> They didn't have to. It's not widely publicized, but there's a > version of XP that has the old "type in a registration number"
It's the so-called "Corporate Edition" and it exists in "professional" (i.e., desktop) and various "server" forms. I wonder if the Thai guys are just redistributing it with a key they stole from some company (in which case it's easily traceable back to the origin of the leak), if they cracked the testing code and are creating their own keys, or if they simply patched the binary to always return true no matter what activation key is given. I also wonder how the cracked version will interact with the Windows Update feature. M$ claims that Windows Update does not transmit any information about the computer that's being updated to microsoft, but I don't trust them. Has anyone actually analyzed the WU scripts to see what exactly they are sending, and whether they have any covert channels to send information back? /ji - KC2IER -- /\ ASCII ribbon | John "JI" Ioannidis * Secure Systems Research Department \/ campaign | AT&T Labs - Research * Florham Park, NJ 07932 * USA /\ against | "Intellectuals trying to out-intellectual / \ HTML email. | other intellectuals" (Fritz the Cat) --------------------------------------------------------------------- The Cryptography Mailing List Unsubscribe by sending "unsubscribe cryptography" to [EMAIL PROTECTED]