest.If you read the first comment in the article with 70 something diggs now:"I work at a PC shop and I have personally worked on dozens of cases like this"I assume by dozens he means like 25. If there was a 20% rate, it would mean his shop has only sold 125 computers in the time he has been there. Somehow I doubt that is the case.
grumpyrainJan 25, 2007
If it was such a piece of crap, you would have no need to pirate it either.
grumpyrainJan 25, 2007
It was illegal for the store you purchased your machine from to not provide the Windows CD or at least some sort of Recovery CD that will restore the image onto a new drive. Your PC should also have had a sticker stating the keys.
Closed AccountJan 26, 2007
Oddly enough I read yesterday that about 20% percent of windows copies are pirated...1 in 5 is 20%, I would have to say that the WGA is spot on.