M$ gets sued over WGA
- From: Jim Polaski <jpolaski@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Fri, 07 Jul 2006 23:39:12 -0500
from a yahoo group posting:
The WGA controversy took a new turn, as a Windows user filed suit against
Microsoft alleging that WGA is spyware. This Los Angeles PC user has now
made the spyware allegations explicit, in a suit filed this week in U.S.
District Court in Seattle. The lead attorney acknowledges Microsoft's
right to fight piracy, but stated that Microsoft shouldn't install
software on people's computers without informed consent. The lead lawyer
for the plaintiff was the lead co-counsel for consumers in the Sony
rootkit case.
The lawsuit is seeking class action status. Windows users had complained
about the anti-piracy tool that it was checking in with the company's
servers on a daily basis, unbeknownst to computer users. This week,
Microsoft changed and clarified its practices, although it says nothing
underhanded was going on to begin with.
The WGA tool is part of the monthly security updates, and it has two
parts: the validation part that determines whether the copy of Windows
running is legal and the Notifications part. It's the latter that sends
info every day even after the copy of Windows has been validated.
Now a company called Firewall Leak Tester, a company that provides tools
to test the quality of personal firewall software, has come out with a
program called RemoveWGA that removes the Notification portion of WGA
only, the daily phoning home & does not touch the Validation part. It
works on XP SP1 and SP2.
Once the WGA Notification tool has checked your OS and has confirmed you
had a legit copy, there is no decent point or reason to check it again
and again every boot.
Note: Once the WGA notification is removed, the Automatic Update will
bug you about installing the update again. This is normal, and out of
the scope of RemoveWGA (since at this point, the WGA notification is
uninstalled from your system).
If you are concerned about tweaking Automatic Update to prevent Microsoft
trying to push the update on your computer, read this page:
How to prevent the update to install again or to prompt you eveytime?
http://www.firewallleaktester.com/tweak_automatic_update.htm
This is a quick howto (screenshots are in French, but there are red
arrows to show where to click).
Read more about RemoveWGA here:
http://www.firewallleaktester.com/removewga.htm
Still others claim the suits are without merit.
http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=3185
--
Regards,
JimP
"The measure of a man is what he will do while
expecting that he will get nothing in return!"
.
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