[Infowarrior] - Microsoft's antipiracy tool phones home daily

[Richard Forno]

Microsoft's antipiracy tool phones home daily

By Joris Evers
http://news.com.com/Microsofts+antipiracy+tool+phones+home+daily/2100-1016_3
-6081286.html

Story last modified Wed Jun 07 17:25:54 PDT 2006

Microsoft has vowed to better disclose the actions of its antipiracy tool
once it is installed on Windows PCs.

The tool, called Windows Genuine Advantage Notifications, is designed to
validate whether a copy of Windows has been legitimately acquired. However,
it also checks in with Microsoft on a daily basis, the company confirmed
Wednesday.

This has alarmed some people, such as Lauren Weinstein, a civil liberties
activist, who likened it to spyware in a blog posting.

Microsoft disputes that notion. It said that WGA's regular call home is
innocent and done for necessary maintenance purposes.

"The WGA Notifications program checks a server-side configuration setting to
determine if WGA should run or not," a company representative said in an
e-mailed statement. "As part of the pilot, this gives Microsoft the ability
to disable the program if necessary."

No meaningful data is exchanged during the check-in with Microsoft, which
happens after a computer starts up, the software maker said. Regardless, the
company does receive a user's IP address and a timestamp, Weinstein said in
his blog posting.

"We can argue about whether or not the tool's behavior is really spyware,"
Weinstein wrote on his blog Tuesday. The question is whether or not
Microsoft has provided sufficient notice, he added.

Microsoft acknowledged that it has not been forthcoming enough about the
antipiracy tool's behavior, but countered that its tool is not spyware,
since it is not installed without a user's consent and has no malicious
purpose. Still, Microsoft is considering several options to make its actions
clear to the user, including amending the software license, the company
representative said.

Microsoft launched WGA in September 2004 and has gradually expanded the
antipiracy program. It now requires validation before Windows users can
download additional Microsoft software, such as Windows Media Player and
Windows Defender. Validation is not required for security fixes.

Originally, people only had to validate their Windows installation when
downloading additional Microsoft software. Since November last year,
however, Microsoft has been pushing out the WGA Notifications tool along
with security updates to people in a number of countries.

The first time that a user runs WGA Validation to check if their version of
Windows is genuine, the information sent to Microsoft is the Windows XP
product key, PC maker, operating system version, PC bios information and the
user's local setting and language. Microsoft discloses that this information
is sent in the WGA tool license.


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