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!'"

Why

[JackMeyhoff]

.. doesnt somebody actually create a distributed brute force on Windows activation. How many windows machinès in the world? That adds up to some pretty powerful attack.

Re:If it's actually a brute-force == Solution!

[julesh]

Based on calculations in the other thread discussing this, we reckoned that if MS hadn't been stupid designing the key system, you'd have to try somewhere in the region of (IIRC) 10^17 keys before getting one that works. Now we can discard the "evidence" that suggested they had been stupid, this is back to being our baseline assumption. Based on speed-of-trial stats reported there, this would take a 65K-node botnet around 14 years to crack a single key.

Re:Why

[JackMeyhoff]

Yes but you will be doing that every time, once you got the algorithm you just have to seed it (most likely a hash of your computer configuration) to generate valid keys. They cannot go and redo the algorithm without impacting a LARGE amount of their customers, they can black list numbers but so what, with the algorithm you just genereate a new valid one. GAME OVER. Isnt that what we want to render it TOTALLY useless FOR GOOD? This is the way, not some bypass thats just temporary. THINK BIGGER!

Re:OEM_BIOS_Emulation_Toolkit

[Anonymous Coward]

"Once again, product activation is only a PITA for legit customers."

For some extreamely low threshold of PITA. But then this is the forum that's stymed by DVD commercials.