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WGA — Too Many False Positives
Posted by
kdawson
on Wed Sep 27, 2006 04:30 PM
from the customers'-genuine-disadvantage dept.
from the customers'-genuine-disadvantage dept.
An anonymous reader writes, "Microsoft insists that its Windows Genuine Advantage anti-piracy program is nearly flawless. But that's not the impression you get when you visit the company's WGA Validation Problems forum. Ed Bott at ZDNet went through 137 problem reports submitted there during a two-week period, each one accompanied by the output from the official Microsoft diagnostic utility, and found that 42% of the people reporting problems were actually running Genuine software. From the article: 'One large group consists of people who, for some unexplained reason, were displaying cryptographic errors related to digital signatures. The problem is so common, in fact, that Microsoft representatives have a canned response they paste into replies to forum visitors who appear to be showing false positives caused by these errors.' In a related story, the first WGA errors from Windows Vista and Office 2007 have appeared in the wild."
Related Stories
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IT: A Different Kind of WGA 'Problem' 348 comments
Ed Bott recently attempted to scout out the problems reported in so many horror stories floating around the net relating to Microsoft's WGA. He did experience problems, however, not the ones that you might expect. He intentionally installed a pirated copy of Windows XP to see how the process worked but was unable to get WGA to recognize his computer as pirated. From the article: "I'm reluctantly running a pirated version of Windows and can't get caught no matter how hard I try. But these same people want us to believe that the WGA software they've developed is nearly foolproof. They claim that all but "a fraction of a percent" of those 60 million people who've been denied access to Microsoft updates and downloads are guilty, guilty, guilty. Right."
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Download From Microsoft Without a WGA Check 195 comments
Anonymous Coward writes, "When you want to download a file from Microsoft, a WGA (Windows Genuine Advantage) check is performed. Microsoft installs a small piece of software on your computer that contacts the Microsoft server and checks the validity of your installed Windows software. If the test fails you will not be able to download the file(s). The following method gives you the ability to download every file from Microsoft without a WGA check."
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IT: Microsoft Office Genuine Advantage (OGA) 192 comments
Ant writes "PC World is reporting that Microsoft's Office Genuine Advantage (OGA) program will require mandatory validation of Office software starting October 27 (2006)." From the article: "Similarly, starting in January, users of Office Update will have to validate the legitimacy of their Office software before they can use the service, Microsoft added. Users absolutely hated the first iteration of the Windows Genuine Advantage (WGA) program, and their protests pressured the company into revising it about a year after it launched in July 2005."
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42% (Score:5, Funny)
RTFS (Score:4, Informative)
Parent
The Spin of the Dot (Score:4, Insightful)
It's more than likely that one of the very few problems you could experience with this software is that it gives you a false positive--therefore a high percentage of forum posts are based on this problem.
Honestly, do you think that every person who used this with success went straight to the forum boards and posted "Success! Thanks Microsoft!"?
Wait, you're trying to tell me that a software program run on thousands of machines has failed in some cases!? No fscking way. That never happens--WGA should be error free--this is unacceptable.
In the software world, 137 problems on say 5,000 cases of average people using your brand new product is "nearly flawless." I would guess 50% are user error, 42% false positives and 8% other.
How is this news? Come on guys, I hate Microsoft as much as the next Linux user but I'm not blindly stupid about it
Re:The Spin of the Dot (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:No point whining (Score:5, Insightful)
I am sick of Windows, but I'm even sicker of the geek who assumes that just because he switched his home computer—or even his office server—over to Linux that anybody should be able to ditch Windows whenever they feel like it.
There is a real world out here, and in it there are thousands of small companies that have to use computers to communicate with their customers and suppliers and to keep up with their competitors but that are too small to afford even a part-time IT guru. Companies like that have to buy their accounting software, their production software, their shop management software, their design software—and what's for sale out here in the real world only runs on Windows.
It's not, "can't be bothered to jump to a competitor". There is no competitor, not realistically.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:No point whining (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Great, you gave a valid reason for 10% of the office to run a paticular vendor's OS. How about the rest of the office? It's time to get something that is reliable.
Re:No point whining (Score:5, Insightful)
Wine isn't perfect. Some Windows applications do not work well under Wine.
Parent
Re:No point whining (Score:5, Insightful)
Your joking right.. In my humble opinion, wine is a piece of shit.
Computers aren't many thousands of dollars anymore, buy a $300 emachine, and run windows on your office computer if you need to. Come on, get real.. who can't afford to buy windows that needs to be running it?
I can go down to Walmart and BUY a computer with windows and be just fine. If I need to run Peachtree. I have a small business myself (Am a partner), we have about 6 Linux servers.. 1 is running PGSQL, one is running Resin/Java... the rest are running Asterisk. We put them into a 1/2 rack that we pay $400 a month for. We have a office full of windows workstations for our Customer Service, though all of them are using Windows & Xten phones for SIP taking incoming calls on Asterisk from a phone provider who has a sip gateway. Yes , we are windows friendly... but shit.. come on!
We have an accountant that keeps our books in order, taxes in line.. she uses Peach-tree. if someone thinks a -real- business is going to have a hard time paying $375 for a low end dell, with windows.. to do NOTHING but run Peach-tree... they have their head on backwards. You will spend more than that in man hours trying to get some linux goon trying to get whatever wacky-ass hack-accounting package to work.
Windows is a commodity, cost of doing business. Running Linux or Mac is nothing more than a luxury, being a linux/java programmer myself.. I don't see any savings at all, I find nothing more than comfort in working in my own familiar environment (My Mac doing Java programming and voiceapp work on Asterisk for Linux servers).. but that's just as expensive as a MSDN membership and paying for windows licenses on servers...
Parent
Running Linux or Mac is nothing more than a luxury (Score:3, Insightful)
I disagree that running Linux is a luxury unless you add that running any computer is a luxury. Last week I bought a new pc with linux preinstalled. The lowest priced Windows PC was twice what I paid for mine. And they all had XP installed, because of Activation and WGA I had decided years ago I wouldn't buy another Windows OS unless I absolutely had to or until MS got rid of Activation and WGA. Now I did have to get a card of ram because the pc didn't come with enough and a second harddisk, again for t
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Not my topic, but what the heck...
You know, OSS does not need to mean free. Why not donate part of what you save on lincensing to those OSS developers? Or fly them out on a junket? Or give them a leftover PDP POS in your storage that you've not fired up in years?
You are not a fool, so what guarantee can you expect from the developers that give their work to you open and free, at their loss, wi
Re:The Spin of the Dot (Score:5, Informative)
If you RTFA, you'd see that they limited their survey to people on the WGA forum who were having problems and upon request ran MS's "WGA Diagnostic" utility and posted the results. That utility throws back one of 4 results: Genuine, Blocked VLK, Invalid Product Key, and Not Activated. So as far as MS is concerned, they are legit, and not copies, but the WGA program still flagged them as not legit because of things other software (like a McAffe "quick clean" product) did to their system.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
If they have functionality to work out whether it's a false positive, why isn't that functionality in WGA in the first place?
Shouldn't even exist (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Explanations (Score:3, Interesting)
And no im not kidding, im heading out to 'repair' the very user that called microsoft crying for help. Its far to easy to just change your # then reformat..
Screw them and WGA.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
MS was built on piracy. Their 90% install base was derived from people passing copies of windows around back in the DOS and 3.1 days. Having achieved that it's now time to start charging, because the company is not making enough money (from the Wall Street standpoint, which requires logarithmic sales projections to achieve linear stock price changes). WGA was implemented because MS has no need to increase the install base % further, and they figure WGA can at
Re:The Spin of the Dot (Score:5, Insightful)
Wait, you're trying to tell me that a software program run on thousands of machines has failed in some cases!? No fscking way. That never happens--WGA should be error free--this is unacceptable.
I think the point is that there are a significant number of apparently legitimate Windows users who are having problems with their computers because of WGA. Since WGA offers no benefit to users, this is an instance of Microsoft taking actions which harm their own legitimate customers because of a policy which doesn't help any customers.
What I'm saying is, we accept software to malfunction now and then, so when the whole complicated piece of software has a couple bugs, that's expected. When a developer tries to integrate a new feature that benefits large numbers of customers but harms a small number due to a bug, that's forgivable. However, when a developer takes action to punish illegitimate users, developers should tread very lightly. It almost feels like vigilante justice, and you should make sure that it's not an issue for legitimate customers. They might have every legal right to do it, but as a customer, I do find it unacceptable. Microsoft purposefully shutting down an otherwise working system, causing a loss of man-hours, because they've falsely identified it as "suspect"-- I find that to be sufficient reason to complain.
As if we needed another reason.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:The Spin of the Dot (Score:4, Insightful)
Every test will ultimately have faults. They will always produce some amount false negatives and false positives, and to that extent you're right in saying that they're unavoidable.
But! That doesn't mean they are equally unavoidable. Depending on the consequences of false negatives and positives, you can and should design your test to avoid one, possibly at the cost of another.
For instance, when testing for a disease, the consequence of a false positive indicates a healthy person is sick. A false negative indicates a sick person is healthy. Obviously the former scenario is a lot more preferable. Proper disease tests are designed in exactly that way, so that the probability of the former is usually several orders of magnitude larger than the latter. (This is also why they almost always do further tests on a positive result.)
Okay. So in the WGA scenario, a false positive means an honest customer is getting screwed out of support they paid for. (I'd actually call it a false negative though, since they're not running 'genuine' software.) A false negative means someone running pirated software gets support they weren't entitled to.
At least from the consumer perspective, the latter scenario is definitely better. In an ideal market, that would be what would be best for MS too. However, it's not an ideal market situation, because they're a monopoly. That makes it possible for them to push their own interest at the expense of the customer to a lot larger extent.
So I think there's every reason to criticise MS here. If they didn't intend for this, it's badly designed software. Given their massive install-base, they should be expected to be careful in designing this stuff. Given their equally massive profit, they certainly have the resources to do so. If they did intend this, then they're screwing their own customers just to save a buck on support.
Incompetence or malice: Take your pick. But in neither case would I hold MS blameless.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
actually, I've heard that M$ is encouraging this kind of behavior as they believe it will put less load on their servers if people just post when something they make actually works and they can just assume the rest is total dogshit.
My Experience with a WGA False Positive (Score:5, Interesting)
Back in July(?) when Microsoft issued an update to the WGA tool, I figured I may as well install it (I'd be forced to eventually) on my one Windows box. So I installed it, and rebooted, and the login screen proclaimed loudly that Windows was not genuine. (Well, not literally loudly, it didn't shout over the speakers or anything -- which would be an interesting deterrent, now that I think about it.)
This came as something of a surprise, given that:
I logged in, did some searching on Microsoft's knowledge base, and found a link that said something like "Validate here." I clicked on it.
To my surprise, it told me my copy was perfectly valid.
I eventually concluded that Norton Internet Security had blocked the initial validation attempt. Because there was no desktop shell, there was no opportunity for it to pop up a notice and ask me if I wanted it to let the data through.
After that experience, I can't say I'm surprised that Microsoft found many of their false positives to be the result of security software. Admittedly, they were looking at registry changes, crypto problems and McAfee, rather than a transient error with Norton.
What about false Positives? (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
There are 10 kinds of people (Score:3, Insightful)
those who can read statistics and those who can't.
There is no way you can derive a headline like "WGA giving 42% false positives" from a statement like "42% of the users that reported problems with WGA ran genuine software". 42% of the problems sampled should not have triggered problems, but that's all, there's no insight how many attempts of validating your Windows license there are.
There are at least 10 people who don't understand this: One slashdot poster and one slashdot editor.
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Made Up Statistics (Score:3, Funny)
Umm, selection bias....? (Score:5, Insightful)
Wild guess here -- people with legitimate software are a lot more likely to submit problem reports than people with bad copies are to post "My 1337 w4r3z w0n7 w0rk! G00d j0b!"
Just the other day.... (Score:4, Insightful)
One facet of this comparison is that Linux (generally) does not claim to be perfect, or the best operating system to have. This, to me, looks like the playground bully trying to recover from having his pants fall down around his ankles.
While WGA is a plausibly good idea for someone that sells their software, the implementation of it has left a lot to be desired.
The Question Is... (Score:5, Interesting)
Why I'm running Linux on this PC (Score:5, Interesting)
The reason the other two are running pirated XP was an experiment after the legit pirated fiasco on this PC.
I decided I had had enough, booted into FC5, repartioned the drive to all Linux and haven't looked back.
Don't care what Vista is like, as I will not even reinstall XP anymore. This weekend, both of the other PC's will get their XP partitions deleted and go back to dual boot Win98se and Ubuntu only. The XP partitions are too small to be more than barely functional, so no sense in trying to leave them running.
So here is 3 sales/upgrades that MS won't get.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
It doesn't look like they were getting them anyway.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Until last month's fiasco, they both just used this one- I was usually gone at work anyhow. So, I have spent a bit of time and effort to get most of the stuff working for them in Linux. It has not been easy, as
What's counted as false positive (Score:5, Interesting)
What I don't get is why they don't just take the flawless detection code from the diagnostics tool and put it into WGA.
Apple (Score:3, Interesting)
In my neck of the woods two people in my family are thinking of a full out change and so are a few of my friends. It's obviously not just because of WGA. It's a lot about a growing feeling of insecurity and anger at a company that just doesn't seem to care a damn.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
The day Apple ever does this kind of shit is the day i skulk over to Linux and figure out how i'm going to do my video work.
Re:Apple (Score:5, Insightful)
Now, with WGA (and my valid key invalidated for whatever reason), I'm now using my Mac and my Linux machines only. I have absolutely no desire to deal w/verifying with MSFT that my install is a valid one. I shouldn't have to as it's THEIR problem.
While I never trusted MSFT, there was a 3.5 year stretch there where I didn't much care either way. This one incident has turned me around right quick.
And now, for the machine that I need to have XP on for my wife to do her job, we have used several hacks to get around the WGA and get it what it needs to run. I don't feel the slightest bit guilty about it either. I paid for it and now I'm going to run it.
Parent
Why exactly would you install the WGA update? (Score:4, Insightful)
1. System works fine, and your copy of windows keeps working just as before. No added benefits.
2. System stops working due to problem with WGA.
Given that there is no benefit and the possibility of a downside, I fail to see why you would choose to install or use such a technology if you know about it. It is a move with only a negative expected value.
I just don't understand (Score:5, Insightful)
WGA locking legitimate users out (Score:5, Informative)
Some customer would bring in a computer that wouldn't start. We determined that the motherboard was faulty, and replaced it with a similar one.
Windows starts up, everything works, except it wants to be re-activated again. Online activation fails, so I phone Microsoft, enter the forty-something digit number, reads the product key to someone, who then tells me that they are very sorry, but no, for some reason they cannot give me a re-activation code, so I will have to reinstall Windows in order to get it working with that product key. However, changing the product key works fine.
So I call the customer and explain the situation to them, and let them choose between:
1) me taking their harddisk out, attaching it to our backup machine, backing up all their stuff, reinstalling Windows, and all their programs, and all updates, then restoring the backups, and
2) buying a new xp home license,
they both chose option 2. That way they would get their machine back with their entire configuration intact, and if they chose option 1, all that work I would have to do would take so long time that they wouldn't be saving much anyway, compared to buying a new license.
This only happened these two times; most times when we replaced a motherboard, either the reactivation over the internet would work, or the phone representative would give a working reactivation code.
But these two customers payed for a new XP Home license even though they owned a fully legal one already.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
My mothers computer had issues booting a week ago, trying to use the disc that came with the machine to resolve the problem resulted in the harddrive being formatted (no questions asked, nice, eh?), and then failed to actually install the OS as there seem to be disc errors.
Solution? Purchase a copy of XP Home (Upgrade). I wasn't happy about it, and I probably would have started yelling at the clerk in the store, but in the end they now have a copy of XP Home which can be used to install, or fix/repair an in
nothing is as aggravating as... EXACTLY! (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Sad, but biased (Score:3, Insightful)
My question would then be: if it's working, how many of you even bother to visit Microsoft's forum to post "Thanks, it worked"?
Usually, when a fix works, people move on, and don't go back to forums to confirm things are working.
My experience (Score:3, Informative)
I've used one of the many hacks (Removing execute permission for the Local System account to the WGA files and then deleting them) to remove WGA from my machine and now I only use MBSA [microsoft.com] for my patching. It's a little long winded, but it's infinitely better than the hassle of being repeatedly told that my copy of windows is illegal when it clearly isn't.
screw wga because... (Score:3, Insightful)
If MS sold their software at a lower price they would generate more sales that would compensate for the low price.
I know so many people that say "I would buy windows, if it didn't cost hundreds!" If they sold the pro edition for a cheaper price then they would sell so many more that it would compensate for the few that did pay the higher price. I'm not in marketing, I'm in accountancy, so I know about economic curves and I think MS is just milking the corporate market for as much as they can. If they opened up their 'pro' systems for lower prices I am sure their sales would increase as well as their revenue.
MS alienate potential buyers with their WGA and high prices. Set your prices low, and sell a bundle. Look at your profits, M$, you're not "hard done by".
42%? It is 100% at my company (Score:3, Insightful)
So, we wasted two days reloading a bunch of PC's that most definitley had legal software, in two of our divisions.
The result? Windows Update service is DISABLED on our domains, and I am looking into some sort of update deployment program that will allow me to choose which updates go out to PCs.
Microsoft, I guess thinks it can operate like the RIAA, assume that their customers are thieves and treat them like criminals.
I can tell you this much, I don't see myself deploying Vista anywhere until it's absolutely unavoidable.
Re:Not as many as it seems. (Score:4, Insightful)
I can't say, but I'm imagining it's a very small fraction of total users.
The point though is to make sure you're comparing like to like. Problem Reports is not the same as Total Problems, just as Potential Problem Reports is not the same as Total Windows Users.
Parent
Re:Not as many as it seems. (Score:5, Insightful)
Unlike Slashdotters, not everyone has a spare computer or six kicking around, to deal with just such an occasion. Of course since I switched to Macs, I'm not quite sure what failing the WGA does at this point, but since I've seen the term 'locked out' more than once in this topic, I'll assume it's a bit more hostile than it used to be.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
So how well do you like Ubuntu? I have had no problems with it myself.