Microsoft is determined to make us all move to Linux or Macs. The latest push to get us all to abandon windows is somthing called Windows Genuine Advantage. It turns out that WGA isn’t very good at telling if your copy if windows is legit, and if WGA decides that you are not legit the only fix Microsoft will offer is to sell you a new copy of windows ($150). Most of us are not interested in that option so folks have come up with some other options.

There’s been a lot of press about this event. I’ll quote some of the best:

Brian Livingston writes something called “Windows Secrets” and is a long time vetren of the M$ wars. He sent an email today to his email subscribers with this to say:

What’s so bad about Genuine Advantage?

My last article, in the June 15 newsletter, flatly declared that Windows Genuine Advantage is Microsoft-sponsored spyware. That story received the highest reader ranking since we started asking our readers last January to vote on our articles (4.4 out of 5.0). We also received almost 200 e-mails, far more than we normally get about any single topic. Windows users are highly agitated.

I’ve repeatedly heard terms like “furious” and “livid” to describe how people felt about Microsoft pushing a piece of marketing spyware through the company’s sacred mechanism for distributing critical security updates. Perhaps the most deeply offended were the outside professionals who have defended Microsoft for years against charges that it’s an “evil empire.” Microsoft’s abuse of its auto-update system to install an intrusive sales gimmick caused a lot of these faithful ones to rail against the idea as though personally betrayed.

Without repeating my June 15 article, I’ll summarize the bottom line: No security-minded company or individual can allow a program to stealthily contact a distant server and morph its behavior at will. This principle holds just as true for people who think Microsoft is the world’s greatest corporation as it does for those who deeply distrust the company’s motives. (The rule obviously doesn’t preclude trusted programs with specific, known tasks — such as an antivirus utility — from automatically downloading new signature files.)

Let me emphasize that I’m dead set against the mass piracy of software or any other creative work. But Windows Genuine Advantage and Windows Product Activation, which WGA is meant to enforce, have nothing to do with stopping mass piracy.

Brian goes on to say