Inspirational Technology

Well, we’d like to think virtual appliances are only used for good, but it looks like there’s also a virtual appliance floating around that can be used to activate the corporate version of Windows Vista without paying for the licenses.

The MelindaGates hack uses a VMware image of a KMS server to activate — and keep activated — a pirated edition of Windows Vista Business. “Looks like Windows Vista Volume Activation 2.0 is a big bust,” wrote a user identified as “clank” on the PirateBay Web site Friday.

I’m not much of a fan of the activation nonsense that Microsoft has been putting into their software, so it’s kind of interesting to see it defeated so easily. It looks like the use of a virtual machine may have been a necessity in this case as well. This current trend of tying software to hardware is kind of interesting when you consider that the hardware that’s being presented to the OS now is increasingly just software itself. I suspect we’re going to start seeing some lobbying for some way to allow software running in a virtual machine to gain more access to the physical hardware for the sake of licensing and “security”. If that happens then we’re really going to have a mess to deal with.