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WinXP Keygen Foils Product Activation
Bill Gates' Friend's Brother's Roommate writes: "The Register has a story on a working key generator that produces 25 valid Windows XP Product Activation Keys in a few hours. As author John Lettice summarizes, 'So the question as regards keymaking software is whether or not Microsoft has any way to differentiate between generated keys and the ones it has issued itself. If not, this generation of WPA is now surely toast.'"
But fix the security hole they put in box, as well!
Woohoo! :-D
Actually, some companies do it the way you describe (with a database of known keys) but Blizzard does something slightly different, which Microsoft may do as well.
:D
In Blizzard's games, the routines used by the installer to verify authenticity of a CD key actually checks for compliance to a much more broad algorithm than the keys are actually manufactured by. This means that methods of generating keys reverse-engineered from the game itself will produce keys that work for installing the game but are very likely outside of the real algorithm, which usually constitutes a tiny subset of the one used for installation. This REAL algorithm is used to manufacture the CD keys and is what is checked for on, for instance, the multiplayer servers. Since that checking is serverside it theoretically can't be reverse-engineered to a keygen. Lots of companies are doing this now -- most game keygens are fine for installing but won't play online, and while it's possible for the keygen to randomly hit on a key that falls within the real algorithm and thus allow online play, it's astronomically unlikely.
Quite smart, really.
I was trying to decode this, but was having trouble with it until I figured out that it is in base64 encoding, not uuencode (as it appeared at first). If your Linux or Unix distribution does not have base64 installed by default, you can get it at http://www.fourmilab.ch/webtools/base64/. Thank you, Fair Use Guy, for promoting this tool.
Loneliness is a power that we possess to give or take away forever
#!/usr/bin/perl
.= $_; $x =~ s/[\r\n\t ]//g; } print decode_base64($x); exit 0;
use MIME::Base64; $x = ""; while(<>) { $x
Just find a copy of the license pack edition - it requires no activation. I use this at work - you can even change a whole motherboard out and it doesn't say a thing. Perfect for ghost (which is what we use it for)
That isn't a "keygen" per sae.. it is just a program that spits out a random, probably stolen, key.
Thanks for trying, though.
Nice theory. Too bad it runs afoul of one inconvenient fact: the copies of WinXP in use in most companies do not have WPA in them at all. Only the retail versions get the activation, OEM and Enterprise-license copies are essentially pre-activated or don't require activation.
The program appears to be written in VB (if it is indeed the same one as posted here)
Rewriting it in C++ (perhaps with some inline assembly optimizations) will probably yield a significant performance boost if it is number crunching that is in fact slowing it down so much.
I bought Sierra's "Tribes 2" game a number of months after it originally came out, and when I went to register and sign into the online portion of the game for the first time, it came back with a message that I was using a pirated CD key! Considering I had just brought the game home from Electronics Boutique and read the key off the back of the shrinkwrapped case, I figured this was unlikely.
Eventually I got in touch with Sierra and they had me fax them a photocopy of the store receipt and the back of the case clearly showing the CD key (which was a bitch since I don't have a copier). Within minutes of doing so I was back in business. I can only assume Microsoft has a similar policy, where if you can prove ownership, they'll unblock your key.
Rock over London, Rock on Chicago. Wheaties: Breakfast of Champions.
You posted the wrong keygen.
about this one they are talking.
here it is:
--snip--
UEsDBAoAAAAAANZ6TiwAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA5AAAAc29mdHdhc
--snap--
base64-enc, some
greetz,
deucalion
The aforementioned program is NOT the best solution. It only generates CD-Keys, you still need to contact MS, give MS your key (and hope they don't notice it's generated) and get your activation key.
Most people don't want to contact MS in the first place -- perhaps worried they could trace IP-addresses...
The ideal crack would be a program that took a CD-Key as input, and generated a activation key as output, just like Microsoft itself.
Does such a program exist?
There's 10 types of people in this world, those who understand binary and those who don't.
I don't even have XP, nor any other XP product (my only windows is the one that came with my IBM thinkpad which is 98), on my desktop I use linux, but I was curious, so I debase64ed this program, virus scanned it and tested it.
It only contains 4 keys.
If you click on about, it says:
"This is the first of many XP keygens to come. As new numbers are being discovered, they will be added to the final version. Email us for more info on this and other keygens! crackware_y2k@hotmail.com"
Anything? Really?
Hey, make a copy for me and 5000 of your other friends while you are at it!
Unfortunately, now that the DMCA is law, there's little distinction in Copyright law between making illegal copies and breaking in using activation keys.
That's why we needed to stop the DMCA before it became law.
Our hopes now lie in the DMCA being struck down as being too broad or ambiguous.
There's near zero chance that Congress would ever seriously review the DMCA as long as the Media Giants like the status quo.
This situation will become much worse if the current version of Campaign Finance Reform that just passed the US Congress becomes law. Under that law, we won't be able to get together and run issue ads against the DMCA around election time, but the Media Giants, through their news organizations, can run endless editorials and stilted "news" stories about how the DMCA is a good thing right up to and including on election day.
There's still a good chance that bans on issue ads wouldn't pass judicial review. See this page for a discussion of the issues. It seems that this ban would run against the 1976 Supreme Court Ruling Buckley vs. Valeo. There can be no ban on spending, only on individual contributions, which the "soft money" ban would effectively do.
In any case, I don't see much hope of getting the DMCA repealed. Even if we could try to drum up support, it would be an extreme uphill battle trying to get people to understand the issues, what's at stake and overcoming the powerful interests on the other side of the issue. There's some hope that it could be ruled unconstitutional. IANAL, but in my opinion, a bright spot is that recent ruling reported on /. where a judge ruled that put software sales back into the domain of "First Sale" like books regardless of whatever EULAs they might have you clicking through.
That's true, but it doesn't prove your point. By itself, superficially, all that it is an argument against economic regulation of any form. It's certainly a superficial argument against taxation, of which the minimum wage is functionally equivalent. In fact, not only does something like taxation only transfer wealth, it almost always generates an economic "friction" that reduces wealth creation.
So that shows that all taxation is bad, right? Wrong.
In the most obvious example, taxation allows the funding of a law enforcement agency that protects citizens from violence. If an armed gang can roam the marketplace at will, stealing anything they like, the marketplace will fail and wealth creation will dramatically plumment. Therefore, taxation which allows for funding of a police force pays for itself, in spite of the fact that it creates an economic inefficiency, because it protects the very existence of the market. This is an example of why it's boneheaded to claim that all regulation of markets is bad -- some regulation ensures the proper functioning of the market. Financial disclosure and, in general, accounting transparency regulations play an important role in safeguarding the market for securities in public corporations. I mention this to allude to the current Enron scandal.
Beyond regulation of economic activity to protect against "violent" acts, there is also beneficial regulation that supports and protects the infrastructure of the market. Roads and highways, and public education are good examples of this.
With that in mind, it's important to consider that the legal minimum wage certainly acts as a public good, in that it very well may be the case that were those earning minimum wage to earn what they're "really" worth, that amount would be far, far lower than anything approaching a "living wage" -- and that the resulting poverty would generate any number of secondary costs to the economy as a result. There would undoubtedly be more violent crime, as for the very least skilled it would be economically more "rational" for them to wield a gun and take their chances with the law than it would to work at a job that they were "worth". To combat that, we'd have to pay for additional much more highly skilled public workers (police officers) at inflated rates to compensate for their physical jeopardy. In just this limited sense, the extra twenty cents for your burger may very well be offsetting what otherwise would have been an extra thirty cents in direct taxation to pay for police protection.
I think it should be pointed out that even in a recession, the American economy has a very low level of unemployment. Those who have argued against minimum wage laws have always predicted that the resulting economic inefficiency would destroy jobs. The problem is that the difference between the current unemployment rate and any sort of realistic "full emplyment" is very small -- it is now understood that the last one or two percent is intractable. Even the complete abolition of a minimum wage wouldn't eliminate that last bit. In fact, there's good reason to believe that trying to achieve a literal full employment either by regulation or deregulation is a losing proposition in that the harder the rest of us push for the last two percent to work, the more expensive, one way or another, they'll make it for us to do so. They'll either be unbelievably unproductive workers or criminals. Neither come cheap.
I'm all for rational economic analysis. Unfortunately for the ideological conservative, such rational analysis does not always lead to the conclusions that they favor. Some taxation and regulation is undeniably economically advanatageous.