OEM Vista crack gets round 'phone home' activation

[Alpine]

Oh God, you've set him off again

JUST AS MY INBOX WAS RECOVERING from the flames from my last story on crackers/hackers/pirates, along comes news of yet another exploit. APC mag carries details of a crack released by pirate horde Pantheon, which allows a stolen installation of Vista to be activated and made fully-operational without phoning home to Redmond.


Like XP before it, MS produces OEM versions of Vista for shipping with new systems as a result of outfits like Acer and HP reckoning the whole process was too complex for their dim-witted customers to get their heads round. The chosen companies get a unique key for their preloads and the system can then run straight out of the box as soon as the punter gets it home.

Pantheon's crack involves an emulator that spoofs the BIOS from ASUS, Dell, HP and Lenovo and allows Vista to run without requiring the original hardware it was shipped with.

The good news for Microsoft is that the crack is tied to specific product keys which will eventually (but not yet) be detected by Windows Genuine Advantage and then prevented from downloading updates and security patches. Disregarding the legality of running a stolen and cracked copy of Vista, one has to admire the innovative way this particular crack works. However, the question has to be asked: How long did it take to write the crack and couldn't the pirates have spent the same amount of time working at McDonalds and earned enough to buy a legitimate copy?

The INQuirer