Pirates Find Proper Way to Crack Vista's Activation Schema

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.'"

Comments

Old News Crack

[Tx]

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.

Re:Old News Crack

[S.O.B.]

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.

Re:Good work MS

[Brian Gordon]

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

old news. 365 days old.

[leuk_he]

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.

Re:old news. 365 days old.

[baadger]

> 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.

Fixed :)

[cigawoot]

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).

Re:What SP1?

[Xenolith]

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.

Re:What SP1?

[Puppeteer_23]

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

Re:... But Windows STILL not dying...

[JasterBobaMereel]

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)

Re:... But Windows STILL not dying...

[rriven]

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

Microsoft has fixed some activation cracks

[enosys]

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