WGA — Too Many False Positives 268
An anonymous reader writes, "Microsoft insists that its Windows Genuine Advantage anti-piracy program is nearly flawless. But that's not the impression you get when you visit the company's WGA Validation Problems forum. Ed Bott at ZDNet went through 137 problem reports submitted there during a two-week period, each one accompanied by the output from the official Microsoft diagnostic utility, and found that 42% of the people reporting problems were actually running Genuine software. From the article: 'One large group consists of people who, for some unexplained reason, were displaying cryptographic errors related to digital signatures. The problem is so common, in fact, that Microsoft representatives have a canned response they paste into replies to forum visitors who appear to be showing false positives caused by these errors.' In a related story, the first WGA errors from Windows Vista and Office 2007 have appeared in the wild."
42% (Score:5, Funny)
Made Up Statistics (Score:3, Funny)
What about false Positives? (Score:5, Funny)
md5sum (Score:1, Funny)
Re:Made Up Statistics (Score:2, Funny)
Re:42% (Score:2, Funny)
Re:The Spin of the Dot (Score:3, Funny)
actually, I've heard that M$ is encouraging this kind of behavior as they believe it will put less load on their servers if people just post when something they make actually works and they can just assume the rest is total dogshit.
Re:Definite false positives. (Score:3, Funny)
So how well do you like Ubuntu? I have had no problems with it myself.