Microsoft’s Frankenbuild
p2pnet.net News:- Bill and the Boyz figure they’ve come up with a way to stop people from using ‘pirated’ versions of Vista without going through the built-in product activation.
They’re calling it Frankenbuild.
Vista was released to businesses last month and of course, it immediately started showing up online.
“Over the last few weeks, we’ve seen a number of attempts at workarounds for Vista product activation,” says alexkoc on the Windows Genuine [dis]Advantage blog. “As of now there are at least two distinct workarounds that have worked to some degree,” he says. But, “I’m sure there are more on the way.”
Count on it, and enter Frankenbuild because, “it involves cobbling together files from an RC build and with an RTM build to create a hybrid that bypasses activation. The other workaround involves the use of some virtualization technology and our practices for activating larger business customers.”
alexkoc goes on:
For me, it’s an interesting moment. We’ve been investing a lot of resources into continuously evolving our approach to piracy. One of the key “pillars” we focus on is what we call the Engineering pillar – this is essentially the body of work that shows up in the products themselves (as opposed to policy or education efforts). With the release of Windows Vista we’re putting into place a number of new anti-piracy innovations. And with these first work arounds we’re getting to see those innovations in action.
I thought it would be useful to walk through what our plan is for the “frankenbuild” systems.
Windows Vista will use the new Windows Update client to require only the “frankenbuild” systems to go through a genuine validation check. These systems will fail that check because we have blocked the RC keys for systems not authorized to use them. In other words, the wrong key is being used. The systems will then be flagged as non-genuine systems and the experience will be what we announced back in October (direct link to doc)- including losing certain functionality (e.g. Aero, ReadyBoost) and the system will have 30 days to activate with a good product key. If they don’t produce a new product key within 30 days, they will then only be able to access their system in what we call reduced functionality mode – a mode which limits their use to one hour with their default web browser. I want to be clear here that even though they can only use their browser for an hour, we will never limit their access to their data. A user can always -boot their PC into what is called Safe Mode. Safe Mode is a mode of using Windows that has limited driver, display and networking support – but allows a user access to all their files.
We hope that this action will help get the message out that pirating Windows Vista will have real consequences and will, in turn, encourage people to check before they buy.
If your Net access is blocked by government restrictions, try Psiphon from the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto’s Munk Centre for International Studies. Go here for the official download, here for the p2pnet download, and here for details. And if you’re Chinese and you’re looking for a way to access independent Internet news sources, try Freegate, the DIT program written to help Chinese citizens circumvent web site blocking outside of China. Download it here.
Also See:
blog – The ‘Frankenbuild’ monster, December 14, 2006
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December 15th, 2006 at 7:24 pm
…and, above all, the growing WGA neoplasm is clearly extraneous to the basic OS components, no matter how much effort goes into intertwining the former with the latter.
Unless activation involves downloading some executable code that was missing on the machine (and so can be used to provide some additional functionality), WGA can and will be defeated.
December 16th, 2006 at 1:26 pm
“We hope that this action will help get the message out that pirating Windows Vista will have real consequences and will”
that line is just hilarious…
December 16th, 2006 at 5:22 pm
These guys will re-invent the wheel 1000x over before re-discovering what everyone else already knew was reality:
THERE IS NO SECURITY THROUGH OBSCURITY!
This WGA shit is conceptually the same as any other DRM and doomed to fail. The difference is that this WGA shit cost lots and lots of development hours (the blog even says it was a long time coming.)
The only thing that saves MS is the security updates users need to apply 10 times a day to keep every aol elite haxor from owning your Vista-powered ass.
With many Linux distros already surpassing MS crap in quality, MS’s days are numbered. Fedora Core 6 is absolutely spectacular, and I’ve heard good things about Ubuntu as well. There is a trend happening, and MS is on the losing end of it.