Hacker News Reader

Comment by zeusk | Hacker News Reader

I don't see how Microsoft is overstating anything.

A) They didn't bring the case, US Customs did.

B) As the victim (financially) of the Crime they were approached to state the financial damage to decide on the restitution amount and they chose to pick the lowest price on market and further reduce that amount to depict their actual profitability for selling obsolete software.

C) Eric's intentions were clearly not to recycle and reduce waste but to profit from this racket of duping buyers into buying "genuine" recovery discs with Microsoft and Dell logos and tampered activation keys (read the court docket for more details).

View on HN

The price they quoted was for a disc with a valid license. His discs didn't have licenses, so they were worth a few cents apiece.

> His discs didn't have licenses

That is where you're wrong. Read the docket, better yet here is a screenshot from the demonstration that the discs had keys replicated from original Dell recovery discs:

https://imgur.com/3eHjPjO

Moreover, "so they were worth a few cents apiece." - The value of financial damage (especially in this case) matters only towards deciding the restitution amount. They also have a cut-off, above which the crime is considered to be under federal jurisdiction which wouldn't have mattered in this case since the amount was obviously above the cut-off and the crime was of inter-state nature.

I haven't had to recover from an OEM vendor install in awhile, but if I remember right there are many situations where the user does not need to input the serial number for activation.

Windows Vista and up support reading device activation information from the system BIOS.

However, in this case you wouldn't see "Contact Dell for Support" on a lenovo laptop as demonstrated during the trial (see screenshot above).

The image gallery doesn't tell us if they were using a dell recovery cd or something else.

Looks like to me the normal error using a none oem disk with an oem key that is baked into bio

How can a Lenovo laptop have Dell's activation info baked into BIOS?

If the disk had no activation info, setup would have prompted for a key (trial keys for 30 day are available online).

It doesn't, it has Lenovo's SLIC in the BIOS. More than enough to activate Windows. Device manager would no doubt show it's a mess of not installed drivers though.

Big OEMs including Dell and Lenovo use an activation baked into the BIOS and a SLIC (system licence internal code) that's also in the BIOS. No activation required after restore from legitimate or otherwise CD or restore partition. It won't match the code on the machine's sticker, even if it's 100% legit just bought new from maker.

Search will turn up plenty on how SLIC works.

Lenovo's SLIC wouldn't load an invalid key that required them to then copy the key manually from COA on the laptop itself.

IIRC when the BIOS contains the activation data blob the discs are not manufacturer specific. There also used to be discs (at least in the windows 2000 times) that only checked for correct manufacturer name in DMI (or something similar), which obviously were manufacturer specific (AFAIK for a long time this is not possible).

The Dell-specific stuff would be on the disc. On page 32 you can see the gov operator has to input the Lenovo's COA key to activate the OS:

https://imgur.com/a/Ua7SLWo

The gov operator would also have to input a key during setup and OOBE if the disk did not have a tampered key/activation mechanism.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com