Posted on 03/02/2007 7:31:22 AM PST by sionnsar
Bengt writes "The Inquirer has a story about a brute force Vista key activation crack. It's nothing fancy; it's described as a 'glorified guesser'. The danger of this approach is that sooner or later the key cracker will begin activating legitimate keys purchased by other consumers. From the article: 'The code is floating, the method is known, and there is nothing MS can do at this point other than suck it down and prepare for the problems this causes. To make matters worse, Microsoft will have to decide if it is worth it to allow people to take back legit keys that have been hijacked, or tell customers to go away, we have your money already, read your license agreement and get bent, we owe you nothing.'"
haha, security, windows, business
it's basically the same rules as XP, and Vista's algorithm is actually a little bit less restrictive than XP is.
When the user gets used. He is not saying that it is ok to steal. What he is saying that if someone gets robbed, I can't think of a nicer bunch of folks for it to happen to than MS.
maybe you should move to France they seem to like to sue Microsoft all the time.
Anyway, I was looking a an installation CD of Windows XP the other day, and it said "Made in China". Given that China has zero respect for intellectual property rights, the irony is, in a somewhat twisted way, amusing.
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Yes, it is ironic. China has literally stolen and pirated more software than all other nations combined. I have worked with Asian cultures in business for decades. They have no ethics...
I changed a hard drive and had to reactivate XP. It wasn't too big a deal, but I did resent the attitude of the MS rep. It was clear that the presumption was that I was ripping it off and that it was my job to prove I wasn't.
There seem to be a lot of reports to the contrary. Apparently, over a million legitimate Windows users have been wrongly informed that their copy of Windows is not "genuine". And now the hackers are stealing activation keys from the legitimate users, which will result in more hassle and irritation for Microsoft customers.
Fortunately, there are other popular operating systems that don't require activation keys at all.
Yet another reason to not rent software from MSFT.
no for the PC, and Windows is the MOST dominate period. All the others are marginal at best.
Vista, however, will apparently be a bit more tolerant of the DIY community: "Windows Vista is more intelligent and a bit more lenient than Windows XP around hardware tolerance," Brown said. She referred questions to Microsoft's Windows Activation Web page, which does not address Windows Vista.
In Windows XP, the software looked at ten hardware attributes to create the hash: the display adapter, the SCSI adapter, the IDE adapter, the network adapter and its MAC address, a "RAM amount range" (0-64 Mbytes, 64-128 Mbytes, etc.), the processor type, the processor serial number, the hard drive device, the hard drive volume serial number and the CD-ROM/CD-RW/DVD-ROM.
"Specifically, product activation determines tolerance through a voting mechanism," the XP Activation FAQ says. "There are 10 hardware characteristics used in creating the hardware hash. Each characteristic is worth one vote, except the network card which is worth three votes. When thinking of tolerance, it's easiest to think about what has not changed instead of what has changed. When the current hardware hash is compared to the original hardware hash, there must be 7 or more matching points for the two hardware hashes to be considered in tolerance."
like i said Vista's algorithm is less restrictive than XP's.
Thanks for the explanation.
actual i got tagged on xp for a harddrive change on an oem box.
no problem-o.
Not even in "the vast majority of cases." Just because you haven't had problems doesn't mean
Most of the computers in my house are running with upgraded hardware--and each time required a call to MS to reactivate.
This is one reason why I try to do most of my work on Mac or Linux. If something should happen (which on those systems rarely does), I at least have the ability to reinstall my OS without having to talk to overseas Tech Support for three or four hours.
And SuSE is horrifyingly easy to install (my 13 year old brother can run the install (including partitions) for me without a problem if I'm away at work or school)...
That's the point.
The thing that puzzles me is why playing a DVD would require decrypting the data from the DVD and then re-encrypting it for the display? Wouldn't it make more sense to design a standard method for the computer to exchange information between the display and DVD player and have the display handle all the decryption? This would eliminate the risk of people reverse-engineering the PC code, since the PC code wouldn't have any ability to decrypt anything anyway.
I don't see the major problem here for Microsoft. For any given hardware activation key sent to Microsoft, there's only going to be one genuine activation code out of a something like a quintillion superficially-valid ones. If Microsoft includes in the initial Vista release a test that will be passed by one in a million superficially-valid codes, then a random basher that could try millions of codes would probably find some that would pass validation today.
On the other hand, Microsoft could very easily, at any time, incorporate another test into its software that would only be passed by one in a thousand codes that passed the first test. And if people crack that one, Microsoft could implement yet another test that would only be passed by one in a thousand codes that passed the first two. And even after doing that, Microsoft could still pull another one-in-a-thousand out of its hat.
The word you were probably trying to use was "dominant", followed by a comma.
Yeah, that's about what I did. I restored the ghost image and then rebooted and of course, no joy. So I stuck the XP disk in and reinstalled over the top of the original install. Everything looked good, but it has mucho glitches. I will just have a clean install from the get go this weekend.
Ghost has always done fine until I switched to SCSI. The boot.ini and ntldr is just not compatible at that level. There are work arounds for most other changes, but that is too basic to jiggle with. Nuttin to do but start over.
Back to Activation....... I just think the hackers have this stuff figured out before the first copy of Vista hit the stores. Just like Xbox games and DVD movies, it's a waste of time. Pirates steal and others don't. I bet they spend more money trying to defeat them than they make. A billion Chinese probably had a copy before we did and not one paid for one copy.
are you having problems activating your copy?
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