Pirates, Crypto, and the Secret History of Windows Product Activation - YouTube
Not an insignificant amount of time spent in my youth trying to bypass the part of Windows this guy was responsible for.
I don’t think there are any startling revelations here about the Windows activations process, but its pretty cool to hear about it straight from the horse’s mouth.
A friend once quite proudly sent me a link to a Windows 7 ISO image with some sort of bypass built into it to allow activation to be neutered. I think it used some BIOS shim or something because you could chose who the manufacturer of your machine/BIOS would appear to be. I never used it outside of playing with it and testing it in a virtual machine because I was afraid it was some massive trojan or backdoor. These days it almost seems Microsoft doesn’t really care much about Windows licensing. I assume they’d probably rather have a user than “scare them off” to Apple or Linux.
Microsoft pretty much quit the game of Operating Systems and went to focus on cloud-based products for revenue. From what I can see they are just trying to get as many people using Windows as possible without directly saying they are practically giving it away for free.
In the beginning, you were able to activate Windows 10 for free then it went to you could use a previous version of Windows Key Code to activate Windows 10, even after they said that was going to stop working it continues to work to this day, Absolutely no issues with activating Windows 10 with a previous versions key code whether that be during an upgrade or a stand-alone install and just putting in that key code during install. I’m sure it makes it easier to get people to use their cloud-based products if they are all integrated into the OS that is already being used…
I was applying for class action money from Microsoft at http://thatsuitedeal.ca/ and I had to mentally audit my OS licenses over the decade or so involved. I was a bit shocked when I realized how many Windows licenses I have purchased over the years. I still have at hand my 15 or so various licenses of Windows XP, Vista, 7, 8, and 8.1. My 2 Vista licenses are still new in box, having never been installed successfully. (I built a machine back then with no floppy drive, and I therefore couldn’t boot it off CDROM without the CDROM going away in the process, so I never could get it installed. I ended up sticking on Windows XP until Windows 7 came out, containing the necessary drivers.) The downside is I own no actual Windows 10 licenses (just entitlements). Luckily, because of the way they’re managed now, I can enter an old license when installing a new machine so I don’t have to first install an ancient OS (7 or 8) and then “upgrade” to 10.