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The Windows XP activation algorithm has been cracked
- adr1an 3y agoGreat, now we only need activation codes for WinRar free trial :p
- gruez 3y agoWinrar keygens have been around forever
- vasili111 3y agoThere are other great alternatives for Winrar, like 7zip.
- LoganDark 3y agoThere are other great alternatives for Windows XP, too, but some people don't want or can't use alternatives.
- LorenDB 3y agoLOL, just told somebody that this morning.
- MikusR 3y ago7-zip does recovery records now?
- meinheld111 3y agoBitRot is not as bad anymore thou
- Lukas_Skywalker 3y agoCoincidentally, RAR support will be included in Windows 11: https://www.engadget.com/windows-11-finally-gets-native-rar-support-192034673.html https://www.engadget.com/windows-11-finally-gets-native-rar-...
- capableweb 3y agoThe original source (https://blogs.windows.com/windowsdeveloper/2023/05/23/bringing-the-power-of-ai-to-windows-11-unlocking-a-new-era-of-productivity-for-customers-and-developers-with-windows-copilot-and-dev-home/ https://blogs.windows.com/windowsdeveloper/2023/05/23/bringi...) states: > We have added native support for additional archive formats, including tar, 7-zip, rar, gz and many others using the libarchive open-source project. You now can get improved performance of archive functionality during compression on Windows. It doesn't mention unarchiving/decompressing, maybe I'm being nitpicky, but at a glance, it seems to only be about compression? That'd be horrible though, but more horrible changes that that have gone through lately so I guess you never know...
- i2cmaster 3y agoThat will probably turn out to have been a mistake. RAR should not be easy to use. TAR and CPIO would have been better formats to support out of the box.
- rincebrain 3y agoSince it's "libarchive" support, good news, we get those too.
- i2cmaster 3y agoYeah, I saw that. My worry is that this will just make drive-by malware easier.
- rincebrain 3y agoAntimalware engines have already had to support unpacking somewhat arbitrary things, sometimes with serious comedic effects when people fuzzed those unpackers; I don't see this significantly increasing the burden of their examination, signed binaries are no more dangerous after this than before, and unsigned binaries could already bring their own arbitrary unpacker. (At least quickly thinking about it; I could easily have overlooked some complexity, but barring an unpatched libarchive exploit, I don't think this markedly increases attack surface...and at that point, you could probably make similar arguments about adding any new file format?)
- 4gotunameagain 3y agoUsing ollydbg to make a crack for WinRar so that the popup does not appear was my very first reverse engineering application.. Fun times. Now the floodgates of the masses have opened to computing, and look at us
- tough 3y agoWinRar had an open backdoor for years wonder that's why it was free lmao
- SillyUsername 3y agoIt had a bug caused by a third party ACE library that was closed as soon as it was discovered. The ACE library was 15 years old, not knowledge of the exploit. TBF after so many years of people taking the piss of the trial version, if they're still using it in 2023 without paying the one time $30 that's pretty much scumbag Steve and the reason it's free.
- TeaDude 3y agoThat's cool. Had they already patched long strings of single digits by then?
- voytec 3y agoI'll never get FCKGW-RHQQ2-YXRKT-8TG6W-2B7Q8 out of my head.
- gjsman-1000 3y agoI’m curious if the first five letters were meant to imply “F*** Genuine Windows” or if that’s just a coincidence.
- rhema 3y agoI always thought the GW was short for George W. Bush. Not a popular figure when XP came out.
- tapland 3y agoWhen XP released he had the highest approval rating ever measured for any US president.
- psychphysic 3y agoI've just seen a chart on the BBC of approval ratings and elections share. My word was Dubya popular in 2001
- thx-2718 3y ago[flagged]
- frumper 3y agohttps://news.gallup.com/poll/116500/presidential-approval-ratings-george-bush.aspx https://news.gallup.com/poll/116500/presidential-approval-ra... Chart for reference
- timbit42 3y agoMaybe it's for GW-BASIC.
- persedes 3y agoWindows XP was my first time I actually felt like I had "hacked" something. My old lab had a machine that needed XP to run the software for the pipetting robot and the key was lost. A bit of googling and some rainbow tables tool later I was able to recover it. Still remember how surprised I was at how fast it was to crack whatever hash they were using.
- nebster 3y agoDo you mean the key for XP? If so, you can recover it using a command or through the registry. You can use rainbow tables to crack passwords for XP which was super quick though!
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- persedes 3y agoAh it was the password for the admin account and not the key!
- meinheld111 3y agoAfaik you could just set a new admin pw using a livecd and some tool. I wonder if that’s still possible.
- jasomill 3y agoNot only is it still possible, there's even a supported first-party tool to do so, https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-desktop-optimization-pack/dart-v10/overview-of-the-tools-in-dart-10#locksmith https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-desktop-optimiza... This only works for local accounts, though similarly trivial techniques apply to Active Directory accounts if you have "live CD" access to a domain controller. Just to be clear, in neither case is this a security vulnerability; under the "live CD" assumption — specifically, that you're able to make even a single arbitrary registry edit — there are far simpler ways to completely bypass Windows security that require neither tools nor understanding of the (AFAIK undocumented) HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SAM registry hive. For example, make the registry edit given by the reg add "HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\ Image File Execution Options\sethc.exe" /v Debugger /d C:\Windows\System32\cmd.exe /f command (without line breaks). Then, at any login, lock, or "Ctrl+Alt+Delete" screen, pressing the Shift key five times pops up a shell running as NT AUTHORITY\SYSTEM[1]. This has immediate effect — you don't even need to reboot or log out. [1] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/services/localsystem-account https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/services/loc...
- 10729287 3y agoCan someone explain what have been cracked there ? I can't remember xp needing to be online activated back then, and for sure I didn't.
- CodesInChaos 3y agoWindows XP does need activation involving Microsoft. Typically via online activation, but you could also activate it via phone, and possible some other communication methods.
- 10729287 3y agoIm 100% sure I never activated XP, installed through the famous FCKGW-RHQQ2-YXRKT-8TG6W-2B7Q8 quoted before. And back in the days, as a teenager, I typed "format c:" every week-end ;) Maybe it's the later builds that need activation ?
- okl 3y agoMight have been a volume license that doesn't need activation or a cracked installation CD.
- 10729287 3y agoThanks guys for the explanation :) Make sense.
- jeroenhd 3y agoThe leaked keys were blacklisted down the line. Online and phone activation didn't work for them anymore. They regularly updated their list of banned keys as well. Activation became a hard requirement further down the line, I think the process got more strict during one of the service pack upgrades. It's possible your installs were all automatically activated over the internet. I think the hardware ID and the serial number were some kind of combined identifier and if your computer(s) were part of "the good list", your fingerprint may have been whitelisted so that automatic online activation never caused a problem.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- kneebonian 3y agoCan I just take a minute to reminisce on how it seems XP and 7 were the best MS OSes out there and everything before or since has been inferior to those few glorious years of XP and 7. Sure it had issues but at least it wasn't an actively hostile bloated piece of adware it is now.
- sva_ 3y agoI think people who say such things may just idolize the time ('the good old times')
- dijit 3y agomaybe, but they were also warmly received at the time they were released too.
- RobotToaster 3y agoWhat feature does windows 10 have that 7 didn't, that you find useful? Personally the only thing I can think of is the slightly better calculator.
- speedgoose 3y agoWSL.
- RobotToaster 3y agoThe only useful feature of windows 10 is linux?
- speedgoose 3y agoIt’s not the only useful new feature but certainly the best one for most people on HN. Combining windows and Linux so well is great.
- junon 3y ago
- merricksb 3y agoPrevious discussion of original tinyapps blog post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35993044 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35993044 (238 points/7 days ago/151 comments)
- rurban 3y agoThe activation algorithm had been cracked in 2009, since then keygen binaries have been floating around. And it had been open sourced in 2019. The register seems again a bit late to the party