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Poll: Do you think WinXP's copy protection scheme will be cracked?

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I know that tweaking does not trigger the protection, but it usually DOES trigger a reinstall.

So, great, everytime I have to reinstall, I have to make friggin' phone call to MS. It damn well better be a 24/7 toll-free call.

I hope there's a crack for the activation....



<< I think MS finallly deserves to get some money for their products. >>


Yeah, they're hurting for money. That's why Mr. Bill is one of the richest men in the world.

amish
 
So? Are you going to keep running NT or the semi-stable 9x?

No, the comparison was between win2k with office 2k and winXP with office XP. In Anandtech's test PC, it was about equivalent to taking 500 Mhz away from the P4.
Sorry, but that's huge to me.
I'll be sticking to win2k. It's pretty stable and does what I need. I realize that I'll need to upgrade to XP sooner or later, but I'll make it later.



 
I really hate microsoft for this ...
how would you feel that every re&iuml;nstall you have to call microsoft
(which will cost microsoft loads of money to phone operators 😀)
to get your half million digit code that you need to write down and enter in yer comp ... I can tell you for sure that I'll be keeping with win98 for a while ... maybe till my OS's 10th birthday (2008) then linux will have conquered microsoft (I hope cous I really despise them but I cannot without them ... 🙁

 
They just want to stop everyone with a CDRW (just about every clueless OEM system buyer in the last 2 years) form casualy copying.

They prettymuch will never stop the hardcore elite crackers and users without going to a dongle protection.
 
If I pay full retail for an OS or a game or any other software, I have no guilt in installing said software on one or one hundred machines that I own. Making copies and selling them is a different story. I do understand that this isn't how corporate lawyers see it, but that's how I see it. I work for an extremely large corporation. In my building alone, they have approximately 3,000 WinNT licenses. That is big business and MS DOES do random inspections of our &quot;books&quot; to see if we've purchased the appropriate number of licenses. They don't care about you or I with our copies of W2K or Win98 loaded on your and grandmas' machine.
 


<< They don't care about you or I with our copies of W2K or Win98 loaded on your and grandmas' machine. >>



Ditto
 
VDboy, do you work for Microsuck? Cause you sound like a commercial or marketing TOOL.

Lets look at the company...every product since win95 has been drastically delayed from originally announced release, yet still manages to get out with hundreds and hundreds of bugs which require timely downloads and updates. What they didn't steal from other companies they manage to make mediocre so they got us by the balls to rape us for more in a couple of years fixing the crap that should have had right in the first place.

I think while protection schemes are necessary to combat ever growing piracy, I think making prices more reasonable for a new os every 2 years or a new office product every year can cut this number in half. Most ppl I know (who have burned copies of m$ OS's)would have full legal copies if it didn't cost so much.

I also think any system that requires that it look into our system to get a virtual &quot;fingerprint&quot; of our systems is potentially dangerous...IE big brother...who could stop them from taking images of our files and such. Would we really know what they would be doing? If this isn't like this exactly I can promise it is heading for it.

I can also imagine that microsuck is moving us to an age where we buy no cd and it is only downloaded off the net (as dsl and such become more mainstream). Without something physical it may make it very hard to copy. Imagine systems where it has to dial in at bootup to login and verify you have the right to use the system before it boots you onto the desktop screen. A pay-per-use scheme that like clockwork requires payment yearly (w/ cc I imagine) to get it to boot again.

I want to buy something and then have the right to use it w/o ever having to deal with them. Work on making the cds more difficult to copy...work with cd-burner manufacturers to make sure no one develops a system to defeat it. There is the protection scheme that stays out of my personal life.

 
I was just wondering, if i wanted to install XP on several home machines, couldn't i just tell MS that i upgraded my machine, or even bought a new one, and then get a new registration key? How would they turn off the activation on the first machine? Do they have any way to tell if i actually uninstalled from the first machine?
 
Don't forget that XP is the one OS that is worth paying for 🙂 It's very stable and.. good 🙂 I think MS finallly deserves to get some money for their products.

I thought that win3.1 was supposed to stabilize win3.0? And then win95 was supposed to stabilize win3.1? or was that win95os2? But wait, wasn't nt3.1 supposed to be the stable version? At least until nt4.0 came out.

OH RIGHT now i remember, win2k is *THE* stable version because they had all these &quot;blue screen&quot; advertisements. too bad it still freezes and glitches here at work.

Now you are trying to claim that XP is &quot;the&quot; os worth paying for because of stability? Oh please, i'll believe it when I see it, but windows == stable is a decade long joke.
 


<< They don't care about you or I with our copies of W2K or Win98 loaded on your and grandmas' machine. >>

Sorry Wrong MichaelD, The causual loaning of Windows and multiple installs on different machines is what caused MS to intergrate this hardware indentifaction scheme into the OS and Office packages.

Rain
 


<< Sorry Wrong MichaelD, The causual loaning of Windows and multiple installs on different machines is what caused MS to intergrate this hardware indentifaction scheme into the OS and Office packages >>



Ditto. And you better believe that companies are going to keep their MS Select 'key' under lock and key (no pun intended) as Microsoft is actively going to go after companies whose key has leaked.

 
<< Now you are trying to claim that XP is &quot;the&quot; os worth paying for because of stability? Oh please, i'll believe it when I see it, but windows == stable is a decade long joke.>>

How can you expect code consisting of millions lines of code written by thousands of developers to be completely stable? Most people can't even write a single page of code without bugs, both logical and syntactical.

I am just saying that MS finally did a _better_ job than before - XP is more stable because I did load testing and &quot;leak&quot; testing on it, and it did better than both 9x and 2000.

And whoever complains about it taking up more disk space and memory should look at the history of computing since Day 1.

If you're comparing Windows to Linux, then wait in line 😉
 
OK. I do respect you guys' opinions and do believe in registering your copy to you. My copy of Win98SE is registered; heck, I do the Live WindowsUpdate thing about 2x week. I don't sell copies or give them away to others like candy. I have it loaded on my machines and my GFs. Not a biggie. Yeah, technically MS could come after me...and the other 1.32 Billion people out there doing the same thing.

I think myself and others who agree with me are a far cry from the VideoGame and Comic Book store around the corner from my house that sells pirated copies of Win98/W2K for $50 apiece though. They can and prolly will get busted. I lay low with my properly purchased copy and live fat and happy. Have a good day, guys. 🙂
 


<< Has there ever been any software that hasnt been cracked???? >>



Well, if you can find a crack for Adobe Illustrator 9 Demo, i'll personally buy you a beer and have it shipped to you overnight.

And if they want copy protection why not make some hardware key like an USB device that has to be plugged in in order for Windows to run. Sure it could be replicated but who would consider paying for pirated software.
 
Up to RC1 has been cracked, but to my knowledge 2509 has not been cracked yet. Regardless, since M$ keeps adding layers to the activation after each crack it was agreed to not keep posting the cracks until RC2 or RTM are out... Why keep helping M$ make it better?

It will be cracked, guaranteed. But will it matter? A volume license version will be spread like the corporate version of Office XP anyway... Those that will want it that way will get it without the crack or activation hassle.
 
How can you expect code consisting of millions lines of code written by thousands of developers to be completely stable?

You have the expectation of &quot;very stable,&quot; not me.

And my point is that EVERY windows release is SUPPOSEDLY stable when in fact it hasn't been.

So your suggestion that people should not steal it (as if people should need a reason not to steal) is laughable considering MSs history. MS is the yugo (or perhaps jaguar) of software companies.

 
Yep. As far as I'm aware, its legal to modify software you paid for in any way you see fit, including cracking it, as long as you don't distribute it. Of course you'll violate M$'s end user agreement. The one thing that worries me is that this is an OS and not a program. It could have anti-softice and other monitoring software built in. Oh and about the IP being sent to your ISP, forget it. Hypotheitcally, if I was going to crack it I would be disconnected from the net, goto phone registration and run a debugger to get the proper code that would be sent to me if I had called M$ and that would be the end of it. Of course M$ knows this and they are probably installing a lot of integrated protection but they also are counting on the fact that not all you guys are l33t crax0rs. Now M$ makes most of its $ from the corporate world that would get caught if it had copied copies on its machines. All it takes is one disgruntled employee to make a call. Now M$ has gotten even more greedy and wants 100% of the home user market while eliminating the casual copying among friends. They claim that by eliminating piracy they'll save the consumer money but there will always be piracy and why lower prices when they know that all you guys are dying for all the brand new bloated bells and whistles of this OS. Remember Q3? It had one of the best serial protections because it had to be registered with a serial that was once on the shelf. The chances of generating one was at least 1 in a million. I sat and watched that game sit on the shelf at $49.99 for months. Don't believe the misonception that they're doing this for you.
 
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