August 2005
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I am The Cyberwolfe and these are my ramblings. All original content is protected under a Creative Commons license - always ask first.
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Boing Boing: Microsoft Genuine Advantage bypass

Boing Boing: Microsoft “Genuine Advantage” cracked in 24h: window.g_sDisableWGACheck=’all’

That was pretty quick!

Should you actually go straight in to the updates page, it will tell you to run the validation, and you might get some strange replies. I didn’t get a copy of the full text, but two machines I ran updates on today gave me the same notice. It went something like this:

You computer checks out as having a version of Windows purchased from an OEM manufacturer, but the computer hardware it reports seems to be different from what the intended hardware was. This is ok for now, but may be a problem later on.

WTF? What kind of hardware was it intended for? These were corporate-licensed copies, built on Intel processors. (Insert sound file here.) Were these copies intended for an Apple? A SPARC? Maybe an Atari?

What this means, folks, is that MS tracks which vendor bought which batch of license keys as a means to help them catch piraters. So, if you had an XP key installed on a Dell that was originally sold to HP, it would send up a flag to Redmond when you tried to validate it. It also seems to be tracking what the original hardware was intended to be, so changes you made to your system may be a problem down the road, if you happen to be an upgrader like myself.

Bastards.

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