Hacker News Reader

Comment by josephcsible | Hacker News Reader

If Microsoft would rather have people pirate Windows than use another OS, then why did they add product activation at all?

View on HN

Microsoft doesn’t care if josephcsible pirates Windows. Maybe he has his reasons. Maybe he can’t afford it. It’s not a major issue.

What they really want to stop is businesses selling PCs with pirated copies of windows. And that was quite common back in the Windows 95 days and is still common in some countries.

They also want josephcsible's employer to pay for Windows.

Failing that they wouldn't mind if he bought a computer with Windows preinstalled by the manufacturer, who has paid them.

It was justification for an OS that has the capability to phone home over a network, and now twenty years later we have Windows OSes that log and report everything down to the minute details of what you do in the calculator. Xbox was the same thing: justification for developing code-signature enforcement, hardware attestation, remote key revocation, etc. We would have opposed those things if they came from the world of general-purpose computing, so instead they were developed on an appliance platform where media """needs""" to be protected from the user, then it metastasized over to our computers two generations later once it was battle-tested.

Code-signature enforcement, hardware attestation, and remote key revocation aren’t inherently bad things. Like almost all technologies there are cases where they can be abused, but they can also be used to massively increase security on sensitive systems.

I develop industrial IoT gateways that are deployed to client sites, often in places which aren’t massively well secured from a physical perspective. Often an attacker could get in with a hi-vis vest and a clipboard.

Hardware attestation allows us to store encryption keys for the internal storage in a way that makes that storage useless if you remove it from the device. Signature enforcement prevents an attacker from booting their own OS on the devices and extracting keys that way (this also works alongside hardware attestation, as the TPM isn’t going to return a valid decryption key unless the expected kernel has booted). Remote key revocation allows us to terminate the device’s connection to our backend if it’s stolen.

If general purpose computers were routinely shipping with all those features turned on to ensure you could only boot a properly licensed version of Windows, and you had no access to enrol new keys, then I’d be with you, but that’s not the reality of things. If I buy a computer, either an Intel PC or an Apple desktop/laptop, I can install an OS of my choosing on it. We haven’t really lost anything here beyond the ability for people to trivially compromise computers without being detected.

Because they'd still prefer you purchase it, or maybe a later version.

In Windows 10, if you don't activate, all that happens is that it displays "Unregistered" in the corner and refuses to let you change the desktop wallpaper (and you can even get around that by rearming the "trial").

There's a few other customization items that are locked away as well. I can't recall what they are, and I finally registered by copy after years of running windows 10 and 11 unregistered so I can't even look for it. It might have had to do with graphics settings (flip presentation model?), or HDR. I think there were ways to force those options with registry edits, but that's more trouble than buying a cheap $10 windows key, which is what I finally ended up doing.

I also see lots of reports that updates other than critical/security ones may not be downloaded and applied for unregistered installs, but I'm not sure how true that is (or if it's mostly moot because I know you still get the big spring/fall patches, or at least have historically).

> There's a few other customization items that are locked away as well.

One of them is the "transparency effects" toggle, which needs to be off in VMs with VirtualBox Guest Additions installed for things to work right, and is on by default.

You can buy $10 legit keys. You can also get "free" keys from a student friend (academic license, ...)

> Kinguin's merchants acquire the codes from wholesalers who have surplus copies of Windows they don't need. "It's not a gray market. It would be like buying Adidas or Puma or Nike from a discounter, from TJ Maxx," Jordan said. "There are no legal issues with buying it from us. It's just another marketplace."

https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/get-windows-10-free-or-...

> You can buy $10 legit keys

These keys may activate just fine, but they are not "legit" in any case. Most turn out to be acquired in illicit ways (MSDN licenses, ...), and a couple years ago here in Germany this led to massive amounts of criminal cases [1].

[1] https://www.borncity.com/blog/2021/03/05/betrug-mit-office-w...

Microsoft themselves says otherwise -- that this practice is not allowed, and that there is no such thing as a secondary-market product key as large customers are supposed to discard unused product keys. These $10 keys frequently get revoked as Microsoft discovers them used outside of their intended setting.

I don't know why a site that is usually reputable (tomsHardware) has gotten the facts wrong on this.

So why doesn't Microsoft sue that reseller into oblivion. It's been selling those keys for years without hiding itself.

Legal discussion:

> In the EU, software license resale is legal, even if explicitly forbidden by terms of any EULA or other contract imposed upon the parties.

https://law.stackexchange.com/questions/50462/is-resale-of-w...

There's no legal issue, but the possibility of having your Windows license revoked for an EULA violation definitely falls under "not legit". And if you continue using it after it's revoked, that will be a legal issue.

Make sure businesses pay?

Didn't the basic product key requirement in Windows 95 take care of that?

Not if they keep reusing the same key for multiple installs?

Companies using it need to pay.

Home users are whatever.

I'm pretty sure the reason for the forever upgrades since Win7 is more because it costs them less to have fewer variations of windows in the wild than to stay closer to evergreen.

Price discrimination

Reply on news.ycombinator.com