Vista phones home to check for piracy

When Windows XP first came out, it only checked online once after you installed it to check the key for piracy reasons, if the key wasn’t valid, you were asked to purchase a legal one and the copy of XP was deactivated.  Things are different now, even for XP users.  Usually when Windows updates are rolled out for XP, there is a WGA update utility in there, WGA checks your windows XP key when it installs and every so often thereafter.  This is nothing new but Vista takes it to an entirely new level.

The difference is that with XP it was easy to tell what it was doing, especially if it was calling home to see if it was still legitimate.  Vista checks online immediately after installation to check the key but phones home at any point during the day, week or month afterwards periodically to check again to see if it is still valid.  Some of the hacks out there for Vista bypass the check after install but it remains to be seen if any of them can bypass the constant online checking it does.

Microsoft states, “Technology built into Vista allows Microsoft to periodically evaluate the OS to make sure it is legitimate, rather than just having one opportunity, when the product key is first entered at activation.”

The Business software alliance contends that 35% of all software installs are counterfeit but this number is not set in stone.  There are probably more counterfeit installs of expensive software suites like Adobe PhotoShop or other professional creative suites.  Microsoft claims that at least 20% of Windows installations have failed to activate for reasons other than piracy.

“Most failed validations, approximately 80%, are caused by a misused or stolen volume license key. The remaining 20% of the failures have a variety of causes, including tampering, hacking, and working around product activation. Across the more than 300 million validations, only a small percentage of validation failures were found to be in error,” said Microsoft.

Given all 300 million copies of all versions of Windows activated since 2005, there is a failure rate according to Microsoft of “one in five”.  When you have 300 million customers that means 60 million of them experienced a Windows activation failure of some sort.

Risks to the home user are slight but even some of those copies may fail but it will not be nearly as bad as what large corporations are likely to experience.  These companies often deploy custom installations, using the same CDs or DVDs, streamlining discs with updates, software packages and the like so what happens when they use the same one over and over, EVEN if it is an Enterprise key it may fail due to the changes they have made. 

Microsoft is probably going to be hearing from lots and lots of IT departments, it would serve them right to have an activation fail internally but then they can workaround that.

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