James Bannan02 December 2006, 4:22 AM
Never say never, but Windows Vista final code has been out for three weeks now and is standing firm against pirates so far. Has Microsoft come up with an uncrackable product protection?
Almost as soon as Vista RTM was released, and well before it was available for download by MSDN subscribers, pirates had it up and
available for download.
The pirated copy, released by a group called BillGates, wasn’t a true cracked version. Instead, it used activation files from the pre-RTM releases, enabling pirates to use older product keys to activate the OS.
The main anti-piracy feature, mandatory activation, was actually still intact.
Two weeks have passed since then, and although every single official version of Vista (and Office 2007) has made it onto the pirate boards, no group has stepped forward to claim success with a crack to bypass activation.
This is actually a pretty impressive feat by Microsoft. Normally, a release of this size and importance is cracked wide open within 48 hours of the release of the final code (and most lesser applications in 24).
For Vista to have held off pirates for a full three weeks (and counting) is no small achievement.
It’s probably too early to speculate about the long-term impact of Vista’s activation model.
Pirate groups have circumvented every method of copy protection available, and with that sort of history it would be silly to claim that Microsoft has come up with an uncrackable system.
But – Microsoft have an enormous vested interest in protecting Vista after hundreds of thousands of volume licenced copies of XP were pirated, and I’ve never seen a product which has product security built in to such a fundamental extent. They’ve clearly taken the fight to pirate groups, and so far seem to be holding steady.
Microsoft's main weapon is actually the constant stream of patches that Windows requires to maintain its security. Microsoft has shown with WGA that it has no ethical concerns with slipping in layer upon layer of additional copy protection into Windows under the guise of "critical security patch". Security for Microsoft's revenue streams, that is, not security for your PC.
Still, you can't blame Redmond. After the five year gap between XP and Vista there's a hell of a lot of sales to make up.