2 year Old Pirated Keys Work : Defeating WGA

[macmax]

On July 18, Microsoft's WGA team promised to send me a disk with a product key from their blocked list. It was supposed to arrive via overnight service, but it was never sent. After several follow-up messages, I was assured on July 26 I would have something by the end of that week. The package finally arrived the next week, on August 1. It contained a CD-R with a handwritten label that read ?Windows XP SP2 ? VLK,? and a 25-character product key on a small slip of paper.

Over the weekend, I hoisted the Jolly Roger, cleared a partition on a test machine, slid the CD into the drive, and prepared to join the ranks of Windows pirates. Unfortunately, the product key that Microsoft had sent me didn?t work. Instead of a smooth installation, I got an error message: "The Product ID which you entered is invalid. Please try again." I fired off a request for assistance to my contacts at Microsoft. Nearly 72 hours later, I still haven?t received a response other than a note that confirms my message was forwarded to the correct person.

No problem, I thought. I?ll just do what any red-blooded pirate would do and Google for a working product key. It took me about 15 minutes to find a web page containing five volume license keys that had reportedly been posted on September 9 2004. Surely if I can find a leaked VL key on a search engine, Microsoft can too, right? If these keys have been floating around the Internet for two years, surely they?ve been tagged as stolen by Microsoft, and I?ll get a WGA failure that I can show the world.

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lol i searched for 15 mins and gave up ... lucky pirate to find a working one still on the internet

[samg]

VLK's are proberly linked to a company, so they cant jusy ban them. But saying that, they could find them, then find out the owner and reissue one.

You can also get key generators, so it's hard to ban those.

[Brian M. Veteran]

Yeah - some leaked keys are actually linked to huge corporations etc... i guess the British government would get peed if they were called by microsoft and told to reinstall windows or at least, change the keys on all of their computers...

sometimes it isnt possible, all they can do is issue the company with a new key, and refuse new activations... there IS one key i know of which passed WGA (and no i wont give it to anyone because i do not have it)

i say that microsoft should stop people physically USING vlk copies unless they are connected to a specific network - people like you and me actually pay for software, so why should they get it for free?

[Napalm Frog]

That's an interesting read. I admit when I was in highschool I had a pirated system (not anymore, the university game me free copies, so I've been legal 3 years), and oh boy was it easy to find keys. Even after each service pack. Though, I obviously haven't tried with the WGA yet. All I know is that all of my licenses have never hit a false positive yet.

[Slimy]

My 64 installation is pirated but the installer for ie7b3 did not find anything wrong with my setup. I was a bit shocked to say the least. I ended up uninstalling because of other issues, but that's not the point. MS should have these things worked out by now :/

[L3thal Veteran]

My 64 installation is pirated but the installer for ie7b3 did not find anything wrong with my setup. I was a bit shocked to say the least. I ended up uninstalling because of other issues, but that's not the point. MS should have these things worked out by now :/

There's no WGA for XP x64, hence why IE7b3 didn't "detect" anything.

[Quillz]

That's an interesting read. I admit when I was in highschool I had a pirated system (not anymore, the university game me free copies, so I've been legal 3 years), and oh boy was it easy to find keys. Even after each service pack. Though, I obviously haven't tried with the WGA yet. All I know is that all of my licenses have never hit a false positive yet.

I was the same way. And then I found programs that could back up the file where the serial key is stored, so you could simply re-install it every time you did a fresh start to alway get around the activation.

[Des429]

Was it just me or when this was shown up above as "2 year old pirated..." i thought it was about a two year old hacker.

[Shof]

my key is still good after 4 years

[Ultomato]

Im building a new computer and i dont really want to buy another damn windows xp when vista is coming out soon so i guess im gonnaa have to do a lil "searching"

[madnuke]

The whole WGA dosnt anoy me really, the thing that anoys me is having to ring India up after you've reinstalled and want to activate with a 100% legit copy that you bought for ?120 and having to read out the 42 digit key and then having to listen carefully as you get another key back to activate it seems that SP2 did that.