p2p news / p2pnet: Bill and the Boyz are being sued by an America PC owner who’s alleging Microsoft’s so-called Windows Genuine Advantage anti-piracy tool violates laws against spyware.

"The suit by Los Angeles resident Brian Johnson, filed this week in U.S. District Court in Seattle, seeks class-action status for claims that Microsoft didn’t adequately disclose details of the tool when it was delivered to PC users through the company’s Automatic Update system," says ZDNet’s Spyware Confidential, going on:

"A Microsoft spokesman says the lawsuit is ‘baseless’ and denies that the Windows Genuine Advantage tool is spyware. Microsoft published instructions yesterday for disabling and removing WGA notification. Apparently they are having second thoughts about it. Windows IT Pro quotes a Microsoft statement saying ‘Our customers have told us that they were disappointed with their WGA Notifications experience, and we have made an effort to improve that with this update,’ referring to an change on June 27 to WGA so it longer sends information to Microsoft on each computer boot up."

It may have stopped phoning home every time you boot, but it still phones home regularly, ie, every fortnight.

But thanks to firewallleaktester.com you can block Windows Genuine DisAdvantage completely with a tiny application called RemoveWGA which removes the notification part without interfering with the Validation process.

Download RemoveWGA from firewalltester.com, and we’ve also stashed a copy, just in case.

Digg this story

Also See:
Spyware Confidential – User suing Microsoft over WGA notification, calling it spyware, June 28, 2006
every fortnight – Disable Microsoft WGA, June 24, 2006

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This entry was posted on Thursday, June 29th, 2006 at 8:53 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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