Time of death: 4:22 PM UTC September 26th

Notes, please read:

For those of you who don’t know, HWID was the holy grail for Windows activation, letting you generate licenses straight from Microsoft licensing servers, being registered as fully legitimate in microsofts servers and letting you keep the activation permanently, even after windows reinstalls being completely undetectable and with nothing on your system being modified. If you’re still using outdated activation methods and you missed out on this, I’m sorry

Existing HWID licenses are left unaffected. Only new requests are blocked, no licenses were revoked.

By the way, MAS still works and is the best option for Windows/Office activation. For permanent Office activation use it’s Ohook method (supports subscription products such as 365 as well) and KMS38 for Windows

ALL OTHER ACTIVATION METHODS ARE STILL WORKING, ONLY METHOD AFFECTED IS HWID.

All HWID activators are affected, not only MAS

Around that time, Microsoft servers unexpectedly started blocking the licensing requests HWID activation method sends to Microsoft. This was a slow rollout that spanned over a few hours, at the moment the exploit is completely dead. The best options for Windows activation now is KMS38 or vlmcsd.

Patching this would boost illegal key reselling websites which causes more harm to Microsoft than HWID exploit. We can only wonder why they patched this.

{“code”:“BadRequest”,“data”:[],“details”:[],“innererror”:{“code”:“PermanentTSLRejection”,“data”:[],“details”:[{“code”:“113”,“message”:“avsErrorCode”,“target”:null}],“message”:“The Purchase Service rejected the provided TSL; the client should destroy the TSL.”,“source”:“PurchaseFD”},“message”:“The calling client sent a bad request to the service.”,“source”:“PurchaseFD”}

TLS=Temporary Signed License=The tickets HWID activation sends. Microsoft servers are now just responding with “kill it.”

Transferring existing HWID licenses to other computers using Microsoft account is broken too.

  • AndreTelevise@lemm.ee
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    11 months ago

    Now, you can’t perma-crack your new PC with a “real” HWID key, then years later reinstall Windows and keep your “real” license anymore! And you can’t upgrade anymore on that new PC either! You have to patch Windows every time!

  • u/lukmly013 💾 (lemmy.sdf.org)@lemmy.sdf.org
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    11 months ago

    Sorry for possibly a stupid question, but what’s the point of activating Windows?
    I never seriously used Windows, but I have a Windows 7 VM that’s not activated, and it works. Just the wallpaper is black. Also most of our school computers don’t have activated Windows, yet it seems to work fine, there’s just the watermark. And on some it shows the “You may be the victim of…” message. Same seems to be the case for Office 2016 installed on those. Other than the “non-genuine” message, it works.

    • yoichi@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      11 months ago

      I guess it’s just a personal thing. I personally cannot stand the “Please Activate Windows” watermark and MAS is such an easy tool that it just makes sense to do it. It’s not like this announcement kills MAS, you can still use the other activation methods

    • Polar@lemmy.ca
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      11 months ago

      Ya! And then just quit my job, since none of it runs on Linux.

        • Polar@lemmy.ca
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          11 months ago

          I don’t? Are you assuming because I clicked a random post I saw on the active tab that I run pirated Windows?

  • faede@mander.xyz
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    11 months ago

    I’m so happy now that I’ve finally fully migrated to linux.

    • OverfedRaccoon 🦝@lemm.ee
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      11 months ago

      What’d you end up on, out of curiosity? I was on Fedora for a couple years, but with the whole Red Hat thing (that I don’t fully understand the implications of), I switched to openSUSE Tumbleweed. Still have love for Mint, though, after all these years.

      • Draghetta@sh.itjust.works
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        11 months ago

        The whole red hat thing (you mean the centos drama?) has no implications whatsoever on fedora, fyi. If you liked it feel free to go back to it.