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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.'"

5 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: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.