Genuine Windows Blog

Well, I’ve been away for a while on a combination of time off and doubling up to cover for others taking time off. Even though I’ve been away on vacation, many of my colleagues have been busy at work and it’s shaping up to be busy fall. I’m excited to...

Since my post on Sunday, in which I talk about what a false positive is and what it isn't, I've received a couple of questions about the scenarios I outlined and how the math works so I'd like to clear some of that up. First off, the purpose of outlining...

Recently I've been hearing questions from journalists, other bloggers and customers about what exactly makes systems fail validation. Specifically, I have been asked for two things. First, a breakdown of the kinds of piracy that are detected by WGA and...

I saw a report internally today of a customer who recently purchased a PC from a reseller, the customer indicated that they were pretty sure that the copy of Windows included with the PC was not genuine. Also, the customer thought that the reseller that...

In recent days we've received a number of reports of a worm or Trojan that is infecting systems and labels the process it runs under as "Windows Genuine Advantage Notification". An update was posted to the Malicious Software Encyclopedia that provides...

Just saw this news earlier today reporting that a recently released Apple software update, specifically to a widget that runs on the desktop, checks in with Apple servers. Apparently this feature is used to confirm that the widget that is running is the...

With all of the recent interest in WGA over the past month, I wanted to take a moment to clarify a few of the misperceptions out there and hopefully bring some clarity about what the program is intended to do. First, I’d like to revisit the announcement...

After reading much of the coverage of WGA's latest release in the trade press and on numerous blogs recently I've seen people repeatedly ask why WGA is important or at all useful to PC users. I've also seen numerous places where it has been claimed that...

The weekend saw even more activity with a posting late on Friday on ZDNet by David Berlind , another post on Slashdot and a piece posted on Groklaw . I spent some time over the last couple of days reading through much of what has been posted and want...

Lots more activity for us today around WGA’s ‘emergency switch’. Allison Linn wrote an Associated Press article that is responsible for most of the pick-up the story has seen. As of this evening Google News is showing over eighty articles related to this...

An article on ZDNet talks about WGA explains that the recently released WGA Notifications feature does check for an updated configuration information at launch. Lauren Weinstein blogged on this and raised the issue of whether because of this WGA was like...

It seems that of the news alerts I receive for Windows Genuine Advantage an increasing number actually turn out to be PC advice and help columns. Of the few I’ve read typically the individual writing in for advice is unaware that their software might...

The Wall Street Journal published an article today ‘Hackers' Xbox Game: Decoding The Console’ that includes an interview with Andrew Huang author of Hacking the Xbox: An Introduction to Reverse Engineering. While the article is interesting and points...

The Business Software Alliance, a software industry trade group (of which Microsoft is a member) just released their annual study on PC software piracy. It’s amazing to me just how much of the software out there is pirated. The study report (direct link...

Our team has been working recently with a couple of internal teams to work genuine Windows validation into their setup. Both Internet Explorer 7 Beta and the Windows Media Player 11 Beta have validation built in. There’s a shot of the IE 7 Beta setup...

Hi! My name is Alex Kochis and I've just joined the Windows Genuine Advantage team product management team. I’m starting this blog because I would like to share some of the cool things our team is doing and because we want to hear from you. We want to...