Windows Anti-Piracy Program Gets Stronger, Weaker with Vista SP1

Published: December 5, 2007

by Alex Woodie

The forthcoming release of Windows Vista Service Pack 1 (SP1) will bring changes to Windows Genuine Advantage (WGA), the anti-piracy measures instituted by Microsoft in 2005. While Microsoft will close least two loopholes that have enabled pirates to continue distributing fake copies of Vista, Microsoft will get rid of the "reduced functionality" mode that was introduced with Vista due to an excess of negative customer feedback.

Microsoft has made major gains in the last year against software piracy, a plague that costs the software giant billions of dollars every year, and probably hundreds of billions of dollars for the commercial software industry as a whole. With the introduction of Windows Vista a year ago, Microsoft instituted big changes in the product registration process that closed enormous loopholes--such as encrypting product activation keys, which previously were left in plain text (practically begging pirates to steal them).

"Software pirates are becoming more sophisticated, not just with their ability to produce high-quality fakes, but in their distribution systems and international reach," says Mike Sievert, Microsoft's corporate vice president of Windows product marketing. Approximately 35 percent of the world's software is still pirated, according to Business Software Alliance studies.

But the tide may be shifting against the pirates, at least for Microsoft, Sievert says. "This past quarter, we reported that about five percent of Windows desktop OEM revenue growth was attributable to piracy declines," he says. Further eroding pirate market share is the fact that Microsoft has gone after 1,000 dealers of counterfeit Microsoft products and taken down more than 50,000 illegal software auctions, according to Sievert.

Most of these gains can be attributed to the stronger anti-piracy measures in Windows Vista than Windows XP, Sievert says. But there are still ways for enterprising pirates to get around them, he says.

The first technique involves modifying system files and the BIOS to mimic the type of product activations used by OEMs. The second involves resetting the "grace timer" feature in Vista--the one that's tied to the "reduced functionality" mode in the new operating system--to extend the activation deadline to some ridiculous year, like 2099, according to Sievert. Microsoft aims to eliminate both of these loopholes with Vista SP1, which is due to ship early next year.

Reduced Functionality Eliminated

While these changes will strengthen Microsoft's anti-piracy measures, the software giant is also making a change that will weaken it. This has to do with Vista's reduced-functionality mode, and the decision Microsoft has made to eliminate it with Vista SP1.

Currently, Vista enters reduced functionality mode when a user has not activated the product within the 30-day grace period. It will also enter this mode when a user attempts to use an incorrect product activation key, when Windows detects a key has been tampered with, or when Windows detects an attempt to hack the product activation.

A PC becomes very difficult to use when it's entered the reduced functionality zone. For starters, there is no "start" menu or desktop icons, and the desktop background is changed to black. The user is also logged off every hour, without warning, which has to be the most annoying part of it. Users are able to log back on, and no data is lost, but it will be very hard to get any work done.

Microsoft is backing off this approach with Vista SP1, and it also won't be used with Windows Server 2008, which shares Vista's product activation and anti-piracy measures. According to Sievert, users of Vista SP1 and Windows Server 2008 will be presented "with clear and recurring notices about the status of their system and how to get genuine [software]. [However] they won't lose access to functionality or features."

The change, according to Sievert, was instituted as the result of "great feedback from customers and partners."

There are two ways to interpret this statement. The first is that customers unknowingly paid good money for PCs loaded with fake copies of Vista. Microsoft now figures it's better off not penalizing these innocent victims for the mistake they made of trusting Microsoft's unscrupulous business partners.

The second way to interpret this statement is that legitimate Vista uses were being tagged by WGA as software pirates after they failed to activate their legitimately obtained operating system, perhaps because they were confused by the new activation options available with Vista, or maybe just because they were lazy. In either case, once tagged by the WGA tool, they would have to suffer from the more draconian measures intended to weed them out.

While Microsoft has not disclosed the rate at which its WGA program falsely tags a legitimate user as a pirate, even a very small percentage of false positives would result in hundreds of thousands or millions of PCs being incorrectly flagged. Eliminating the reduced functionality mode is an easy way to not irritate its customers.

"It's worth re-emphasizing that our fundamental strategy has not changed," Sievert says. "All copies of Windows Vista still require activation and the system will continue to validate from time to time to verify that systems are activated properly. What is changing with SP1 is the nature of the experience for those systems that are never activated or that fail validation."

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