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According to this item
<http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20061031-8113.html>, Microsoft's
Windows Genuine Advantage spyware identifies about 1 in 5 PCs as having
some kind of licence validation problem.

For those that fail, a stolen volume licensing key is the culprit about
80 percent of the time.

So what about the other 20%? Presumably they are false positives--legitimate
users incorrectly identified as illegitimate. That's 4% of all PC
users--quite a large number of ****ed-off users, wouldn't you agree?

Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote:
> According to this item
> <http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20061031-8113.html>, Microsoft's
> Windows Genuine Advantage spyware identifies about 1 in 5 PCs as having
> some kind of licence validation problem.
>
> For those that fail, a stolen volume licensing key is the culprit about
> 80 percent of the time.
>
> So what about the other 20%? Presumably they are false positives--legitimate
> users incorrectly identified as illegitimate. That's 4% of all PC
> users--quite a large number of ****ed-off users, wouldn't you agree?

Could be any other type of stolen key, volume license keys are just the
most common way of pirating windows but it can be done with a normal XP
Pro or Home key.

On Wed, 01 Nov 2006 16:45:44 +1300, Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote:

> According to this item
> <http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20061031-8113.html>, Microsoft's
> Windows Genuine Advantage spyware identifies about 1 in 5 PCs as having
> some kind of licence validation problem.
>
> For those that fail, a stolen volume licensing key is the culprit about
> 80 percent of the time.
>
> So what about the other 20%? Presumably they are false positives--legitimate
> users incorrectly identified as illegitimate. That's 4% of all PC
> users--quite a large number of ****ed-off users, wouldn't you agree?

Isn't it interesting that a "positive" means *not* having a valid licence.

Under the WGA a 0 returns 1, and a 1 returns a 0.

The "Windows genuine advantage" is nothing at all about having an
advantage per se - it's all about deliberately forcing those who will not
(or cannot) pay the M$ tax onto Open and Free software.

Many of those people probably would not have tried Free Open Source
software otherwise.

The WGA is, therefore, a good thing. )


Ma Hogany

--
"The average user doesn't know what he wants. The average user wants
fries with that, if prompted."