RemoveWGA Not Helping Piracy

[hayc59]

Firewall Leak Tester NEWSLETTER
August 1 2006: RemoveWGA Not Helping Piracy

Piracy is Illegal

I have received some complaints from users who said that RemoveWGA was not working on their system. RemoveWGA was saying that WGA notification was not active, despites the WGA popups telling the user their Windows was pirated.

After investigation, it appears that RemoveWGA works well on legit Windows copies (it detects the WgaLogon DLL being loaded) but is unable to see the DLL on pirated Windows, hence saying that WGA notification is not active. In fact, Windows seems to cloak the DLL from RemoveWGA purposefully if it is running on a pirated copy.

At first, as I didn't know that RemoveWGA was not working only on pirated OS, I made a fix to make it to work in all cases, and I posted it on a forum. After discovering that only pirates had the problem, I quickly removed the fix and the manual steps to disable and remove the WGA notification tool on pirated Windows.

While I still think that honest people being wrongly spotted as pirate should be helped, they are a minority, and should contact Microsoft. The other real pirated copies should not receive any help. I do not support piracy, I'm strongly against it, and will stand on this.

RemoveWGA is done to help legit Windows users to remove the WGA Notification update if they installed it inadvertedly, and feel concerned about their privacy and security. It will not work on not genuine copies.

If you are running a pirated Windows, you must buy a valid and legit licence

View Source: RemoveWGA Not Helping Piracy

[Temmu]

hear, hear.

the wga thingy is supposed to slow the spread of mis-used corporate licenses.  someone burns a copy of the unlisenced corporate disk, uses the 25 character corporate number & * poof * their home machine now has xp.

i saw wga do a false positive on a legit pc at work.
very unlikely someone loaded a pirated copy over an already running xp box...

i'm all for free or share ware, when it's offered as such, but theft is theft.  even if it's stealing from ms.