A little music to set the mood.
While Windows XP has been cracked for quite some time, there has been a new development. According to The Register, the Windows XP activation algorithm has been cracked offline by the use of Linux.
Per a blogpost on Tinyapps (a site dedicated to small applications for Windows), this crack makes it possible to safely and securely activate new Windows XP installations offline. Specifically, it allows users to activate the OS without altering it in any way whatsoever.
According to the currently blacked out subreddit, this software has actually been available for months. But nobody knows who made it or shared it.
While a key generator for Windows XP that could generated infinite keys was released in 2019, it still required external services to validate and complete the installation, though; a problem, as XP can no longer speak to Microsoft’s servers, and XP frankly shouldn’t go online at all now. Last year saw a release capable of generating those IDs offline, from which this current program is derived. And right now, there are people at work reverse engineering the new program to make an open source version over on Github.
While it’s easy to consider the 21-year-old OS to be obsolete (because it is), it’s still in use in many parts of the world; not a surprise, considering how popular it was. For example, it’s the most used OS in Armenia as of 2021, and probably still now. As of 2019, an alarming one third of U.S. businesses still had at least one Windows XP machine in operation.
And this is still a positive if you like PC games from the early 2000’s. A lot of them need work to operate on modern systems, but an XP install would bypass a lot of that. So there’s definitely some positives to utterly defeating the security measures of an ancient OS.
Source: PC Mag
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