This just appeared on Boing Boing.
DRM bites again: the Microsoft Windows Genuine Advantage servers (which every XP and Vista install phones home to) all failed sometime earlier today.
The result? Every single Windows XP and Vista installation — except possibly those with volume license keys — is being marked as counterfeit when it tries to check in.
Looks like this isn’t the weekend to install a copy of Windows or buy a new Windows PC. Now where are they selling Macs.
When you read the forums on this (linked in blockquote below) it’s incredible.
Validation issues – Microsoft is having WGA server problems
Thank you for your response.
I’m sorry to inform you that the Windows Genuine server might be down for few days. I have escalate the issue to our Genuine team, kindly try to validate again on Tuesday 28 Aug 2007.
Thank you for contacting Microsoft Technical Support.
If these programs were properly designed they would all self-validate if the validation server went down. The cheaters would have a free day or two and be caught later. How hard can that be? But no. Now everyone is assumed to be a crook. This is a developing story.
______________________________________
UPDATE: It’s fixed, relatively speaking. Sort of.
Folks:
I understand the frustration you all are going through. I’m investigating the issue right now.
I guarantee that we’re working on this issue right now. For folks wondering, MACHINES ARE NOT SHUTTING DOWN with reduced functionality.
I guarantee that I will personally resolve this issue before I go to sleep – whether or not it is Tuesday I sleep.
And 100 posts! Heeeeee!
Wonder if we could reach it were we discussing the relative virtues of going to a party with a Gant polo or with a GAP hoodie?…
#97 “Last week I bought my wife a new laptop to do her scrapbooking… NOT compatible with VISTA.”
That happened a lot with XP as well. Apple Macs also have compatibility issues with some software which needs a newer version of OS X – so that is not unique to MS.
Regarding the Vista licence working for WinXP – no that doesn’t work.
You might be able to get re-image disc(s) for your laptop from Acer as you used the service partition for WinXP. Its too late now, but Vista could have resized and created a new partition on your primary drive to make room for WinXP so you didn’t need to dump the service partiton.
I had a similar issue with HP on transferring Vista licences. I am in China and my new laptop from a HP shop only had Chinese Vista available. HP Shanghai’s solution was to install a pirated version of WinXP on a HP laptop sold with OEM Linux so I didnt have to pay for a useless Chinese Vista licence as it is not transferable.
So I let them do that just to see if they would and they did! When I got home I installed my legal version of WinXP. I eventually returned that laptop for a better one and replaced Chinese Vista for my WinXP. I am still trying to get a set of recover discs for English Vista from HP but no luck so far…
This has nothing to do with Microsoft as this is a language and HP issue. I am still shocked that the HP staff at a HP shop and the techs at the HP service centre would not only suggest a pirated copy of WinXp but also offered MS Office as well. This is when everyone complains about piracy and here HP helps it along. Truth is stranger!
Cheers
#99 “Something I’m also aware of, T_H, is the glaring absence of any attempt at rebuttal…
”
Rebuttal on what? You did such a good job on proving my points that there is not too much I need to add.. .other that Apple has been around as long as MS so Apple’s business model wasn’t as good as MS. I could add that Jobs when he was fired developed NeXT and then sold that to Apple which became OS X and Jobs is where he is now.
Thanks!
Cheers
#101 – Joao
“…a Gant polo or with a GAP hoodie…”
In the beginning it was suit-and-tie ‘don’t alienate the old white money men’ conformity vs. Dead tour shirts, jeans and Birks. Just cause they’ve both been forced in toward the center by their size and the changing times, you only have to take the most cursory look at their respective companies’ ethics and practices to see that that L / R hippie / suit schism remains. Billyboy is still the spiritual descendant of the robber barons, with their smug New England elitist contempt for the working rabble. Their army of conformist, obedient temp drones, hoping to get a slice of the moolah pie stands in marked contrast to the creative, informal, far-less heirarchial structure and practices at Apple, which was and is the misfit, minority underdog.
So shall it ever be, world without end, amen, and the rest of that stuff.
BTW, T_H, thx 4 specifying “Apple Macs” so’s we don’t confuse them with “Dell Macs” or “IBM Macs”…
#104 Fisherino…
lighten up. I wasn’t being figurative. Gant and Gap don’t represent, to the extent of what you imply, the debating parties. It was just a light remark.
remark: I don’t like the stereotypical dudes in Apple’s TV ads “mac vs. pc guys” either… (the actors are ok, the persona, not so…)
Well at least it’s good to know that if we go to war with another country MS can shut those fuckers out of using their computers.
106 continued
… and come to think of it, it’s not the first time I hear that coming from you, my finned friend. You seem to embark on a dualistic view of these two characters (bill’n'steve) as two opposing forces. The old conservative and the new “open minded” visionary that is set to save our world from the clutches of oppression and status quo (not the brit band…). Reminiscent, no doubt of your sixties roots in political thinking. I don’t presume to teach and enlighten you, since I’m not an actively political person, nor did I experienced such strong youth engagement (too young to be a red when we had our revolution, too old to believe in liberalism afterwards). But seems to me that you act on the smell rather than the substance. You see, in my point of view, Mac vs. PC it’s not a political thing but an socio-economical one. And we know what they all stand for: $$$$$$$. Furthermore, if you believe it, I say it to you the more plainly I can spell it out: In my view of things Jobs appears much more Bigger Brotherish than Gates. Apple has mastered it’s public communications to the point of schizophrenic cleanliness and clinical minimalistic design, as on the other hand, Microsoft has this mix matched image, of confusion and erratic behavior. Ms seems much more ad hoc and plain than the elitist perfection on infinite loop. You see, I don’t buy into perfection and have become increasingly suspicious of it as I grow older. Just that.
Case in point, this WGA fumble. Love it or hate it, it’s an honest mistake. A server has errors and collapsed, so some guys had their Windows copies marked as fakes. So what? Shout that we had it coming because of the choice in OS? That’s ridiculous. Is the Police gona storm troop their houses and demand their Original Windows stickers? No. Life will go on eventually.
And remember, just how many millions of Windows copies won’t, justifiably, pass the WGA test? I bet the number will be High up there in China and Russia…does society collapses there? No.
So who cares? I just like this “do it as you like, buy it as you want” freedom I just can’t get under the white and silver bitten apple world. And it’s all I care. I might even advise my boss to buy a 20″ Glass mac over a Dell. He recently spent more on a 19″compact Dell, that clearly is not worth it. With the Mac and an inexpensive Parallels copy he would have a better machine and protection on his legacy software investment. I’m open to this, no problem.
Me, well, I just like to build my boxes, and I’m proficient enough to protect myself from system quirks and attacking wares. So I’ll just have it the way I like it. Perfection? Bah, it’s overrated…
Guess what I’m going to say?
I dunno? “Boo”?
-ETH0
Has a good fix for this already. If you do a search for “Windows.Genuine.Advantage.Validation -ETH0″
On google you might be able to find what I am talking about .
Cheer’s
Just DL the hacked version and get on with your lives.
Ooboontoo!
Great, It finally happened. Now, several people are aware of what will happen when MicrShaft decreets the OEL to xp. No more data, no more OS. I just hope people would wise-up, once and for all regarding MS stupid activation scheme and WGD-A.
#78 You make an excellent point I was going to bring up before this nugget appeared. Bioshock is not only riddled with a rootkit, but also limits you to two (yes 2) installs only (afterwards, the thing’s dead) and it phones home before allowing you to see any gameplay. Screw them.
I’m with Dvorak one this one. But I’ll do him one slightly better. Why not have the stupid WGA simply extend its trial period another 30 days, if the M$ server fails? It’s not a permanent free ride for the OS piraters, and most “genuine” users can live with that.
>>And :> to boot. Fucking Micro$oft. Why didn’t we break them up when >>we had the chance? This monopoly thing sucks ass.
And I was wonder why our local PBS (DC) station ran a documentary on how M$ was “reigned in” by that court decision. But in the end we find out that it was “settled” and M$ didn’t have to break in two. Thanks, very probably to the Bush Administration (Ashcroft at DOJ). I quess someone at the Tv station was doing a bit of damage control.
Hey folks, there was this item in the news about Amtrak ticket sales computers being down because of “newly installed software”. But they didn’t say what software. This has me wondering if the WGA failure wasn’t what was screwing them up. But of course, the guttless news service can’t report THAT! And BTW, good timing by M$. If you’re going to have a major screw up like this. Do it on a weekend and fix it before the stock market opens on Monday morning. I’ll bet not a single analyst even mentions it by then. The “fix is in”, in more ways than one.
This particular topic needs a new “Breaking News” heading of a skipping record, except nobody born after 1984 would know what a vinyl record is.
This is a Skipping Record Topic: expect to hear the same thing over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over…
#105 LtG Your welcome.
I was wrong to only using the term ‘Macs’ and also PC does not mean MS Windows so it should MS Windows(version) PC.
Cheers
#113 “Ooboontoo!” Yes that solves everything…
Bill, Steve pack it all in, you got trouble now boys!
Cheers
#100 Ok – Here is your rebuttal.
Apple and Microsoft start out at about the same time. Apple chooses to go one way with hardware and OS and Microsoft chooses to go another OS and software.
Looks like Microsoft had the better plan. So don’t whine on how Microsoft became so big because if Apple had better management they could have been right up there instead of being one of the crowd like Dell, Acer…
When Jobs was fired he had a good idea – NeXT CPU independent for both PowerPC (Apple) and X86. Smooth – works on anything you have. So what happened? Apple is going broke (cause their inept) so they hire Jobs as a consultant, buys NeXT and does a purge of Apple executives for NeXT execs and ‘poof’ OS X is born….BUT Apple stifles NeXT’s cross platform ability and aims for the high end market. Another smart move like IBM.
So now Apple not wanting to be another IBM – out of the personal computer game is doing as much damage control as they can…
How people view Apple Macs is how Apple wanted people to view them – high end and different – only it didn’t work out as well as they thought.
So now you want to blame Microsoft for having good business sense to read the market potential very well. So in your mind Bill Gates should have said “Oh wait…Apple is falling behind…lets slow up fellows and let them catch up!”
Apple marketing strategy is based on FUD (Fear Uncertainty and Doubt)
The I’m a PC and I’m a Mac campaign – Why not use Peter Griffin for the WInPC and Stewie for Apple Macs.
Peter: I’m a PC………………………………………………..(farts)
The dopey girl whose homework was eaten by her PC…..
Be different…….
The sheep you refer to aren’t that stupid to believe all the Apple rhetoric about (Win)PCs as so in the end Apple cried Wolf too many times.
Microsoft marketing is geared towards being productive – Office became #1 because it is easy to use and has more features than what you could ever need. If Office is so terrible then why not use Word Perfect or OS?
One thing that Microsoft has done VERY well is their software is easy to use – the commands, tools are all intuitive. This flowed over to other software so if you use Office you can use so many other programs. Just what Joe Sixpack can use.
Is Apple like this? Not that I can see. I use AutoCAD, and graphic programs every week. I have Adobe Illustrator and CorelDRAW – which was the one easiest and more intuitive to use? Not Illustrator, oh boy take a course first and get ready to punch the keyboard for even simple shit like Undo (Ctrl+Z) and Redo (shift+ctrl+z) while CorelDraw just has a button to press. Like to customise the menus in Illustrator – NOPE use what you have – CorelDraw go ahead make your work easier. It wasn’t until CS2 could you use the mouse wheel to zoom!
This is software designed for Apple’s platform and ported to Windows which gives me a reasonable insight into Apple’s world. I accept that both Illustrator and Photoshop are industry standards and are superior but not needed by everyone. Which is why there are other alternatives.
Sorry again that Apple made market choices that placed them exactly where they are…less than 20% but now is expected to rise because they can run MS Windows, but don’t blame Microsoft for that one! LOL!
Cheers