Windows Genuine Advantage has turned out to be two lies for the price of one; it neither consistently validates the genuine product nor does it offer much of an advantage to anyone.
What it does do is confuse a lot of end-users and prevent people from getting software and updates necessary to their productivity and full use of their computers. Ed Bott has a
first-pass analysis up that suggests 42% of current WGA failures are false positives. So far it's not been used to prevent vital security updates. It's more likely that it never will be; instead, in Vista and beyond it's probable that a WGA validation failure will simply disable your computer entirely. Of course, it's bound to be more reliable by then--Microsoft doesn't want the public relations disaster that would come of so many people being prevented from using legitimately purchased software--but still, do you want to be in that tiny percent that is left?
There are a couple of articles up at ghacks.net detailing some ways around the current WGA check technology.
This one is a purpose-built tool that can bypass the WGA checks;
this one simply fools the Microsoft Website and doesn't require you to install anything. The latter is probably preferable although I imagine it will be eliminated more quickly.
I haven't had a chance to try a third method that I think might work yet; I imagine any site running
WSUS can probably get around WGA checks since the download server is the only thing that talks to Microsoft, not the clients.
Automatic Updates apparently have still been working for some people, but those don't include many tools you might want to download from MS separately. For those, a Software Update group policy on AD (Active Directory) networks should probably still work. I don't have any clients running AD or WSUS who are also experiencing the WGA issues, however.
Unless the company takes a drastically different direction with their anti-piracy measures (and I don't contend that they shouldn't have such measures; only that they shouldn't ever inconvenience legitimate customers) you can expect a lot more of this, with more severe consequence, with Vista and Office 2007 and beyond.
indigoMOONsystems
