The business launch of Windows Vista is only a few days behind us and already the attempts to pirate Windows Vista are underway. Recently I stumbled on news of a rogue KMS servers that has appeared on the internet with information on how to activate a copy of Windows Vista VL against the server. Once activated your illegal copy of Windows Vista will be good for 180 days before it needs to talk to the KMS server again.
KMS, which stands for
[Only Registered and Activated Users Can See Links. Click Here To Register...], is part of the Volume Activation 2.0 scheme to protect Windows Vista and Longhorn Server from piracy. As part of your license agreement with Microsoft you agree to not bring up a KMS server on the public internet. This server is a clear violation of that agreement, which I doubt they had.
To complicate matters this server appears to be setup somewhere in China. Which I assume would make things a little difficult for Microsoft from both a political and technical standpoint. The domain name which is registered to Shenzhen
[Only Registered and Activated Users Can See Links. Click Here To Register...] has a
[Only Registered and Activated Users Can See Links. Click Here To Register...]. It was a domain name that a variant of a recent zero-day bug in word was trying to communicate with. Coincidence? Unlikely!
So what does this mean? Well hopefully Microsoft can get the server shut down in pretty short order, and even if they can't then the key will likely get flagged and anyone that has used it will no longer be able to download anything that requires [Only Registered and Activated Users Can See Links. Click Here To Register...].
I think we might see the occasional rogue KMS server that Microsoft has to shutdown, but the real question is....Do you think Microsoft will succeed at protecting Windows Vista from large scale piracy?
Illegal KMS server appears on the Internet
Linear Mode
