Lots of people start packing up early on a Friday afternoon, and last week, Microsoft's WGA servers decided to follow suit. WGA stands for Windows Genuine Advantage, though a more accurate name would be WAPS, for Windows Anti-Piracy System. In Windows XP, WGA merely checks if a PC is using a valid version of Windows. In Vista, however, it can reduce the functionality of the "pirate" operating system by, for example, turning off the Aero-enhanced graphics. So if the WGA servers fail, it could ultimately punish more than 60 million innocent - and legal - users.
Microsoft became aware of the problem after users started posting angry complaints to the WGA support forum. WGA product manager Phil Liu said he wasn't going to sleep until the problem was fixed, and the servers were working correctly on Saturday morning.
The WGA blog says: "Our data shows that fewer than 12,000 systems were affected worldwide and that many of those have already revalidated and are fixed. This is encouraging news but we want to emphasise that one bad customer experience is one too many and that we're committed to learning from this experience and working to prevent this type of event from occurring again".
Source: guardian.co.uk
Nothing more than human error started it all," Alex Kochis, senior product manager for Windows Genuine Advantage at Microsoft wrote on a company blog Tuesday night. New software was accidentally loaded onto the live servers running the system, he said. That ultimately caused the servers to decline activation and validation requests that were good, he wrote.While Microsoft quickly noticed the problem and rolled back the changes within a half hour, the problem continued to affect the validation service, he said. The activation process was fixed in that time frame, he said.
The company is implementing some changes to make sure a similar incident doesn't happen again. It is improving monitoring in order to find out sooner if there is a problem, he said. Microsoft is also adding checkpoints that should prevent accidental changes to the servers.
Source: pcworld.com
Tags: Aero-enhanced | anti-piracy | Disadvantage | functionality | Genuine Advantage | Graphics | innocent | Microsoft | Pirate | PUNISH | Reduce | valid | version | Vista | windows
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