Rumor: Microsoft slaps warez in the cheek! ???

[chiwawa626]

News Story link



<< It seems that Windows XP has an extra feature not too widely known. Many Office 2000 &quot;pirated&quot; CD-keys will no longer work in Windows XP, regardless of whether it was installed before hand, or not.
I decided to test this &quot;feature&quot; out for myself. So I uninstalled my Office 2000 and grabbed my copy of Office 2000 Premium and proceeded to install it using a &quot;pirated&quot; CD-key. After checking the cd key several times to see if i had entered it correctly it continues to say &quot;Invalid CD-key&quot;.

My next thought was maybe that key itself was just not real, so I tried several other &quot;pirated&quot; ones with the same luck, none were valid. I then decided to try and install Office on a computer running Windows 98. I used one of the &quot;pirated&quot; cd-keys, and guess what? It works perfectly.

So it seems Microsoft has hidden even more &quot;extra &quot;features&quot; that are not well known at all. I imagine they have done this with several, if not all of their products. So yet we have another blow to the &quot;warez&quot; kiddies out there. I should also point out that Microsoft has done this in the past before.

In service pack 1 for Office 2000, many &quot;pirates&quot; found that after rebooting their copy of Office 2000 will refuse to work and crash.

>>

 

[Warblad13]

that relly sux!
:|

 

[MichaelD]

Oops, guess I won't be running XP...I can't live w/o my Office 97!

 

[chiwawa626]

Hah...they shoulda done some Office XP protection in there...doenst effect me just yet

 

[The Stigenator]

what would happen if you register a legal copy of office in one OS with microshaft and then try that key in XP... I am sure its either checking on the website or something else... There has to be some algorithim that its using in the OS to check..

oh well I am not getting out of W2K and office2K (without teh SP1 - i hate that)

 

[TheVrolok]

Don't worry warez'ers.. you really think it'll take that long for someone to figure out how to crack/hack that as well? There's an old saying, where there's a will, there's a way.

 

[Goldfish]

Yet another reason not to upgrade to XP and keep using Windows 2000.

 

[warcleric]

The_good_guy: more than likely it is just a built in blacklist of known pirated keys. Not hard to overcome, just hasnt been a need to overcome it as of yet. My Office XP pirated keys work fine with Windows XP, so I could really care less. Also, you would think that MS would worry more about the pirated Windows XP keys

 

[Donuts]

I think you don't give those warez kiddies enough respect. They will only see this as a challenge. Give them time, and they will find a work around for anything.

 

[SendTrash]

will my pirated office xp corporate edition still work?

I guess according to warcleric, they still will

 

[bonkers325]

<< Hah...they shoulda done some Office XP protection in there...doenst effect me just yet >>



there are some hidden stuff in it for pirated stuff

 

[chiwawa626]

These warez kiddies are smarter then you think as someone posted above. To take a program made by a multi billion dollar corporation and to cripple it with a 34k program, i think thats somthing. Like within a week of RC1 comming out, it got cracked, these kids are the future

 

[warcleric]

chiwawa: ummm kids?? every cracker I know that has a real affiliation with a release group is 30+ and been doing it since the days of C64 pirate boards and acoustic coupler phreaking.

bonkers: heh, a group of trained monkeys could pound out code as good as most of the crap I have seen from MS. Mr Gates needs to look to these warez groups for some real talent at writing anti-piracy scheme's. I still believe that MS wants individuals to pirate their office suites and OS's though, the more users they can maintain through any means, the more probable thier chances of scoring the huge corporate accounts.

 

[Elledan]

Shees, just use StarOffice

 

[PCResources]

I am using Linux with two separate Office apps...

No one will be stopping me from doing anything, i mean, i do not pay, and that is ok...

Linux for the future, XP for the dumb... that is my opinion.. XPerience the trouble it causes...

Patrick

 

[Pretender]

it's a lot easier to think up a crack than it is to come up with a protection. I, for one, applaud software developers who try (usually unsuccessfully) to protect their stuff. Think of the difficulty it takes to write a program that has to verify its legality. It's damn near impossible. I'll admit, these 'kids' (to use chiwawa-speak ) are good with a decompiler and assembly language. Unlike trying to hack into a remote system though, cracking a program is much less of a problem because the source code is on your system, in a different form, so really it's more or less impossible for Microsoft to win.

 

[warcleric]

Shrug, I ahve had no problems with Office XP or Windows XP, I am by no means a heavy office suite user, so I havent exactly tested it extensively, but Windows XP is definitely an improvement over previous Win9x products. As for linux, I have no use for anything that wont run my games.

 

[KBrinks]

the only good thing about hackers is their talent to f**k over microsoft.. they will find a way to get around it

 

[warcleric]

Pretender: well you don't &quot;hack&quot; into a remote system, you &quot;crack&quot; a remote system. Hacking is making hardware or the OS on your machine do something other than it was designed to do.

 

[PCResources]

<< Pretender: well you don't &quot;hack&quot; into a remote system, you &quot;crack&quot; a remote system. Hacking is making hardware or the OS on your machine do something other than it was designed to do. >>



You have gotten it all wrong, you hack into a system but you crack software...

Patrick

 

[BD2003]

XP works great for me.

I plead the fifth.

 

[PCResources]

<< Windows XP is definitely an improvement over previous Win9x products. >>



Over previous Win9x products... LOL... Nope, it is not even closely related to Win9x, actually WinXP is more related to Unix or Linux than it is to Win9x...

Win XP is just a more resource demanding version of the original NT with a shell that demands tons of resources...

Win XP is a joke, they think that they can control the market all by themselves, well, guess what, i think they are wrong..

patrick

 

[Double Trouble]

Of course it makes you wonder what other spy goodies Microshaft puts into the OS... But then again, I know that within 1 day of the XP OS &quot;going gold&quot; some smart person out there will have cracked it and produced plenty of keys that work just fine.

 

[Linh]

give em time, i for one am counting on those warez kiddies

 

[Lyquid]

Wow... some of the most idiotic conversation I've read in a while. Spy goodies? Give me a break. Would you want to work hard on something and then have people steal it from you? I wouldn't think so. In fact, you'd take whatever measures you could to stop it... I won't even start on the comment about the trained monkeys.

As far as Linux goes... when it's good enough to the point where a majority software companies can afford to devote time and money to Linux distributions, then tell me it's better, not until then.