Real reason WGA phones home
p2p news / p2pnet: Microsoft’s introduction of its WGA (Windows Genuine Advantage) has landed the company in all kinds of hot water, the loudest complaint being WGA is corporate spyware in sheep’s clothing.
“If you’re a pirate and caught, or if you’re a victim but have no proof, you can buy legitimate keys,” observes Ars Technica’s Ken Fisher. “If you’re a victim and you can prove it, you get a free replacement. The program is clearly designed to smoke out counterfeiters while collecting licensing fees.
But, he continues, the switch from a one-time authenticity check to what’s essentially constant monitoring isn’t addressed.
To explain this, “I offer the following hypothesis: constant monitoring is going to become very important with Windows Vista,” says Fisher. And it’s called Anytime Upgrade. With it, users who bought one version of Vista to ‘upgrade’ to other versions can simply obtaining a new license key and insert their old installation disk.
” When consumers head to the store to pick up Windows Vista next year, they will actually be picking up media that has all flavors of the desktop OS on it, regardless of what the box says,” Fisher goes on. “Joe’s Windows Vista Home Basic disc will also have all of the features found in Vista Ultimate, and Joe can activate those features for an upgrade price to be announced later.
“The end result is that the OS can be upgraded ‘in place’ using existing media.”
But with the potential rewards come concomitant risks.
What’s to stop users from, “uying the cheapest version of Vista (or even pirating it, for that matter) and then using hacks to easily upgrade to the best version?” wonders the Ars Technica post.
“This is where WGA’s persistent monitoring comes in. Through updates delivered to the application, known exploits will eventually be identified, or so the company hopes. Post installation hacks, whether to gain new features or change product keys, can now be identified in the field and targeted dynamically instead of waiting for the next major service pack (which could be years away). Furthermore, valid keys that are leaked can also be quickly disabled, although the company hopes to have another solution for leaked corporate keys in place soon. The fight against key leaks explains why the persistent monitoring will also be applied to OSes such as Windows XP, which cannot take advantage of Anytime Upgrade.
“As we move closer and closer to a world where portable physical storage formats will be replaced by high-performance networked storage, software developers are drooling for a safe way to sell software and software upgrades online, cutting out the middle man. Some are doing it already, others want in. For big-time targets of piracy such a Microsoft, the rush to sell software online must first be subjugated to antipiracy strategies. Microsoft and others know that post-installation exploits can be attractive for pirates, even sophisticated exploits that involve more than just replacing a specific DLL or editing a registry key. For Anytime Upgrade and its forthcoming brethren to be a success, persistent monitoring is going to be part of the equation.”
Also See:
Ars Technica – Why Microsoft would want WGA to phone home, July 2, 2006
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July 3rd, 2006 at 5:36 pm
what if the computer doesnt have access to the internet?
July 3rd, 2006 at 9:42 pm
the only people who this penalises are innocent clueless users, anyone with a clue who uses an unauthorised version of windows wont have a problem as they wouldnt be stupid enough to uses wga!
July 3rd, 2006 at 10:15 pm
For a long time I’ve had computers without internet access. I’m sure everyone has at one point or another found applications to legalise what M$ sees as pirated versions of software. Even now, I have a computer, not connected to the internet. So how is that one going to be checked? Simply it isn’t.
Just because you have programs doesn’t mean the internet is necessary for computing life. Of course, that isn’t the issue is it? M$ wants to protray that internet/computers are coupled together just like hotdogs and buns. As long as they can sell this idea, maybe they can sell the idea of spyware is ok too. It never was in my book and it still isn’t.
As Sony was told, it isn’t your computer.
July 4th, 2006 at 4:04 am
My prediction: if you can’t connect to the Internet, it will boot only into safe mode. Enough for you to copy files, but little else. The excuse will be that 99% of applications are Internet Aware – if you’re not connected, you’re pointless. Under their breath, they’ll say “so another 0.1% of users switch to Linux… big deal. We’re better off making honest customers of the other 99.9%”.
IMHO, of course…
July 4th, 2006 at 6:43 pm
dont givem any ideas
July 4th, 2006 at 6:47 pm
Everyone who actually believes THAT, stand on your head!
It’s SPYWARE plain and simple. It’s a known fact that M$ co-operates with any government that gives it the least bit static about anything. China and the US are only TWO examples. How many others are there?????
July 4th, 2006 at 11:12 pm
This isn’t going to be effective. A crack will be developed whereby the spybot will be directed to a ‘fake’ WGA site (probably through the use of the HOSTS file, in which case the fake validator can run as a part of IIS on the same machine) which will automatically ‘validate’ whatever is running on the machine.