Re: [Off Topic] Windows Genuine Advantage

[J R FOX jr_fox@xxxxxxxxxx]

--- Michael Norman  wrote:

> There's been a flood or WEB articles on MS' Windows
> Genuine Advantage
> (XP) patches. Frankly, I can't decide whether to
> throw in the towel,
> download these corporate efforts to, MS says, combat
> piracy, or to
> look on them as spyware or worse and get updates
> from a third-party
> enterprise program such as NetChk Protect (free for
> a year). I
> certainly don't want to create a contretemps here,
> waste bandwidth
> and clutter mailboxes and would be fine with pulling
> this post, but
> I'm curious whether others are simply ignoring the
> issue, downloading
> the two WGA components (required if you want to use
> WinAutoUpdates)
> and just keeping to their work. Thanks for your
> thoughts.
>
> Michael Norman
>

I bookmarked (and can retrieve with some searching) a
couple of postings about ways to defeat this, which I
think were from some hacker types. That is, methods
other than your alternate download service or site
idea, of which I gather there are now a few.  I have
not tried these out myself, and don't know about their
effectiveness, or if they carry any risk. Personally,
I have not run into WGA myself (at Windows Update,
etc.), apparently because I have the corporate
editions of W2K and XP. (The XP has only been
installed briefly as a test, on a spare hard drive.
Day to day I still run W2K SP4. Should I decide to
really do anything with XP, I'm very leery of taking
it to SP2.) While I can't confirm this, an IT
consultant I know tells me that the corporate editions
do not have DRM, either.

Meanwhile, I keep hearing good things about UBUNTU
Linux, equipped with WINE to run a lot of the Win
app.s . . . .  No WGA there.


Jordan