14 DAY TRIAL // Microsoft's former marketing chief, Michael Sievert, revealed back in December 2007 that, with the advent of Windows Vista Service Pack 1, two of the most popular Vista cracks would be history, namely the OEM BIOS and Grace Timer activation workarounds. Vista SP1 is designed not only to identify the pirated versions of the operating system that have been activated with OEM BIOS and Grace Timer, but also to disable the exploits. However, Microsoft has a surprise planned for the users of Vista RTM that were planning not to upgrade to SP1 in order to avoid having their platforms labeled as pirated. The Redmond company is cooking an update to its Windows Genuine Advantage anti-piracy mechanism that will be served to the gold version of Vista and help identify the two cracks.
"Later this month Microsoft will release an update to Windows Vista through Windows Update that will enable Gold and SP1-installed systems to detect the presence of the Grace Timer and OEM BIOS exploits then alert the customer of their presence. The dialog box (shown below) also provides customers with guidance about what they can do to fix it and provides a Web link for more details, so that customers can learn about the particular exploit and learn how to disable and remove it. If they are a victim of software piracy, the linked Web pages will provide information on how to get genuine software," explained Alex Kochis, Senior Product Manager for Windows Genuine Advantage.
But unlike Vista SP1, the Windows Genuine Advantage update will only detect the OEM BIOS and Grace Timer cracks, but leave them and the operating system copies activated via the two exploits untouched. Vista will present users with the dialog box featured on the left, which essentially has the role of informing end users of the activation bypasses. This will only be the initial behavior. Down the road, Microsoft will also build into the WGA update the capability of removing the exploits.
"It's important to note that this update does not disable the exploits it finds - it simply alerts customers that exploits exist. When we first release the update that enables Windows Vista to detect the exploits we will also make available a separate removal tool as a download. In the future we will integrate the removal of the exploits with the detection. I'm expecting to see that integration in our next release. We also wanted to minimize any interruption for genuine customers so if a Windows Vista customer does not have an exploit on their system, they won't see any dialog box after the update is applied. It's that simple. By providing this kind of technology, we want to make sure our customers are able to have the best Windows experience possible," Kochis added.
