Windows 8 To Fight Piracy With the Cloud 404
MrSeb writes "With the latest Windows 8 build (8064) that has been delivered to Intel, it's clear that the company is taking strides to make sure that its upcoming OS isn't quite so easy to pirate. For starters, the generic volume license keys that were so easily exploited during the early days of Windows 7 leaks will no longer be an option for pirates. Product keys also won't be shipped in the prodkey.txt file included in the build packages. Instead, installers will need to retrieve a unique key from a Microsoft web page. There's also a good possibility that the recently-surfaced fast booting patent could come into play as well. If Microsoft does indeed have designs on using a remote server to push OS code to systems at boot time, that code would be a very clever place to embed activation-related programming. Even if a crack was discovered, it would be neatly undone during a subsequent start-up sequence — similar to the way Microsoft's now-idle Windows Steady State could turn back the clock on an entire Windows installation after rebooting."
Microsoft has also indirectly confirmed in a recent blog post that Windows 8 will make use of an app store.
Re:Here it begins.. the FUD (Score:5, Informative)
Well of course these speculations should be taken as that until MS locks down features. Those articles you link deal with panic over MS enforcing anti-piracy for third parties. However given the history of MS pushing for more anti-piracy features of the OS itself such concerns are not neccesarily FUD. My main concern with that would be the false positives. Having been inconvenienced with calling MS for them to bless my installation of Windows for no apparent reason I can say it's a concern.
Lets take this from the article:
With the latest Windows 8 build (8064) that has been delivered to Intel, it’s clear that the company is taking strides to make sure that its upcoming OS isn’t quit so easy to pirate. For starters, the generic volume license keys that were so easily exploited during the early days of Windows 7 leaks will no longer be an option for pirates. Product keys also won’t be shipped in the prodkey.txt file included in the build packages. Instead, installers will need to retrieve a unique key from a Microsoft web page.
That was the case for Windows 7 Beta and RC releases as well,with the keys expiring in 1 year. Don't see anything new here, the article does cite any sources except a build to Intel which is obviously a preview build which always required you to get a key from Microsoft web pages to operate.
Re:Deja Vu (Score:4, Informative)
I normally have respect for haiyfeet as his comments contribute a lot and he knows what he is talking about.
In terms of DRM ...
IN actually, I find a lot more pirated versions of Windows XP than Windows 7 on a popular torrent site. The windows 7 ones were hackjobs taht required a special bootloader from some guy (seperate download) and with the hacks you get a Windows 7 OS but you can't use Windows update for patch 2334. Some give error messages a lot and so on.
Maybe there is a perfect pirated Windows 7 professional edition out there, but after reading this I decided to stick with Windows 7 home premium with these hassles. Windows XP has been hacked awhile back.
I have not seen a hacked version of Office 2010 either that worked for more than a week or two. Microsoft has got it down well with its DRM. I hate the DRM and I think Microsoft are idiots in their pricing scheme to the Asian world but it is their choice to be stupid. You need to pay if you use their products. Thank god for GoogleDocs and LibreOffice.