WGA: No Kill Switch, But ... Are Many Failures Bogus?

Earlier on RealTechNews I posted a story from ComputerWorld refuting the "kill switch" scenario which had been posted earlier on the web ... however, a friend who read my article took a closer look at the ComputerWorld article than I did, and pointed out something in the article.

Through its spokeswoman, Microsoft said that “80% of all WGA validation failures are due to unauthorized use of leaked or stolen volume license keys.”

My friend's math is good, and as such it's obvious that means that 20% of the validations failures are NOT due to leaked or stolen volume license keys. A little search around the web and I found that Ed Bott, who proposed the "kill switch" theory, did the math as well.

However, I'm not quite ready to say that 20% of the failures are not caused by pirated keys, as the title of Ed's blog entry implies. It's possible that, since the quote says "volume" license keys, the other failures are a result of hacking, etc. on non-volume installations.

On the other hand, it still sounds like there are too many failures of this "utility" than I am comfortable with, and I am keeping my copy of RemoveWGA close at hand.