Vista Falls on Own Sword, Hacked To Bits

John Biggs

Biggs is the East Coast Editor of TechCrunch. Biggs has written for the New York Times, InSync, USA Weekend, Popular Mechanics, Popular Science, Money and a number of other outlets on technology and wristwatches. He is the former editor-in-chief of Gizmodo.com and lives in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. You can Tweet him here and G+ him here. Email him directly at... → Learn More

Monday, March 5th, 2007

Haxors have discovered how to trick Vista into thinking its running on an OEM machine and bypassing the activation and validity check entirely. The hack involves adding a BIOS certificate specific to a certain OEM which Vista then accepts as legitimate.

After the brute-force keygen — which seems to be hoax — and the things like this hack its abundantly clear that Vista activation is a speed-bump and little else. However, I can suggest you go out and pay for Vista. It’s a good product, a strong upgrade, and a worthy adversary in the cat-and-mouse game called hacking.

It’s official: Pirates crack Vista at last [APCMag]

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