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Comment by xurukefi | Hacker News Reader

In case you want to download genuine Windows ISOs you can use https://tb.rg-adguard.net. It's a simple website that uses some sort of MS API to generate download links (directly from Microsoft servers). AFAIK MS does not publish checksums of their ISOs anymore, which means you have to rely on trusted sources to compare hashes, but at least it is a download directly from MS servers instread of some random torrent.

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Did a quick test and downloaded a random ISO, can confirm that it pulled from

  https://software.download.prss.microsoft.com/dbazure/[...]

I can download Windows 11 iso from here:https://www.microsoft.com/software-download/windows11

even has a checksum.

I think most people who are looking for windows ISOs are doing so to avoid win11.

https://www.microsoft.com/software-download/windows10

Windows 7, Windows 8

https://developer.microsoft.com/microsoft-edge/tools/vms/

Yeah I wouldn’t trust that site. Rather, use UUPDump. It is open source, and uses the Windows update process where you can generate the ISOs yourself on your machine.

Why should I trust this site over the other one? Open source isn’t some magic bullet that means everything is okay.

It creates links to download directly from Microsoft. I've never had an issue relying on the ISO hashes from msdn.rg-adguard.net either. I just wish Microsoft didn't hide their updated monthly ISO's behind a MSDN subscription.

I have a MSDN subscription and one of my colleges wanted a Japanese Windows 10 ISO to track down a particular bug.

While I had to login to get the link to the ISO, once I had that link there doesn't seem to be any requirements to log in again. All the installs are in trial mode unless you get a key, which does require MSDN, but it would be nice if MS just had a convenient place to find these other than people using some 3rd party service. At least it would give people confidence that it's a genuine download and not been tampered with at all.

The Windows installers are not activated. You need either an OEM key in your firmware, a retail key or a volume activation server.

And https://github.com/massgravel/Microsoft-Activation-Scripts can help with that.

I wouldn't recommend using random public activation servers and hundreds if not thousands of lines of batch scripts. slmgr.vbs and ospp.vbs are your friend.

Why you wouldn't trust that site?

Especially when the final URL ends in a microsoft.com domain

Hopefully Microsoft does not accept user submitted content

If someone can spoof an ISO url, they can also spoof the page/file that contains the ISO hash.

Go to the official windows download page without a windows useragent and you get the iso instead of the crappy download tool.

> without a windows useragent

And amusingly this isn't an easy task in Firefox.

Iirc there are add-ons for it, I'd calllp that easy. Also there's the about:config way but I guess this may be considered difficult.

Opera back in and before the Presto days just had a switcher in the menu. (As well as a “cached images only” toggle, which was why I used it in the first place, but I digress.)

> Also there's the about:config way

This is only for responsive design mode in which FF mimics iPhone (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 12_0 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/604.1.38 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/12.0 Mobile/15A372 Safari/604.1)

There is no straight way to just change the useragent like I could do with IE10 *grin*

> AFAIK MS does not publish checksums of their ISOs anymore

I don't know where you got that information, but if i go to the Windows 11 download page[0] right below the download button there's a "Verify your download" section with all checksums for all ISOs in all languages

[0]: https://www.microsoft.com/en-ca/software-download/windows11

> AFAIK MS does not publish checksums of their ISOs anymore

Why no more? I'm sure they could script it as part of their build process. Even PowerShell is bound to have an inbuilt get-md5 or get-sha function.

There is no technical reason. Previously, everyone could browse the MSDN (or whatever it’s called these days) catalog and view the checksums listed there. Only downloading required a subscription. This has changed. Now, browsing the catalog also requires a subscription.

Till Microsoft decides to block their servers.

That's what I thought ... 8 years ago when I started using this website.

The more attention it gets, the more likely it is to happen, of course, this site is not yet quite as popular as Rufus is. I'm guessing somebody noticed hikes due to Rufus in their logs.

This site looks like some sketchy Russian website with patched (pirated) Windows ISOs. While it may use MS API to generate download links, it still looks like some warez storage. I would never install any Windows versions downloaded from it.

Not sure if I'm missing the irony here.

No irony here. Just first impression.

Rambler TOP 100? MyNickName.com? WTF is that?

I would never trust an admin who puts such shit on his website.

Rambler was a Russian-language search engine (as well as portal and directory) back when Yandex hadn’t yet steamrollered everybody else and Google, being incapable of understanding nouns can have more than a couple of forms, was a non-starter. They were irrelevant by 2010 and gave up on mantaining their own index even earlier, I think.

Rambler TOP 100, then, is a website popularity rating from back when voluntarily placing such things on your pages using was cool and you showed them off using these buttons. I don’t think I’ve ever seen it on an English-language page (that wasn’t an obvious translation) before. Apparently it still survives in some form, though I’ve no idea who is in charge of it now.

That is to say, I have no idea why anyone would include that on their pages in this day and age, yet it is hardly nefarious. (Not that you’re supposed to know that, but if you publicly claim it is people will naturally expect you to have done some research beforehand.)

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