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Pirates Find Proper Way to Crack Vista's Activation Schema

Posted by Zonk on from the little-ants-can-fell-big-trees dept.

El_Oscuro writes "A genuine crack for Windows Vista has been released by pirate group Pantheon. The exploit allows a pirated, non-activated installation of Vista (Home Basic/Premium and Ultimate) to be properly activated and made fully-operational. 'It seems that Microsoft has allowed large OEMs like ASUS to ship their products with a pre-installed version of Vista that doesn't require product activation — apparently because end users would find it too inconvenient.'"

16 of 213 comments (clear)

  1. Old News Crack by Tx · · Score: 4, Informative

    In other news, pirates have created a crack to prevent news from 4th March 2007 appearing a year later on /.

    Well we live in hope.

    --
    Oh no... it's the future.
    1. Re:Old News Crack by S.O.B. · · Score: 4, Informative

      I guess someone is too young to know that the OP was referring to "The $64,000 Question" (1955-58).

      The GP was alluding to the oft quoted Bill Gates line "640K ought to be enough for anybody" although Gates denies ever saying it. A very clever reference that whooshed over your head.

      --
      Some of what I say is fact, some is conjecture, the rest I'm just blowing out my ass...you guess.
    2. Re:Old News Crack by AJWM · · Score: 2, Informative

      Friendly nit-pick: the C64 ran on a 6510, CBM's clone of the 6502. The main distinction was a bunch of 'hidden' op-codes that weren't part of the official set

      Yes, the C64 used a 6510. However...

      The 6510 wasn't a "clone" of the 6502, it was a 6502 core plus 8 I/O ports (although most versions of the chip only brought 6 of those out to pins). The I/O ports were similar to those found on the 6522 VIA.

      Further, CBM had no need to "clone" the 6502 since Commodore bought MOS back in the early KIM-1 days, MOS Technology was also known as the Commodore Semiconductor Group. The 6502 and 6510 were both MOS Tech/CSG products.

      The "hidden" op-codes weren't exactly a distinction from the 6502, various vendors' implementations (particularly Rockwell's) also had a number of undocumented op-codes. The 6502 instruction set being rather (but not completely) orthogonal, it wasn't hard to figure out what some of those undocumented ops did.

      The 1541 (and the 1540 before it, it was just a ROM change) did use a 6502; mine had a 6502B (2 MHz clock) but I don't know if they actually ran the clock any faster or that just happened to be the part they had on hand when they assembled mine (which was a 1540 that I later swapped out the ROM on, the ROM change actually slowed it down slightly, the C64 had a bit more overhead than the VIC-20 that the 1540 was designed for.)

      --
      -- Alastair
  2. Re:Good work MS by Brian+Gordon · · Score: 4, Informative

    Owned ages ago. This is PARADOX's crack and it's old.

  3. old news. 365 days old. by leuk_he · · Score: 4, Informative

    Note that the article is dated 4 March, exactly 365 days ago. SOmehow the editor does not have 29 feb and though he was living at tomorrow.

    THis particular crack has/will be defeated by sp1.

    1. Re:old news. 365 days old. by baadger · · Score: 4, Informative

      > This particular crack has/will be defeated by SP1.

      Yes this particular crack (by Paradox) has been fixed in SP1. The thing is, SP1 only blacklists some very specific 'soft mods' (Boot loader replacement designed to emulate an OEM issued BIOS SLIC table and trick Vista into accepting your machine as an OEM product). It is widely known that there are still many others out there, even ones dating from the middle of last year, that work just fine with SP1.

  4. Fixed :) by cigawoot · · Score: 3, Informative

    This was fixed in SP1! I was thinking they found way around the SP1 fix (not like I condone piracy, but seeing MS get owned every once in a while is fun).

  5. What SP1? by Gr8Apes · · Score: 2, Informative

    What SP1? Wasn't it yanked due to incompatibilities?

    --
    The cesspool just got a check and balance.
    1. Re:What SP1? by Xenolith · · Score: 3, Informative

      Yup. But the version MS was about to release contained updates to stop the more common hacks. This hack may have been one of them. There are other activation hacks out there that have been tested to work with SP1 RC.

      --

      Journal
    2. Re:What SP1? by Puppeteer_23 · · Score: 3, Informative

      No. SP1 is RTM, but a pre-requisite update went a bit awry and THAT's what they pulled back.

      --
      -- "Wherever you go, there you are." -Buckaroo Banzai
  6. Where can I get one for XP? by sm62704 · · Score: 2, Informative

    I'm not buying Vista, or pirating XP. My copy of XP is legal, purchased at Best Buy for a hundred bucks (actually a little more).

    As Windows is so damned insecure, I won't get on the internet with it, period. I mostly use an old distro of GNU/Linux/KDE, and that's what I surf with. When I install Windows I unplug the ethernet, and disable networking in Windows before I plug the LAN back in.

    Even were I to trust a patched copy of Windows, it takes longer to patch than a cracker can find the machine and add it to his botnet.

    As a consequence, activation is a complete and itter pain in the ass. I have to call their damned computer in Redmond with my cell phone, which costs me by the minute. I then have to key in a very long unintelligible string, talking to a computer that has more trouble understaning me than a phone monkey in India.

    Windows is getting flakey again (one slashdotter says I must have a bad memory chip, but I had this problem before and reinstalling Windows fixed it. I don't see how reinstalling Windows would fix a bad memory chip. And Mandriva runs flawlessly, why wil Linux work flawlwssly with a bad memory chip but not Windows?

    So before I reinstall that piece of shit operating system that I paid way, way too much for, could one of you pirates point me to a patch that Microsoft calls a crack?

    On second thought, never mind. I have no way of knowing that the patch/crack isn't a trojan. If anybody can figure a way out of this goddamned stupid activation mess that frustrates and annoys the hell out of me, a paying customer, while doing nothing whatever to slow pirates down I'd appreciate it. Thanks.

    -mcgrew (not the security guy, that's a differen mcgrew)

    --
    mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
  7. Re:... But Windows STILL not dying... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

    Vista SP1 is supposed to kill off the crack: http://news.softpedia.com/news/Vista-SP1-The-Death-of-the-2099-Grace-Timer-Crack-and-OEM-BIOS-Hack-77948.shtml

  8. Re:... But Windows STILL not dying... by JasterBobaMereel · · Score: 3, Informative

    Two corrections :

      You are not the only person who uses Linux - Half the internet servers do so and so do a lot of users (just not a large percentage)

      The Model T ford was sold in many colours, black was not even an option on the early models, and the later ones were always offered in multiple colours in all countries ...?

      The problem is that the alternative to XP was Mac (not then considered a viable alternative) Linux (not then considered a viable alternative) or Windows 2000 (XP Improved on it without adding too many annoyances)

    The alternative to Vista is OSX (a viable alternative for most users) Linux (An viable alternative in for some users) or XP (it's not worse in most things people care about, and is less annoying)

    --
    Puteulanus fenestra mortis
  9. Re:... But Windows STILL not dying... by rriven · · Score: 3, Informative

    Ah. So it will just have to be cracked again.

    Already been done - still old news - http://defcon5.biz/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=921

    I have had an activated copy of SP1 on my laptop since the 7th of Feb

    --
    Dan
  10. Re:Improper way? by moderatorrater · · Score: 2, Informative

    There were work arounds like getting it to let you have the 30 day trial 4 or 5 times (or something like that). This is a proper crack in that it actually removes or disables the activation.

  11. Microsoft has fixed some activation cracks by enosys · · Score: 3, Informative

    Microsoft recently released KB940510. Here is what it does. I've read it detects the Paradox BIOS emulator and the timerstop crack.