It looks like Microsoft finally succeeded a bit with its Windows protection. Microsoft’s Windows Genuine Advantage has faced a whirlwind of criticism, but there should not be any complaints about the accuracy of the actual piracy check, according to Microsoft. About one in five of the 300 million PCs that have run WGA validations fail, according to Kochis, a senior licensing manager at Microsoft. That is pretty much in line with industry numbers for software piracy, he wrote. Windows Genuine Advantage is a stepped-up effort by Microsoft to boost the number of Windows users who actually pay for the operating system. The company has said that roughly a third of Windows copies worldwide have not been acquired legitimately–as a boxed product or bundled onto a machine, for example.
When WGA validation is run, the software sends data on the system back to Microsoft. This information includes the Windows XP product key, the maker of the PC, the operating system version, PC bios information, and the user’s local setting and language. In 80 percent of the cases that systems that fail the check, a stolen license key was used, according to Kochis. “One stolen license key from a U.S. university ended up on over a million PCs in China,” he wrote. The rest of the failures are caused by a mix of other types of counterfeiting and piracy, including a variety of forms of tampering, hacking, and other forms of installing unlicensed copies, according to Microsoft. We all know there are WGA cracks, but fixing newer and newer versions may annoy a huge percent of users, so they finally decide to buy a legal copy of Windows. Clever Microsoft, clever…
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