When microsoft launched Windows XP, and it required “activation” with a central server before it would work, everyone thought it was a good idea. When they launched “genuine advantage,” which strengthened the protection by requiring more frequent checks against the server (previously it had only checked at install time,) everyone said it was definitely a bad idea; no one liked the idea that Microsoft could, through malice or incompetence, remotely deactivate their copy of Windows. Microsoft said that would never happen.

This weekend it did.

Ars reports that on Friday night the central Windows Genuine Advantage server failed and users started to have their copies of Windows deactivated. The problem is already solved, so kudos to Microsoft for turning it around that quickly (and I bet a lot of people worked a lot of hours to get it going,) but this should never have happened in the first place, and it just demonstrates why requiring any centralised validation step in software is a Bad Idea. In this case it didn’t have a huge impact, but it could have had. What are we — the paying customers — supposed to do if, next time, the outage is a week, while they track the problem? Just not use our computers? What if Microsoft goes out of business? I know it’s unthinkable, but if it were to happen, we’d all be screwed. I just don’t see any good reason we should accept that our operating system should only work for as long as the company we’ve already paid for it is able to keep a server somewhere else in the world working.

It’s worth pointing out that the people who have illegal copies of Windows would have been unaffected by this outage, since they long ago disabled the WGA checks. Not only is Genuine Advantage ineffective as an anti-piracy measure, but like any “copy-protection” scheme, it encourages piracy, by inconveniencing the legal users in ways their less-scrupulous counterparts get to ignore. Brilliant.