In 2005, Microsoft started the anti-piracy initiative called Genuine Advantage. To be able to download from Microsoft Download Center, you would have had to pass the validation. It was the first time that Microsoft acknowledged the existence of Wine, by blocking its access to the downloads if a Wine specific registry key was found by the ActiveX control or their standalone tool. These are some ways to detect Wine: Registry # Check for the existence of “SOFTWARE\Wine\Wine\Config”