legitimate

It's been a week since we had our vote and my email inbox is buzzing with questions and suggestions from our readers. The question below is the most frequently asked question from last week's vote, and it deserves an entire article on its own. ... Please read it carefully. Note: the article below is lengthy (about 1500 words). Most people reading this article will find it highly informative and interesting as it applies to technology, search engines, advertising, profits, and even addresses how and why Google ranks its search results. It also explains why we are asking for contributions to our ... (view more)

According to a new study, more than 40 per cent of the world's software is pirated. The study also claims the software industry lost $53 billion to pirates last year, though that figure has a major flaw in its calculation. According to the Business ... Software Alliance (BSA), the United States has the world's lowest piracy rate, with just 20% of software being unlicensed. However, the size of its software market means the losses have the biggest financial value, totaling $9.8 million last year. Across the world, the study found that while piracy dropped in the majority of countries, the ... (view more)

Once again Windows Genuine Advantage (WGA) has gone awry, penalizing legitimate Windows XP and Vista users. The problem occurred when unspecified server problems caused by an unknown automatic update from Microsoft created a Windows Validation ... meltdown making Microsoft Windows Genuine Advantage servers incorrectly flag legitimate copies of Windows XP and Vista as pirated copies. The damage created quite a stir in the Microsoft Support Forums , with disruptions lasting for about 19 hours over this past weekend. Windows Vista users who rebooted their computers were blasted with WGA pop-ups, ... (view more)

Last week Microsoft released their newest version of the Windows Genuine Advantage (WGA) tool. WGA is designed to make sure the Microsoft software on your computer is properly licensed (legitimate, not counterfeit) and supported by Microsoft or one ... of their trusted partners. Certainly, Microsoft would like to believe that their WGA software is reliable and doesn't make mistakes. When they released the original WGA software, however, it mistakenly identified potentially pirated software on several legitimate users machines. In a case of deja vu, the the newest version of WGA is also causing a ... (view more)

Yesterday's Visitor Feedback of the Gazette addressed why two program files ( internat.exe and ptsnoop.exe ) might be present in the Windows msconfig startup. To be honest with you, I have never encountered these programs before. The name ... "internat.exe" seemed to me that it was a purposely misspelled version of the word "Internet" -- most likely misspelled to dupe users into thinking that it was a friendly Internet-related program. In all likelihood, I thought, the program name "internat.exe" could have been a trojan. I was right. Sort of. As always, I use Google ... (view more)