Windows Vista Keygen a Hoax

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!'"

i thought so

[jrwr00]

I figured it would turn out like that, its just a random number gen that prints a 25 digit number.
a 4 year old using BASIC could do that

you posted to the wrong thread

[DrSkwid]

I think you meant this one [slashdot.org] and you should have said "I think this is a hoax"

Re:Why

[vivaoporto]

Because 1) It is not intelligent, brute force was never needed to bypass Windows Activation before 2) It is not subtle enough, and an operation this size would put a big bullseye on whoever did it 3) It is not profitable, people that run those botnets do it for profit, not to "stick it to the man", or to piss off Microsoft.

Good scare for Vista people though

[suso]

Even thought it turned out to not be true, there are a lot of people who only read Slashdot and other news places during the week and won't see this retraction, so they may never know that it was fake. So they will go off with a further impression that its unsafe to run Vista and you could have your legitimate key compromised at any moment. Its like the tactics that some politicians and corporations use. What is someone going to post next week and retract on Saturday?

Re:OEM_BIOS_Emulation_Toolkit

[Pharmboy]

While I understand your logic, I disagree with your conclusion. To play some games, you must have Windows at this time. I would rather than people who must have a copy, find a way to get it free. This way they are not financially tied into MS, and they are not any more inclined to invest any money into MS.

Also, since Vista comes with 90% of all computers sold in the US, the fact that they don't have it already means they are building their own boxes instead of buying Dells. Guys that build their own don't pirate OS's because it is cheaper, they do it because it is there to be done. Like running apache on an Xbox...it has no practical value, but fun to try anyway, and play a little with it.

Not Quite....

[encoderer]

I can [not!] speak for myself when I say that even if you don't buy the OS, you can still be very easily financially tied to MS. Both in terms of hardware purchases and software purchases that are windows-only.

I probably have $1k in windows software.

Of course, I don't understand the rabid microsoft-hating to begin with. Their product works fine for me. I can't tell you the last time I had a system crash (opposed to an application crash), or the last time I was infected with spyware or a virus. Also, my computer runs at a perfectly acceptable clip, there's an entire ecosystem of software and peripherals, not to mention support and documentation. I know that if I have a problem w/ windows, office, etc, SOMEBODY has had that problem before and Google can probably explain it to me.

I'll probably be labeled as a Troll because only on slashdot can you be a troll for writing a positive review of a perfectly acceptable software package. Cheers!

Re:When in reality

[kbradford]

0.001% of 8.08E+38 is still 8.08E+34. That is a VERY LARGE number. Why would MS create a key algorithm that allowed for so many valid keys? Not only would they never need that many, but it would only make it that much easier for brute force cracking.

Obviously it isn't that big.