60 Million Pirates

According to an article released at the backend of last week which suggested that Microsoft’s wga tool had identified some 60 million pirate attempts at validation, Whilst its hard to believe that this is sixty million pirate copies, or does it point to either an incredibly stupid small number of individuals who didn’t quite get how it works or there are a shed load of people running pirated software.

           We here at wannabegeek ran a feature on wga and how to work around it. This generated quite a few hits more than anything else that has been published anyway but far far short of the sixty million (if only), the point being when you run the validation check it suggests you purchase a legitimate key for your OS at about £100 a go, so this could mean anything up to 6000 million pounds or approx 10 billion dollars. I suppose I can maybe just start to see the M$ frustration in this. It would pay my mortgage for a year or so .

 Anyway enough prattle read the article and decide for yourself.

By: Marius Oiaga, Technology News Editor Softpedia

The Redmond Company has indeed confirmed the existence of selective false positives. The software giant stated that the false positive cases were only isolated incidents triggered by data entry errors, and that it had made all the necessary adjustments in order to avoid additional erroneous reports via the anti-piracy tool. detected the effectiveness of WGA, claiming the all the false positive incidents combined represented a mere fraction of a percent of all the 60 million identified illicit copies of Windows.

"About 1 in 5 of the 300 million PCs that have run WGA validation fail. That is pretty much in line with industry numbers for software piracy. By volume most of the validation failures detected by WGA are a result of installs that use a stolen volume licensing key. Using stolen volume license keys has been a well known method of counterfeiting Windows XP for a while. This accounts for around 80% of the failures today. As an example, one stolen license key from a US university ended up on over a million PCs in China," stated Alex Kochis, a licensing manager on the WGA team claiming that outside of the small number