not been considered genuine which has made some people compare WGA to time bomb software. Windows Vista SP2 has removed this behavior and reverted to the nag-only methods of Windows XP. Spyware accusations The notification tool has been accused of spyware-like behavior, "phoning home" on a daily basis. Microsoft subsequently admitted the behaviour, but denied that it amounted to spyware. Following pressure, Microsoft announced that in future the tool would only phone home once every two weeks, instead of every day. Microsoft has also provided removal instructions for the pilot version of WGA. Despite this, Microsoft was sued under anti-spyware statutes over WGA's non-disclosed "phone home" behaviour. The lawsuit has since been dismissed. False positive rate The WGA program can produce false positives (incorrectly identifying a genuine copy of Windows as "not genuine"). This can happen for any number of reasons such as failed updates, etc. Microsoft has established a forum to help users encountering problems. In February 2007, a "Not Sure" section was added to the program, in case of an incorrect reading. According to an Ars Technica editorial, WGA reported around 22% of 500 million Windows computers as failing the test; of these less than 0.5% were due to unauthorized software, with the balance (over 20%, or 90% of all positives) related to edge cases. Microsoft "refused to comment on the rate of pure false positives" beyond saying it was "under 1%" (or as stated, at most around 5 million users affected). False negatives On June 18, 2007, news surfaced that it is possible to positively validate as a "Genuine Microsoft Product" user (and as a result be able to download certain software from Microsoft's official website) using Internet Explorer with IEs4Linux and Wine, running on Linux, without even having a Windows-family system installed. Major failures in WGA system On October 5, 2006, a WGA failure occurred, incorrectly flagging some systems as being non-genuine. On August 25, 2007, the Microsoft WGA servers suffered an outage, resulting in many legitimate copies of Windows XP and Vista being marked as counterfeit. The issue was solved about 12 hours later. According to Microsoft, "fewer than 12,000 systems were affected worldwide." On July 18, 2008, reports of Microsoft's WGA and OGA servers being offline surfaced again. Microsoft later responded that only offline verification was temporarily down. See also Office Genuine Advantage Windows Product Activation Digital rights management References External links Description of