A problem at the weekend with Microsoft's Windows Genuine Advantage was down to "human error" during an update, the company admitted on Tuesday.
The wrong tape was loaded by accident, resulting in WGA treating users' legal software as illegal or counterfeit. Although the immediate problem was fixed in half an hour, the effects ran on longer.
"It was human error when the wrong software was loaded during an update," Mike Haigh, Microsoft's Windows client marketing manager, told ZDNet.co.uk on Wednesday. "Code was sent out that should not have been. It shouldn't have happened."
According to Microsoft's Alex Kochis, senior product manager for WGA, two things happened that should not have. "First, activations and validations were both affected when pre-production code was accidentally sent to production servers," he wrote in the WGA blog.
"Second, while the issue affecting activations was fixed in less than 30 minutes (by rolling back the changes) the effect of the pre-production code on our validation service continued after the rollback took place," he wrote.
On WGA, product activation and validation are two separate processes for greater security. If either fails then WGA will assume that the product is illegal or in some way not satisfactory and should then go into what is called a "Reduced Functionality Cycle", which means that the user will gradually lose the different capabilities of the software.
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Some users first noticed the problem when they lost the Aero user interface from Vista.
According to Microsoft's Haigh, there was little chance of wider damage as a result of the incident. "We have built enough safeguards so that in the event of an outage everybody would be OK," he said.
He also stressed that incidents like this, in which users may lose functionality on their systems, are rare. "This is the first issue of this type I have heard about with WGA," he said.
Haigh said the problem was a difficult balancing act. "How do you balance what our customers need and the need to protect our intellectual property?", he said. "I believe we do a good job on this."
Haigh said he did not know if any UK users were affected by the issue with WGA.
Talkback
Its raining and blowing a gale. Your kids are freezing and your wife is complaining about the mess in the house. The next day, you realise that what you need is some windows for those holes in the walls that let in the light. So you call up the local glazing company and soon enough, having handed over the money he asks for, the nice Mr Gates comes round and fits your house with the latest in light-hole-filling technology.
Some time later, its cats-and-dogs outdoors and force-8 again. You and your nearest and dearest are surveying your purchase and thinking what a wise one it was. All of a sudden - smash!!! What's going on??? Stones thud into the rooms of your house, as - aghast at the cacophony - you witness your fine new windows being broken.
You rush to the front-door. Unbelievably - you see before you, Billy the Glazier, clutching a handful of rocks screaming at you "You didn't pay me! You didn't pay me!". "But I did!!!" you cry... too late. He's off in his van to visit another customer.
The children are cold again. Your beloved asks - what you are going to do about it? Reluctantly, you are forced to admit, there is _nothing_ you can do... Your house has no windows because Billy came round and broke them.
Later, still cold and wind-blown, you learn from from the news that there was a spate of occurrences like yours that whole weekend. Mr Gates offered no explanation for his behaviour but said that he'd come round in a few days and repair the damage. One of his workmen said that anyway, not many people had been affected that night (well, fewer than 12,000 - according to him).
I have disabled WGA with the only exception being when I have to update something that requires it, and as soon as the update is complete it goes back on the disable list. I don't want ANYONE have open access to my machine, you don't know what info they are getting. I know, M$ says they can be trusted, but considering some of the things they have done in the past, I don't trust them.
There will be further activation issues to watch out for as Microsoft plans to offer a similar service to independent software vendors whereby they can "control" licensing through activation and other measures similar to the Software Protection Platform.
Microsoft announced on July 10, 2007 at the Worldwide Partner Conference in Denver, that a new suite of products called Microsoft® Software Licensing and Protection Services (SLP Services) will become available in the October timeframe. Note - The Software Protection Platform (SPP) is the set of anti-piracy technologies that Microsoft is using internally and these are already built into Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008. Microsoft has stated that currently these “two platforms (SPP and SLPS) are separate technologies and we do not have current plans to make SPP as an ISV offering”.
Using Microsoft® SLP Services, ISVs can protect their software, while giving end users an easy experience to "get legal" with application upgrades
Microsoft® Software Licensing and Protection Services Datasheet (not yet released) describes SLPS as; “Helping software publishers and corporate developers gain positive control of their software through dynamic licensing, protection, and activation services”.
If the Microsoft WGA outage caused this much disruption due to a user error then imagine what will happen when activation measures are deployed badly by more than one vendor - the knock on effects in business will be very disruptive.