[Infowarrior] - Windows Genuine Advantage suffers worldwide outage

[Richard Forno]

(yet another vulnerability caused by forcing DRM and requiring network
centricity on your customer base to make standalone products function. Not a
good thing!  ---rf)

Windows Genuine Advantage suffers worldwide outage, problems galore

By Ken Fisher | Published: August 25, 2007 - 11:44AM CT

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070825-windows-genuine-advantage-suff
ers-worldwide-outage-problems-galore.html

Late last night we started receiving reports from readers experiencing
problems with Windows Genuine Advantage authentication. Users of both
Windows XP and Windows Vista were writing to say that they could not
validate their installations using WGA, and one user even said that his
installation was invalidated by the service.

We contacted our sources at Microsoft, who told us off the record that the
company is aware of a major WGA server outage affecting users across the
globe. The Windows Genuine Advantage support forum has exploded with
complaints, as a result, and Phil Liu, WGA project manager, says that he
won't sleep until the problem is fixed. Windows Vista and XP are affected,
32- and 64-bit versions.

Microsoft is telling users who are affected that they should "try again"
later, with some support techs telling readers that Microsoft is aiming to
have a fix in place by Tuesday, August 28. That would mean the outage will
last more than three days, given that it started last night (and may have
started earlier; we're hearing reports of some users running into this
earlier in the week, on limited bases).

Reader Aaron Woolf tells us he was unable to validate patches for
installation on a developer's copy of Vista pulled from MSDN. He writes, "My
legitimate MSDN-acquired Vista Ultimate, which has been running, activated
and validated for several months, now fails WGA." Others have reported
similar difficulties.

How does this affect you?

If you use Windows, do your best to avoid anything that requires a ping to
WGA. That means you should stay away from patches and add-ons until the
coast is clear. WGA will not reach out across the Internet and deactivate
your copy of Windows, but you should avoid talking to a WGA server for any
reason.

For those of you doing installations and upgrades this weekend, we recommend
that you avoid activation at this time. Remember that you can run Windows
legally for 30 days without activating.

If you attempt a validation and it fails, your install may be marked as
non-genuine, which could lead to several annoyances. First things first, do
not reboot a Windows machine that has been marked as non-genuine. Once you
do so, you will lose functionality and the Aero interface. It would be best
to wait until this problem has been resolved.

The cause

Right now we don't have official word on a cause, but one source with
familiarity with WGA tells us that the issue may be caused by updates to the
service that were required after Microsoft expanded the number of
activations keys available for Windows XP. However, the sense we get from
Phil Liu is that Microsoft is pretty much in the dark right now.