How are the snide copies of '7 ultimo' from Pantip?

[zubber]

are they with the OEM serials ? and report back disabled ? or time limit disabled versions ?

[Fondles]

I would steer clear of thai snide windows discs, who knows what extras have been added.
Have a hunt round the torrents, I downloaded "good" copies of ultimate in 32 and 64 bit, have installed both yesterday, they are self activating and dont have issues with windows update.
If you want a copy i can burn em whack em in the post if you like.

makes sure to do this though before you let the updates install.
https://teakdoor.com/computer-news/66284-windows-7-activation-snoop-goes-live.html

[zubber]

Windows 7 RC Bi-hourly Shutdowns & Browser Ballot Go Live


If you use a Windows PC then chances are you've had one or two prompts today...

Both are relatively straightforward, but may have slipped your mind. The first concerns those still sponging off using the Windows 7 Release Candidate. Microsoft has made this clear since April last year, but the 12 month free licence is about to expire with bi-hourly shutdowns now starting as of 1 March.

The most determined users will still find the RC will work until 1 June, but restarting every 30 minutes should sicken the majority of (sane) people by then. Don't sigh. If you haven't made your decision over whether to upgrade or not following a year long trial period then I hope never to wait behind you in a take-away.

Secondly, the controversial Windows Browser Ballot screen goes live today across all versions of Windows for users around the EU. Only those who have Internet Explorer (any edition) setup as their primary browser will see the notice which displays the four most popular alternatives (Firefox, Safari, Chrome and Opera) along with IE8.
To try and play fair, the five are presented in random order and users will also have the option to see a further seven browsers should they dig a little deeper. These are Flock, Avant Browser, GreenBrowser, Maxthon, K-Meleon, Sleipnir and SlimBrowser and no, I haven't heard of many of them either. My recommendation? I moved from Firefox to Chrome in December and haven't regretted it one iota.

So can we now expect a radical shake-up of the browser space which IE still dominates with about 60 per cent market share? Sadly I think not. Those using IE are often less tech savvy and this screen is likely to prove an irritant they quickly click pass. Then again, I hope not...

Note: Yes, that is the quality of photo Microsoft has released to show the browser ballot screen and no, I couldn't find it within myself to make IE my default browser to trigger the notice and get a higher quality screen grab. There are just some lines that cannot be crossed...

[zubber]

Microsoft to lock out pirates with Windows 7 fix

updated 05:30 pm EST, Thu February 11, 2010

Microsoft to release anti-hacking Win 7 update

Microsoft on Thursday revealed it will release a Windows Activation Technologies Update for Windows 7 later this month that will close more than 70 activation hacks and thereby prevent hackers from pirating the operating system. The update will also periodically check with a server for future vulnerabilities, though no personal information about the user will be sent to the server, according to Joe Williams, Microsoft Genuine Windows anti-counterfeiting unit general manger. Williams hasn't said whether Microsoft will remove any of the activation hacks with the first service pack to Windows 7 because the company has not yet finalized planning this update.
Thus far, if a user's copy of Windows 7 wasn't found genuine, Microsoft allowed them to purchase a valid copy right away or at a later date, with users informed of the benefits of genuine software if they chose to put it off. This is a less drastic approach compared to the methods it used with earlier versions, where the company would limit Internet access.

Williams pointed out to CNET that many pirated copies of Windows 7 available for download often have malware payloads, such as keystroke loggers or other tools that could create problems for the pirate.

The update can be downloaded manually as early as February 16th from the Microsoft Genuine website and the next day from the Microsoft Download center. Later on in the month, it will be sent over using Windows Update, but will remain optional.

[melvbot]

If youre too cheap to pay a couple of thousand baht for a genuine copy you deserve all the spyware and malware thats bundled in the copies. Probably the cheapest M$ have ever offered an OS

[slackula]

restarting every 30 minutes

So Windows needs frequent restarts. This is news how?

[Butterfly]

If youre too cheap to pay a couple of thousand baht for a genuine copy you deserve all the spyware and malware thats bundled in the copies. Probably the cheapest M$ have ever offered an OS

right, it was a cheap upgrade, but why would anyone want to upgrade to such a monster with little returns and more time wasted to fix things,

WinXP all the way,

[Fondles]

Hmmm, hates win7 and loves XP, has ram/cpu usage issues with gmail...... sounds like Butterfly needs to upgrade his old 386 dinosaur.

[Butterfly]

^ I have a brand new Pentium III 800 Mhz FSB 133Mhz with 256MB RAM and Win2000

it's super fast

why would I want to upgrade ?

[The Ghost Of The Moog]

Mine is crashing every two hours.

Its buggering up my torrents no end !

[zubber]

March 3rd, 2010

Confessions of a Windows 7 pirate

Posted by Ed Bott [at] 4:00 am
I’ve been hanging out with a bad crowd lately.
In the interest of research, I’ve been digging into message boards and forums run by unabashed Windows enthusiasts who are intent on breaking Microsoft’s activation technology. I’ve had these forums bookmarked for years and stop in every once in a while just to see what’s new. This time I decided to drop by and actually try some of tools and utilities to see if I could become a pirate, too.
Unfortunately, I succeeded.
In this post, I’ll share my experiences, including close encounters with some very nasty malware and some analysis on how the latest showdown between Microsoft and the pirates is likely to play out.

You won’t find names or direct links here—although these guys seem like genuine enthusiasts, I have no intention of giving them any free publicity. But if you’re interested in tracking down the tools I tested you should have no trouble finding them using the clues available in screenshots and descriptions here.
If you do intend to try this stuff out for yourself, I recommend extreme caution. My hunt for utilities that bypass Windows 7 activation technologies led me to some very seedy corners of the Internet. First, I did what any red-blooded wannabe pirate would do and tried some Google searches. Of the first 10 hits, six were inactive or had been taken down. After downloading files from the remaining four sites, I submitted them to Virustotal.com, where three of the four samples came back positive for nasty, difficult-to-remove Windows 7 rootkits. Here’s one example:

And that experience is borne out by at least one real-world experience, which was reported, ironically, in the Talkback section of this blog. After I wrote about Microsoft’s most recent anti-piracy initiative last week, one commenter (a loud, proud Linux advocate) insisted that the update opened a secret back-channel, probably as part of a plot by Microsoft to covertly gain access to its customers’ PCs. A day or so later, after checking with his Windows-using friend, he returned with this sheepish admission:

It turns out his iso was not a bona fide purchased copy [of Windows 7], but rather a cracked version off of the net. In all likelihood the iso was trojaned…

Indeed. Which is why I exercised extraordinary caution. For my hands-on tests, I used a fresh copy of Windows 7 Ultimate, installed without a product key. I then looked at two widely distributed tools that work in completely different ways.
Page 2: Disabling Windows activation completely A clever little tool called RemoveWAT not only disables Microsoft’s activation subsystem, it also installs the latest anti-piracy update from Microsoft and then disables it, too!
Page 3: Fooling Windows by tinkering with the BIOS Big PC makers get to install copies of Windows that don’t require activation. Naturally, pirates soon figured out how to make any PC look like it came from one of those big factories.
Page 4: Microsoft versus the pirates Pirates are clever and fast. Microsoft is highly motivated to keep its lucrative Windows revenue stream intact. Are customers going to get caught in the crossfire?
Details and screenshots begin on the next page.
Page 2: Disable activation completely?
Disabling Windows activation checks completely

RemoveWAT first appeared last summer, around the time Windows 7 was released to manufacturing. The philosophy behind this small utility is simple: It disables the Windows Activation Technologies function while allowing the system to retain its Genuine status in every official check by Microsoft. The most recent version claims to work with all editions of Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2. (It does not work with Windows Vista or Windows Server 2008.)
I downloaded the most recent edition of RemoveWAT (v2.2.5) and verified that it was clean. The single .exe file is small (less than 7MB), and the UI is simple:

After clicking the Remove WAT button and rebooting, I noticed a subtle but significant change in the System properties dialog box. The section describing my system’s activation status was gone. There was no sign of a Product ID or activation status. Nothing. Previously, a message in that section had told me that I had 30 days left to activate.
A close inspection of the Windows\System32 folder explained why. RemoveWAT installed its own patched version of a crucial DLL file in the Software Licensing subsystem, Slwga.dll. Thoughtfully, the program’s developer had coded it to save a backup of the actual file so that it could be restored if necessary. (And when I tested the Restore WAT function, I found it worked just fine on my system.)

As far as Windows was concerned, the system was perfectly valid. I was able to download and install optional updates through Windows Update and successfully validated the system so that I could install products reserved for Genuine Windows customers. I was also able to install Microsoft Security Essentials, which performs a validation check during setup.
In a fitting piece of irony, the most recent version of RemoveWAT actually goes out of its way to install Microsoft’s WAT Update (KB971033), which is designed to detect and remove tampering by programs like… well, like RemoveWAT. The pirate code remained working even when I ran the WAT update manually.
Page 3: Roll your own free OEM copy?

March 3rd, 2010

Confessions of a Windows 7 pirate

Fooling Windows by tinkering with the BIOS

The other popular approach toward cracking Windows activation takes advantage of the difference between retail and OEM copies of Windows. Retail copies have to be activated using a unique serial number. OEM copies from large system makers (Dell, Toshiba, HP, and so on, collectively known as Royalty OEMs) use a technique called System Locked Preinstallation (SLP). The preinstalled copy of Windows uses a single master product key tied to specific information in the system BIOS that is unique to that manufacturer’s systems. If the encrypted licensing information in the preinstalled copy of Windows matches the information in the BIOS, no activation is required.
Windows pirates figured out how to exploit this hack around the time Windows Vista was launched. The Windows 7 Loader program, which I used on a test system, looks at your PC’s BIOS to see whether it contains an ACPI_SLIC table with software licensing information (”markers” for the Windows operating system and the name of the computer maker). If the SLIC table is present, the tool installs the correct product key for your Windows 7 edition along with a digital certificate; the combination mimics a legitimate OEM preinstallation. For systems with a BIOS that doesn’t contain the proper SLIC tables (a scenario I didn’t test), it uses an alternate boot loader (typically some variant of GRUB) and installs BIOS emulation code to fool the system into thinking your system is a legitimate OEM installation. You can use the one-click installer or select from advanced options to personalize your PC by choosing a particular brand.
In this case, I had installed a retail copy of Windows 7 Home Premium on a relatively new system (purchased in mid-2009) that was originally licensed for Windows Vista. I didn’t enter a product key during setup, and I had gone more than 30 days without activating. Here’s what I saw when I ran W7Loader:

The installer correctly detected the brand (Dell) and Windows 7 edition. When I clicked the Install Certificate and Serial button on the right, I was greeted with this message:

The system, which had never been activated, had previously been nagging me with “non-Genuine” warning messages. As soon as the pirate tool completed its work, the watermark on the black desktop went away and the System properties dialog box told me I was activated with a Dell OEM product ID.
Page 4: The Empire strikes back –

The Empire strikes back

The two exploits I describe in this post are certainly not the only ones out there. Indeed, Windows pirates have been playing a cat-and-mouse game with Microsoft for years. In the Windows XP era, pirates focused most often on stealing legitimate product keys, especially Volume License keys. Beginning with Windows Vista, Microsoft has begun building anti-piracy components directly into the operating system, and pirates have aimed their hacking skills at those components with increasing sophistication.
The latest salvo from Microsoft in the war against pirates is the Windows Activation Technologies Update (KB971033). In its default configuration, it performs an initial validation check and then repeats the process every 90 days, downloading new signatures to detect exploits that flew under the radar in the previous scan. When I initially wrote about this subject last month, the question I heard most often was, “Why does it need to keep checking? If I get validated, shouldn’t that be good enough?”
Unfortunately, the experiences I’ve written about here prove why that strategy doesn’t work. If you used a copy of RemoveWAT that was created in 2009, you were able to fool Microsoft validation servers with a 100% success rate. However, as the anguished cries of forum participants proved, the KB971033 update in February exposed all of those hacks, restoring the correct license files and causing the systems to (correctly) fail validation. As a result, the RemoveWAT developer modified his code and released a version last week that trumped the new update and once again allowed hacked machines to pass the activation test.
In the past, that would have been counted as a win for the pirates. But with its new signature-based system, Microsoft can improve its exploit-detection code and, at least in theory, identify the updated hacks in 90 days (or, in the worst case, 90 days after that). The point is that pirates can’t count on getting a permanent free pass on activation. If you’re a hobbyist obsessed with pirating Windows, you have to put up with the nuisance of updating your hacking tools every few months. But if you’re selling pirated software (in a box or preloaded on a system), you risk getting put out of business and maybe sent to jail when the systems you sold in March are detected as pirated in June or July.
The other question I hear on the subject is, “Why pick on legitimate customers? Why not go after the real pirates?”
There’s a common misconception that only diehard hackers mess around with pirated software. The reality is that anyone can be a victim, especially if they ever need help reinstalling Windows or repairing some sort of hardware problem. I have lost count of the number of times I have seen a PC that contains a pirated copy of Windows installed by a nephew or a neighbor or even a local computer tech who was trying to share the cool thing he found on the Internet. Back in 2007, I wrote about a firsthand experience with a PC repair tech for a major national chain who used a pirated copy of Windows to “repair” my friend’s PC.
In that case, I was able to spot the unauthorized copy quickly and help my friend undo the damage (and get his money back from the crooked tech). If that were to happen today, the tech might be lucky enough to get away with the deception for a few months, but he would eventually be caught out.
One thing I learned while researching this piece is the phenomenal determination of pirates. They’ve become increasingly sophisticated and are able to react extremely fast to changes from Microsoft. For Microsoft, responding to those fast-moving targets without inadvertently inflicting collateral damage on its customers is a tremendous challenge.
Last weekend, I used some sophisticated forensic tools to take an equally close (and completely unauthorized) look at what Microsoft is doing with its most recent anti-piracy update. Tomorrow, I’ll publish the surprising results of that analysis.
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