Windows Vista Keygen a Hoax 154
An anonymous reader writes "The author of the Windows Vista keygen that was reported yesterday has admitted that the program does not actually work. Here is the initial announcement of the original release of the keygen, and here is the followup post in which the same author acknowledges that the program is fake. Apparently, the keygen program does legitimately attack Windows Vista keys via brute force, but the chances of success are too low for this to be a practical method. Quote from the author: 'Everyone who said they got a key is probably lying or mistaken!'"
OEM_BIOS_Emulation_Toolkit (Score:5, Informative)
But i don't know what will be the impact for online upgrades since i don't use Vista myself.
Re:OEM_BIOS_Emulation_Toolkit (Score:5, Informative)
Once again, product activation is only a PITA for legit customers.
Re:OEM_BIOS_Emulation_Toolkit (Score:5, Informative)
Re:OEM_BIOS_Emulation_Toolkit (Score:3, Informative)
Pantheon released a full Windows Vista Ulimate CD with their own activation tool using the same principle. Here is the NZB set [yabse.com] (click NZB to download the file) to facilitate downloading from Usenet. Posts are two hours old so they may need a bit longer if you're not using Giganews, Newshosting, etc.
When in reality (Score:4, Informative)
Might not even have to validate keys at all anymor (Score:5, Informative)
a key is valid before submitting it to their server for signing.
If I were them I would do what prepaid mobile phone has been doing
for years: generate completely random keys and at the signing server
end just check if that key is in the database and if it's not already
used. If that's the case then all they would have to do is sign the
key and the computer configuration and return that to the client code
that would in turn check if the signature is valid.
That way there would be no way to brute force keys because they have
control over the validation server and can put a stop to that and there
is no key validation code exposed from which someone might derive a
key generator or at least get hints at how the keys are distributed
in key space.
Re:People lie on the internet? (Score:3, Informative)
Uh? Never heard of that hoax. Is there any reference on the web? A cursory google search turns up nothing.
Re:When in reality (Score:3, Informative)
Actually, it's 50 million on average.
Re:When in reality (Score:3, Informative)
Actually, there should be a lot less than that since some characters are always letters and some characters are always numbers.
Done smart is NOT DONE AT ALL (Score:3, Informative)
When you have done that work out how long it would take if you used every computer in the world.
Express it in terms of billions of years, and compare it to the lifetime of the sun.
Then get the cluestick and hit yourself repeatedly on the head.