I'm happy to announce that the Genuine Windows Blog will now join the Windows Team Blog family.  This is a plus because a lot of you already go there for the latest and greatest news about Windows and related products.  The look and feel of the blog will change some, and you can expect improved communications from us on a more regular basis and on a wider range of topics.  The new blog format will also include postings from other members of the genuine Windows team - they have a lot to say about what Microsoft is doing to help protect customers from the risks of counterfeit software, and what we're doing about fighting piracy.

Even though the blog location's changing, I hope our interaction won't.  This blog has always been a great way for me and the genuine Windows team to stay in touch with our customers.  I appreciate your willingness to comment and express your opinions about genuine Windows, and I hope we'll continue to hear from you. 

Please visit us at our new Genuine Windows Blog location! (http://windowsteamblog.com/blogs/genuinewindows/default.aspx)

- Alex

Windows 7 already includes an improved ability to detect hacks, also known as activation exploits, and alert customers who are using a pirated copy.  There is a hack that is said to enable, when paired with the leaked key, a system to install and use a copy of Windows 7 Ultimate. Both the hack and the key are indications that a copy of Windows may not be genuine. The Windows Activation Technologies included in Windows 7 are designed to handle situations such as this one, and customers using these tools and methods should expect Windows to detect them. 

Our primary goal is to protect users from becoming unknowing victims, because customers who use pirated software are at greater risk of being exposed to malware as well as identity theft. Someone asked me recently - and I think it's worth noting here -- whether we treat all exploits equally in responding to new ones we see. Our objective isn't to stop every "mad scientist" that's out there from dabbling; our aim is to protect our customers from commercialized counterfeit software that impacts our customers' confidence in knowing they got what they paid for. That will continue to be our focus as we continue to evolve our anti-piracy platforms, and respond to new threats that we see emerge in the future.

Activation is the initial process by which a Windows running on a PC is determined to be properly licensed and genuine, and it's really quick and easy.   A lot of folks don't realize that activation is required, so our team decided to put a little video together about Windows activation to help explain what it is, why it's required, and how to do it.

Check out the Product Activation in Windows 7 video below and let me know what you think.

Just a little bit of housekeeping before I forget:  if you are running the Windows 7 Beta on your PC, read helpful information about expiration and moving to the Windows 7 Release Candidate.  If you are running the Windows 7 Release Candidate on your PC, check out some frequently asked questions for the Windows 7 RC, including how to locate your product key for activation. 

 -Alex Kochis, Director, Genuine Windows

While Hangzhou is a special city because it its the home of Alibaba.com, one of China's largest internet search providers, our team also announced our hope that we could work to develop similar activites elsewhere. See the Wall Street Journal's report here.

I think this kind of work is essential to increasing awareness among customers and users of Microsoft products in countries that have relatively high piracy rates. I believe our focus on education and awareness have been central to the progress we've made over the last few years.

-Alex

Trend Micro is also reporting that in the last ten days they've found malware that's masquerading as a download of Windows 7 RC. On their blog they say

"The file which arrives with the file name setup.exe is detected as TROJ_DROPPER.SPX. TROJ_DROPPER.SPX drops TROJ_AGENT.NICE."

As many of the news stories I've seen on this are reminding people - the best and safest way to get the Windows 7 RC is direct from us at this site. 

 -Alex

In many ways, the conclusions and logic are not surprising - high piracy markets are growing faster than low piracy markets so the overall piracy rate goes up.  But a few things about the study piqued my interest and I wanted to share my thoughts on.  Once again, I was reminded of the global/local dynamic of the challenge - while improvements can be made in one area, they are often outweighed by piracy advancements in other areas.  We spend a lot of time thinking about both very local approaches - working with local officials, providing benefits for genuine users tailored to local markets, and identifying local partners with whom we can work.  But we also think globally - what engineering changes can we make in our products (such as our recent announcement of Windows Activation Technologies in Windows 7) that will work across every geography where Windows is available.

As mentioned above, the study attributed most of the growth in piracy to the growth in emerging markets, and cited a continued emphasis on intellectual property rights as key to minimizing piracy growth.  While we certainly agree with that, we also think that there is more we need to do.  Sometimes in high piracy markets it can be challenging to even find genuine software and be confident that it is in fact genuine and not just a high quality counterfeit. Having spent the last week in China I can say that while genuine software is readily available there's not as much of it as there should be and it can sometimes be hard for the customer to know what to look for to be confident that they're really getting what they paid for.

I also wanted to point out that while we don't release specific piracy rates for Windows we have historically described them as broadly in line with the rates for overall software piracy as documented in this annual study. This is the first year that I can recall that our internal estimates are diverging from the overall rate. This year we have seen our estimates of piracy of Windows not increase with the overall BSA rates. We believe this is a result of more partners wanting to work with us, more customers checking if their software is genuine, and generally more demand for a genuine product.   We believe if you focus your program on delivering a good customer experience and helping your partners and resellers to provide better service and deliver a better experience, make genuine product easy to obtain, and help customers who have been victims of software piracy you can make a positive difference for your customers, partners and your business. I believe that's what we've seen happen over the last year.

-Alex

The Windows 7 activation experience will be familiar to users of Windows Vista SP1

The Windows 7 activation experience is based on that of Windows Vista SP1 and should appear familiar to users of Windows Vista SP1. This includes the notifications that alert customers if they need to activate their copy of Windows and helps them with issues that may occur -- including the possibility that they might be a victim of software piracy.

Windows 7 includes an updated notifications experience for product activation

We heard feedback from customers that while the notifications that appeared in Windows Vista were effective at helping alert customers, there might be more we could do and say that would be helpful. So for Windows 7 our goal was to do a better job of helping customers make decisions with confidence about which action to take. In Windows 7, we're being more descriptive about what Windows is actually doing and providing more information about what, if any, actions the user should take as a result.

In the Windows 7 timeframe, one of our goals is to improve support for deployment and activation in the enterprise and other large organizations

We also heard from enterprise customers that there were some scenarios where our activation tools could be improved, to help ease the burden on IT departments. So we've added to some of the existing tools for IT professionals and made them easier to access to better support those who need to manage Windows activations at an organizational level. One example is the new support for activation in virtualization scenarios where KMS now counts virtual clients. This is important for customers who have fully virtualized environments or customers who have dev/test environments where virtual clients are used heavily.  

Other changes

Though not a core part of the Windows 7 product experience, one of the changes we are making to our anti-piracy efforts is to better distinguish between the generations of technology we're deploying. As many of you know, our online validation program, known as Windows Genuine Advantage, is a program designed for use with Windows XP. It was also designed to be added to the existing product activation technology that began shipping broadly with the versions of Windows XP that were already in the market. The addition of WGA to the anti-piracy technology used to protect Windows XP was key in that it enabled us to be much more agile in our response to techniques used by counterfeiters and pirates. As a result of the success of WGA, we built validation technology into Windows Vista from the beginning. These components were new and were built for use in Windows Vista. The same components, though tuned up a bit, form the basis of our activation and validation technology in Windows 7. To better reflect this latest generation of technology we will refer to the activation and validation components in Windows Vista and Windows 7 by a new name, Windows Activation Technologies.

In this latest generation of the technology activation and validation work together to protect Windows from being compromised or tampered with for the purpose of working around product activation. The notifications experience and the steps required to resolve issues are largely similar between Windows Vista and Windows 7 though we have made a number of improvements. In most cases a customer simply needs activate Windows with a genuine product key to resolve issues.

One of our design goals in this generation of the technology is to enable Windows to get smarter over time so we added the ability to receive new information that Windows can use to detect and protect against the latest activation exploits, tampering or other attempts to circumvent product activation.

We've also added to the online service that supports activation and validation on the Microsoft side with extensive systems monitoring, geo-redundancy and a focus on accuracy.

Overall, Windows 7 represents the latest technology in the tools and methods Microsoft has developed fight software piracy. As we look ahead, we know there will be new exploits that pirates will try once Windows 7 ships. In fact, we've already begun to see evidence of these efforts; our customers and partners have our pledge that as long as pirates keep trying to exploit Windows for their own ends, we'll be working to beat them through the technologies we develop and the programs we run to protect our customers, partners and Microsoft's intellectual property.

To see some of the changes between Windows Vista and Windows 7 take a look back at my post here about the notifications experience from the Windows 7 Beta, I don't expect much to change between that and our final release.

Not that I have anything against bittorrent. In fact I invited Bram Cohen, creator of Bittorrent and it's protocol, out to Microsoft a few years ago to have an informal conversation about the relationship of the Internet and technology such as Bittorrent to software piracy. As I recall it was a good conversation and I certainly respect him and the technology as innovative and powerful.

I do hope that no one has had any problems as a result of the infected files. This example unfortunately shows that there are those out there who see the significant interest in something such as Windows 7 as an opportunity to try to take advantage of others. In the end this is the same motivation as those who create and sell counterfeit software, to fool users or customers for the purpose of taking advantage of them. When getting something that is free or should be paid for it really is best to go to the source or through authorized distribution to avoid the risks of this kind of thing.

As is often the case with high profile movies, leaked versions started to showing up online well in advance of the release (X-Men Origins: Wolverine is due in theaters on May 1).  But, unlike most cases where the leaked content is traded around in shadows, the Fox News columnist took his experience mainstream and actually reviewed the film for his audience. 

While the story is an interesting read in and of itself (and funny in some ways because the film is actually owned by the parent company Fox Corporation) I found the outcome interesting.  In my recollection this is one of the few times swift and measureable action has been taken against someone who blatantly participated in what we think of as “social pirating”.  The story started off slow over as the first reports did a bit of “wondering out loud” if a fairly prominently reviewer had openly admitted to watching the pirated version.  By the weekend, there were rumors that action was going to be taken and by Monday, he was fired.  It continues to be a top news item.

In fact, X-Men Origins: Wolverine star Hugh Jackman agrees.  His local Australian press quoted him as saying  "It's a serious crime and there's no doubt it's very disappointing -- I was heartbroken by it…”.  Maybe we can get him as a spokesperson for our team?

“Hugh Jackman Rips Wolverine Leak”

“Piracy Sinks Fox columnist Roger Friedman”

“Columnist out of work after reviewing pirated film”

In March Microsoft released a whitepaper titled The Surprising Risk of Counterfeit Software in Business (PDF), this whitepaper follows up on a previous paper (published by IDC in 2006), which explored the risks customers are exposed to when seeking out and acquiring counterfeit or pirated software online.  The paper focuses on the risks of counterfeit in midsize business computing environments, based on a study conducted in the UK where  randomly selected midsize businesses environments were examined for the presence of counterfeit software.  37% of software found in the businesses examined turned out to be counterfeit.  Furthermore, all of the counterfeit found was of high quality, which means that the businesses likely purchased it in good faith but spent money on software that was neither licensed nor genuine.  Check out the paper at the link above and let me know what you think.

 Thanks

- Alex Kochis

Director, Genuine Windows