WGA failure highlights major flaw in Microsoft’s anti-piracy strategy

This article just highlights the growing dissatisfaction with WGA…Analysis: Unfortunately for Microsoft, as an anti-piracy system, WGA’s track record is mostly negative. This weekend’s Windows Genuine Advantage outage was a powerful indicator of the asymmetrical trade-off inherent in Microsoft’s anti-piracy efforts.This latest WGA outage is just one of several signs that Microsoft needs to scrap this system and go back to the drawing board. The company also needs to develop an anti-piracy strategy that it can present to the computing public with promises that it will never ensnare the innocent. It should never make false accusations, it should never reach out and degrade a user’s computing experience based on those accusations, and it should never get in the way of any legitimate user attempting to install, upgrade, or patch a system.This isn’t a lot to ask for, really. Windows is the only OS that puts its users through these travails. While it is true that Apple uses a nasty mix of DRM and other technologies to prevent you from installing its OS on non-Apple hardware, it’s not the same thing at all. WGA simply doesn’t work reliably, and its specialty appears to be false accusations. This is no way to treat customers.Read More…

(Via Ars Technica.)