James Bannan12 November 2006, 1:19 AM
It hasn't been released toanyoneoutside Microsoft, and Vista RTM has already hit the pirate boards, along with an activation hack.
Well, so much for closing piracy loopholes! With Windows Vista and Office 2007 only just going Gold, and not even available to Microsoft beta testers, developers or volume licence subscribers, the first cracked versions have already hit the pirate boards.
The Windows version which has been released is called Vista BillGates. It doesn’t feature any activation cracks itself, and the supplied product key is just for the installation.
The activation crack is a separate download, and works by replacing the licensing components with components from beta builds. Then using a product key from Beta 1, Beta 2, RC1 or RC2, the Gold version of Vista can be activated online.
In this sense, it’s not a true crack – it’s simply leveraging off compatibilities between the betas and the Gold release. Vista still needs to be activated, and it looks like for the moment, there’s no way around that.
Also, my guess is that this particular loophole won’t be open for very long. Microsoft has a list of every product key it issued during the beta testing, so it’s not going to be difficult to blanket block them once the testing period officially ends.
However, it’s still staggering as to just how quickly this was released. Of course, a massive target like Windows Vista was always going to be instantly subjected to pirate attacks, but to be distributing copies so soon is impressive, to say the least.
On a more sour note for Microsoft, a full version of Office 2007 Enterprise was released on the boards a few hours after Vista BillGates. Unlike Vista, Office 2007 uses Volume Activation 1.0 (no activation required), so it’s unclear how Microsoft is going to be able to counter its dissemination in future.
So is it a case of Pirates 1, Microsoft 0? I don’t think so – not yet, anyway. You can tell a lot about the strength of a product by the nature of the methods used to circumvent its copy protection. Some apps simply need the right product key, others need a key plus a cracked executable.
With Vista, Microsoft have demonstrated (or at least appear to – it’s rather early to tell) that they are way beyond low-end piracy. Rather like NS5s in I, Robot, the product is now so strongly tied to its parent that breaking that relationship seems ever-more improbable, given the parent’s ability to keep tabs on each and every installation of Windows out there.
Perhaps Vista is subject to Asimov’s Three Laws. Oooo…freaky.