Microsoft Evolves the Windows Genuine Advantage Anti-Piracy Mechanism

Back in August 2007, Microsoft's anti-piracy mechanism suffered a temporary service outage which caused genuine copies of Windows XP and Windows Vista to be incorrectly labeled as pirated. In excess of 12,000 Vista and XP users were affected by the erroneous invalidations, with the Redmond company blaming the lapse on a human error. At that time, Microsoft revealed that both the activation and validation aspects of its anti-piracy mechanism had been affected due to preproduction code shipping accidentally to productions servers. Since August, the company has been hard at work focusing on the evolution of WGA in order to avoid future problems.

"First off, we've been taking another hard look at our operations and the tools and processes we use to run the validation service for WGA, and we've made some changes including to how we roll out updates to the back-end servers (it was a specific upgrade to our system that analyzes product keys that caused the issue in August) and we've been adding to and improving the tools used to make sure our infrastructure is solid," revealed Alex Kochis, Senior Product Manager for Windows Genuine Advantage.

The changes involve the overhauling of the monitoring resources focused on the WGA infrastructure. Kochis informed that following the introduction of the modifications, Microsoft is more likely to detect potential issues even before users are affected. On top of this, the company has also kicked live support up a notch in North America and promised to do the same for the rest of the world.

"Second, beyond the strict operations processes we've also been looking again at how we can prepare ourselves better to respond to critical situations like an outage or problem. Since August we have conducted more than a dozen 'fire-drills' designed to improve our ability to respond to issues affecting customers or that could impact the quality of the service. These 'fire drills' are practice scenarios that prepare people for action in the event of an actual problem," Kochis added.