Ars Technica is reporting that Microsoft are pushing out a new update via Windows Update to their controversial anti-piracy software, Windows Genuine Advantage (WGA).

WGA is a tool which runs on the user’s system and verifies whether Microsoft thinks the user is running and genuine, or pirated version of Windows. If it finds you’re not running what it thinks to be an illegally acquired version of Windows, it nags you via the system tray to do something about it (i.e. buy a licence). You also can’t install certain applications and updates without having successfully validated your Windows installation.

It sounds simple enough, but WGA has come under fire for privacy issues (it phones home to perform the validation) and because it kept producing a lot of false positives.

This update is supposed to reduce the number of false positives and apparently there’s a new category called ‘Not Sure’, which, as the name suggests, is the category you get put in if Microsoft have doubts about your copy’s authenticity.

While Microsoft has not responded to requests for comment, it’s quite obvious what is going on here: Microsoft has added “not sure” as a way of cutting down on the number of false positives associated with WGA. As many as one in five PCs were failing WGA checks, but this new setting should both reduce this and give Microsoft the chance to investigate further the kinds of things that are landing folks in the “not sure” category.

I think part of the problem here is that a lot of OEM copies of Windows, that is, copies bundled with and usually pre-installed on PCs, use one activation code for each batch of computers (or even a whole model). That meant that if that one key got leaked, many users would find themselves being told about their illegal copies.

Clearly, piracy is something that Microsoft have to address, but the way they are going about it in recent times has not made them many friends. This move looks to be them toning down the severity of WGA.

One thing strikes me though – how easy it would be for malware to emulate WGA’s notifications and perhaps extort sums of cash from unsuspecting users to ‘fix’ the problem. Or maybe that’s just me.

Have you been falsely marked as a pirate by WGA? What are Gizbuzz readers’ thoughts on the issue? Let us know in comments.

Bill Gates just appeared on the BBC’s 10 O’Clock news to promote the launch of Vista (he’s in London today). Huw Edwards, the newsreader, had been well briefed and asked good questions, one of which was why people in the UK will pay so much more for Vista than their US counterparts. Gates’ answer was that he wasn’t aware of how the exchange rate fluctuated, but that they had a ‘global pricing strategy’ and tried to charge the same for their products across different markets.

A quick check of the price of Vista in the UK compared to the US will show that that is patently untrue. The Amazon cost of Vista Ultimate is £353.99 in the UK, and $378.99 across the pond. The US price in sterling today is £194, which makes Vista Ultimate a massive £159 cheaper in the US!

I don’t think it’s fair to call that a global pricing strategy, and frankly it is unacceptable. Microsoft is able to charge so much more simply because the software market in the UK is more expensive, and it is taking advantage of people.

Gates is either not aware of the issues or he lied. I doubt that he would lie on television, and so perhaps somebody should tell him about the price difference?

This raises an interesting sidenote about the BBC decision to use Edwards rather than a technology expert like Paul Mason, Guto Harri or Rory Cellan-Jones; Edwards seemed to feel unable to put Gates under pressure on the subject of prices, which meant that Gates was able to simply say that he wasn’t aware that there was a problem. Perhaps somebody with more expertise would have been more successful.

The launch of Vista is upon us – today being the day you can get Vista off the shelf. We all should know how much money Vista will set you back by now, but security Peter Guttman is asking a different question.

Vista will have support for next-generation DVD formats HD-DVD and Blu-ray. Subsequently, this means it has the ability to decrypt content protected with the new AACS copy protection system built into the operating system.

In a nutshell, some of this copy protection allows content producers to deliberately downscale the resolution of ‘premium content’ if it’s not coming over a protected link, such as a normal DVI or VGA link to your monitor and not the new HDMI connector (with HDCP). The whole idea of this is to prevent the piracy of high definition content.

All the code to faciliate this has been built deep into the bowels of Vista, and Gutmann asks in his paper ‘A Cost Analysis of Windows Vista Content Protection’ – is it worth it?

It’s a fairly technically heavy read, but it raises some very interesting points about this protection technology, and the performance and other costs of having this technology built into the OS.

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