Microsoft support 'cracks' Windows for customer after activation fails | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft support 'cracks' Windows for customer after activation fails

bleepingcomputer.com

75 pointslayer863 comments

Slightly related, Microsoft recently stopped accepting Windows 7/8 keys for Windows 10/11 [0], a change which now is also causing issues when reactivation is triggered on existing installations due to hardware replacements [1].

[0] https://www.theverge.com/2023/10/11/23913107/microsoft-windo...

[1] https://www.theverge.com/2023/11/15/23958751/microsoft-windo...

Well that answers why my keys no longer work on recent re-install. Ended up having to get grey market key. Figured after 10 years wasn’t the worst expense, but the amount of adverts and telemetry they gather for the price not sure it’s even worth the 15 dollars.

You can get stripped down versions of windows on ahem other parts of the internet. If you're going through the trouble to get a grey-market key, might as well choose your installation media with some care.

With complementary spyware of course

I mean, spyware comes standard with Windows 10 and 11

you can get the official media from Microsoft so there's essentially no risk in using a grey-market key (other than you may lose your $3)

vs. a random .iso from some dodgy forum containing god knows what

https://www.stacksocial.com/sales/microsoft-windows-11-pro

https://www.stacksocial.com/sales/microsoft-windows-10-pro

These are some good deals from a Microsoft Partner.

I think GP is talking about the Windows experience, not the purchase experience.

Dang very good to know. I've been using a Windows 7 pro serial for well over a decade. I just rebuilt my laptop a few months ago too using that serialvamd activated without a problem. Guess it's time to buy a windows 11 serial or (yuck) use the home edition that comes for free.

Hey kid, wanna buy a *nix?

Give Linux a shot. Mint is a good easy-going distro that debloats Ubuntu. They have a few different window managers they offer and all of them are pretty good. The defaults are sane and the whole thing is pretty easy to use.

People around these parts are generally well aware of their options.

Oh you’ll be surprised to discover that that’s not a rule around here.

I have and I'll be blunt, Linux on the desktop for me is a tinker toy. When I need something to, "just work" it's windows. I also have windows only stuff I need to run and I don't have time to play around with wine.

I spent hours booting my new pc on windows 8 (with no network drivers), manually activating by phone, only to have it be unactivated again once I upgraded to windows 10.

>"It's literally easier to crack windows than to pay for it," exclaimed Pyburn.

Because Microsoft doesn't care if you crack it or pirate Windows anymore as Windows stopped being their main cash-cow a long time ago.

They know PC sales are slowly declining and that Windows is loosing marketshare to Mac and Linux in an already shrinking market, so they want as many people as possible to keep using Windows, regardless if you pay for it or not, as that way they maintain their OS monopoly and they can monetize users through ads and subscriptions anyway.

That's why they stopped enforcing DRM checks on pirated Windows keys, and even if you don't activate it, it still works fully functional, with just a watermark as the only deterrent, big whoop. Or if you want to be legit you can buy a 3 Euro gray-market CD-key online which also activates just fine.

So unless you're a business or a super ethical user, there's really no point in paying sticker price for Windows today when the alternative ways of getting it range from dirt cheap to free.

> They know Windows is loosing marketshare like crazy to Mac and Linux so they want as many people to keep using it as possible regardless if you pay for it or not.

That has been the case for a long time. Here is a quotation from Bill Gates from 2007:

> "It's easier for our software to compete with Linux when there's piracy than when there's not," Gates says. "Are you kidding? You can get the real thing, and you get the same price."

https://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2007...

So he's basically saying that he prefers people to be on Windows regardless of how they end up there because it gives the illusion of choice that fundamentally boosts Microsoft's uptake and pool of users/customers from which endless value is derived from their panopticon-of-an-OS?

I might be reading a wee bit between the lines...

> Windows is loosing marketshare like crazy to Mac and Linux

The biggest change I've seen is in the stackoverflow developer survey results and it was like a 10 percent difference over 5 years or something like that with the gain roughly split 50-50 between macOS and Linux

Then in the general population windows market share looks stable

I'd love to have a link that shows otherwise though, I've tried to find good data on this

Meh, Stackoverflow is niche of devs who swing hard in the Mac/Linux camp but don't represent the average user worldwide.

Seems like current worldwide marketshare is just 63% for Windows and in the US it's closer to 55% because Macs and Chromebooks eat into that. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fR7KqCbnjfw

Yeah, "loosing marketshare like crazy" probably only in the software development / designer bubble.

WSL + VScode ends up being a better Linux development environment than most distros...

In what world. Everyone i know praising wsl - myself included - moved away long time ago. It’s a fake and it doesnt fool anyone other than perhaps amateurs with experience.

>In what world.

Where I work.

Did you had issues with overuse of CPU after a sleep on win10? And vmmem using 7Go of ram with absolutely nothing running on win11?

I would rather use the 8G macpro than my 16G windows for any task: 4Go for the ms bloat + 7 Go for vmmem, I'm very, very short on usable memory.

> Did you had issues

When you have computer issues in a corporate env, you make a ticket. Of course it does not help to solve the problem, but at least makes you feel better that you did everything you could.

A lot of employers say everyone has to use company windows laptops with all the corporate spyware on it

Those are a pretty big portion of people who buy and use an actual computer anymore. Sure you still have plenty of other desk jobs using some outdated version of Windows, but the personal market is all but doomed. Even my 70ish year old parents just use tablets for everything these days, and MS has next to zero marketshare.

This and other surveys only take into account desktop/laptop computers. For an average person their Android/iPhone or an iPad has fully replaced their Windows PC. I'm certain that if one included mobile platforms into the marketshare stats, they would show a significant decline in the percentage of people who use Windows.

MSFT is paid a fee on the sale of a PC by most manufacturers, for the last 20+ years AFAIK. An OS license sale to the consumer is on top of that.

Something to keep in mind is that these support agents do not work for Microsoft. They're all outsourced. I've had Azure Pro support experiences where the "engineer" suggested to do something that was simply not possible within the Azure service I was using.

Jump over to enterprise support and there's a good chance you'll get an FTE (or an FTE after demanding an escalation).

> The Microsoft support engineer in this case, ran the following PowerShell command

If there's no chiptune accompaniment, it's not a real crack

yfw Windows has its own cracktro, complete with scrolling banner on the bottom of the screen with "GREETINGS TO GOOGLE / APPLE / ORACLE / IBM"

fun fact: the tool used is open source

https://github.com/massgravel/Microsoft-Activation-Scripts

the irony is that the code is hosted on github, a microsoft owned corporation

Is this well known to be safe and trustworthy?

Yes, feel free to read the source code as well.

It's a 10,000 line .CMD

I'm honestly kind of impressed

that’s just the all-in-one file, individual modules also have their own files

> who paid $200 for a genuine copy of Windows 10

Ouch. I'd rather pay the far, far lower price that major PC builders pay.

> The Microsoft support engineer in this case, ran the following PowerShell command on the customer's Windows PC [the Massgrave activate 1liner on Github]

It works as advertised btw.

Just having one thing on the internet be not-hostile or having something Microsoftish that isn't gaslighting me while being malicious and exploitive - that in itself is nearly a joy.

There are resellers that are selling Windows keys for single digit dollar values.

European Court of Justice has declared that it is legal and Microsoft has to accept it.

edit: removed "obtained in bulk"

Source please? I only found some Oracle court case from 2012 (https://www.pcworld.com/article/465777/eu_court_rules_resale...) AFAIK this case is about reselling with the same license, but reselling bulk licenses to end users seems to be something different. Hoping I am wrong.

The EUCJ actually makes it clear that unbundling volume licenses on resale is not permissible, see paragraphs 69 and 86 of the judgment: https://curia.europa.eu/juris/document/document.jsf?docid=12...

I believe it's this one, I'm not a lawyer.

https://curia.europa.eu/jcms/upload/docs/application/pdf/201...

Perhaps they were not bought in bulk then, I don't know.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/gamesblog/2012/jul/05...

Here's a Deloitte talk recommending businesses to buy used licenses: https://www2.deloitte.com/content/dam/Deloitte/pl/Documents/...

Yes, that’s the press release for the judgment I linked. The press release doesn’t address the volume licensing question, which the judgment itself however makes clear in the paragraphs I referenced.

The Deloitte slides agree: “Licenses that were originally sold in a bundle cannot be sold separately.”

Okay, I don't claim those are bundled licenses. I just guessed so.

Every bad day for windows is another great day for Linux. You have a choice. Make it.

this is the year of the linux desktop!

Surely this time!

It's been the year of the Linux desktop for people with self respect since ~2000.

It's getting quite easy on Apple hardware, too

https://asahilinux.org

I wonder how this would work relative to Microsoft's 'genuine' services. I remember having a whale of a time on XP. Our officially purchased Japanese CD of WindowsXP got "caught" as a non-genuine product by Microsoft.

I assume the same/similar risk exists here for this user.

If you purchased the legal copy, and it doesn't work. Then a official agent uses a illegal copy and activates your account. Then you login to a microsoft account. Do you risk losing your entire account due to a TOS violation?

Probably and this is why I wish after a certain amount of time Microsoft would just release a DRM free release for VMs and people who want to use it on period correct hardware.

I'm still rocking a serial I used back in 2003 for an older machine I use for games and nostalgia.

Where are these VMs? I tried to find a legitimate Microsoft XP VM to run some old software but wasn’t able to find any.

Forget the VMs. You can use UMSKT (https://github.com/umskt/umskt) to generate valid keys and phone activation confirmation IDs for any pre-Vista MS product.

They took them down when they gave up on Edge.

That is why you try not to bind any important accounts to anything remotely fishy. Goes for Google, goes for MS, goes for everything. If you have an important account hard-linked to something very important you are sitting on a ticking bomb.

EDIT: Whenever you see "Login with Facebook, Google, Github, .... or email [hidden away in smaller font]", always choose email.

The same Microsoft who was sending piracy threats via BSA in the 2000s? How the turntables...

To be fair, that activation script/crack does work really well

My computer which has had a legitimately bought Windows 10 license and upgraded to Windows 11, started complaining about being deactivated after I swapped to a dedicated TPM due to freezes caused by the integrated AMD one.

Attempting to re-activate just gave me some weird technical error that Google, no shock, produced no useful results for after hours of searching, so I just used a crack and was fixed within minutes.

Oh man. I bought a win 10 retail box and the key is valid, yet activation just keeps failing. I have been putting off calling support because this is for my gaming only PC. Maybe I shouldn’t bother calling whatever Indian body shop that MS uses for this and I should just crack it myself? Seems safer? Is it? Can anyone point me to a trustworthy crack and place to get it?

I hate this company and I am kicking past me who spent much of my early career gleefully switching hundreds of firms over to windows from Novell.

well, if you look closely at the screenshots you have all your answers.

https://github.com/massgravel/Microsoft-Activation-Scripts

This is also the one used in TFA.

MAS my beloved

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