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Vista's WGA Kill-Switch To Die

Microsoft has announced that in the upcoming Service Pack 1 for Windows Vista, they will be removing the most onerous feature of Vista's anti-piracy tools: the kill-switch that leaves "pirated" copies of Vista non-functional:

"They won't lose access to functionality or features, but it will be very clear to them that their copy of Window Vista is not genuine and they need to take action."
Microsoft has described the new approach as a "change of tactics". It said efforts to tackle piracy had seen numbers of fake copies of Vista at half the level of XP, the previous Windows operating system.

I say "pirated" in quotes because the current system of Windows authentication, called WGA, or Windows Genuine Advantage, has been plagued with glitches: from false positives, to the WGA servers being down for days. The server outage caused all new installers of Windows to not be able to authenticate any copies of Windows, leaving them with crippled systems that thought they'd been pirated.

The removal of the kill-switch signifies that Microsoft is aware that they can't risk the whole functionality of a Windows install on an authentication system that has proven unreliable. The problem is the whole system is flawed. Real pirates of Windows easily find ways around the WGA issues, while the only people left suffering from WGA problems are legitimate customers.

It's the same thing as those piracy messages on DVDs: legitimate buyers of DVDs are forced to watch them, but you can bet that if someone pirates the DVD the first thing they'll cut out is that warning. This means only legal buyers see the anti-piracy message, which is preaching to (and annoying) the choir.

Perhaps it might be too naïve of me to hope for Microsoft to revise their anti-piracy methods to be more consumer oriented, but it seems to work for Apple (which has no serial numbers or authentication for Mac OS X) so perhaps Microsoft can work out a more reliable system that won't leave legitimate buyers with crippled systems.

'Kill switch' dropped from Vista [BBC]