moustafa

Architecte, enseignant et passionné d'informatique
#teamarchi #teamdz

[Korben @Korben]

PLAY-DOS - 6000 jeux DOS jouable ce faux PC des années 90 https://t.co/rkeLy9z6NT

[Dave W Plummer @davepl1968]

This is the story of FCKGW-RHQQ2-YXRKT-8TG6W-2B7Q8.

I was the primary author of Windows Product Activation on the operating systems side. Not the key math – those were the ACTUALLY smart guys with heads so big that they bumped the doorjamb on the way into your office. I just did the protection of and integration into the operating system.

As you likely recall, Product Activation required that you have a key, and you’d have to activate it online or over the phone.

But Microsoft had large corporate customers, think hundreds of thousands of PCs, and those customers did not want to have to activate every offline PC. So in that case, you would be given special “Volume Media” that could be unlocked with a Volume key.

That way, a volume key could never unlock your retail CD.

Now, to know what media you have, I inspect the disc image. And the Volume licensing media contained a special binary blob that I made. It was about 10MB of data, entropy stripped, hard to duplicate on Usenet at the time. And it was only present on the Volume media.

That secret data, which I hashed and checked to match to the key, was Microsoft Bob. I took their disc data and compressed and encrypted it several times. Rest assured it’s encrypted and even in the AI age no one has extracted it yet. I really just needed random data, so I started with a precompressed binary image because, secretly, I was young and didn’t know if I could trust CryptGenRand 

And so, if you ever tried the FCKGW key on a regular XP CD, it wouldn’t work, because you didn’t have Bob buried in your bits.

But if you had the means in 1995 to download large ISO binaries or copy CDs, all it took was the key and a copy of the disc.

The key itself still had to pass the product-key validation math (the part I didn’t own). Once it did, WPA simply skipped the rest of the process. That combination—valid VLK + matching volume media—is what made the install look fully legitimate, including early Windows Update checks.

How it leaked

RTM went to manufacturing on 24 August 2001. Retail launch was 25 October. Roughly five weeks before launch the warez group Devils0wn (often written “Devil’s Own”) posted a complete, non-beta “Windows XP Pro Corporate” ISO together with the FCKGW key. That ISO was the volume media. Pirates then started baking the key into images or just writing it on the CD with a Sharpie. The famous photo of the marked-up disc is from that scene.

The most plausible source is an OEM or hardware partner that received final media early so they could ship PCs on launch day. Dell is the name that comes up most often; Intel has also been mentioned because of later source dumps. There were very few organizations that actually possessed a VLK that early, which is why the timing points at a partner rather than a random corporate customer. But I do not know. Presumably someone does.

Aftermath

We started blacklisting the Product IDs that belonged to the leaked keys (FCKGW decoded to one of the 640-range PIDs we later treated as toxic) in SP1. SP2 and Windows Genuine Advantage made the check more aggressive and also started blocking updates for those installs. Other, un-leaked VLKs continued to work on volume media for years; Microsoft did not kill the entire volume-licensing path, just the ones that had escaped.
So the design decision was “give trusted big customers a convenient offline path.” The operational failure was that the media and one of those keys left the building before the product even reached stores. Once both pieces were public, WPA’s hardware-binding never got a chance to run.

These Days

If you’re curious about what I’m doing today, check out Task Manager TMOG at https://t.co/OZcq1axGTb where you can download the Free version! It runs fully native on Windows, Mac, and Linux!

[Lord Arse! @Lord_Arse]

By age 30, you should have a big box of random cables which you 'might need someday'.

[Editions Parenthèses @EdParentheses]

C'est avec une grande émotion que nous avons appris la disparition de Paul Chemetov (1928-16 juin 2024). Il venait de nous donner les derniers éléments pour ce qui sera son dernier livre (en librairie en août) !

#hommage #chemetov

[Amiral ReD.Ak @KDR33_16]

Faut qu’on s’organise. Y’a déjà des initiatives de la diaspora mises en place auxquelles on pourrait se greffer ?

[Dezeen @dezeen]

"I think that there are lessons from what is called 'architecture without architects', where people have created a response using local materials," Foster told Dezeen.
https://t.co/CUbSy829Cb

[Camille Gillet @Gillet_Camille]

Aujourd'hui, on va parler de l'IA.

Mais pas n'importe comment : l'IA en tant que personnage et les narrations associées.

Je vous l'avais promis lors d'un précédent thread, c'est tipar ! Un thread plus intellectuel que d'ordinaire.

#Storytelling #IA

🧵⤵️

[UA. @UnionAlgerienne]

🇩🇿🏛️ THREAD – La destruction de la bibliothèque d’Alger.

Le 7 juin 1962, un incendie fomenté par l'OAS 🇫🇷 détruit l'une des plus anciennes et des plus riches bibliothèques du monde avec près de 600 000 ouvrages sur la civilisation algérienne.

(Retweetez & suivez-nous) ⬇️

[Philip Oldfield @SustainableTall]

Mass timber roof for the extension of Portland Airport - apparently nine acres in area!!!

https://t.co/LnQOWeWMBL

[Mushtaq Bilal, PhD @MushtaqBilalPhD]

Don't use ChatGPT for academic research. It creates fake citations to papers that don't even exist.

Instead, use Consensus — an AI-powered search engine designed for academics.

Ask it a question and it'll give you a summary of top 5-10 (real) published papers.

[Architext @architext14]

TWA drawings

[Prof. Dr. Steve Pascolo @StevePascolo]

Je suis pionnier du vaccin ARNm, 25 ans d’expérience, premier à recevoir des injections d’ARNm synthétique (2003) et à avoir testé le vaccin ARNm en clinique (2003) mais les médias parlent des élucubrations de @henrioncaude qui n’a pas lu ou pas compris les articles qu’elle cite

[Kohan 🏛🏛🏛 @kohantoys]

Aquí una lista de 20 libros de Arquiectura para cualquier estudiante inquieto

sale hilo 🧵0/20

[Ken Shirriff @kenshirriff]

The Globus INK (1967) is a remarkable piece of Soviet spacecraft equipment. Its rotating globe showed cosmonauts the position of their Soyuz spacecraft. An electromechanical analog computer, it used gears, cams, and differentials to compute the position. Let's look inside 🧵

[France Culture @franceculture]

Orpheline puis domestique, Baya a su déjouer sa condition sociale pour devenir une pionnière de la peinture moderne algérienne.
➡️ https://t.co/zNZaxTsrPA

[Vincent Terrasi @VincentTerrasi]

Lancement de notre détecteur ChatGPT - GPT3

Il fonctionne en anglais mais nous travaillons activement sur une version multilingue.

Notre but est d'aider les profs et les plateformes de contenu à identifier les contenus IAs.
https://t.co/N5wR63nGS0

Pour la méthodologie👇

[Eric Lagadec✨🌍 @EricLagadec]

Cette vidéo a été prise à 5 milliards de kilomètres de la Terre par la sonde New Horizons. Oui, vous y voyez la surface de Pluton!!

C'est pas hallucinant ?

[Eric Lagadec✨🌍 @EricLagadec]

Tout le monde a vu cette image de la nébuleuse de la Carène par le JWST. Mais est-ce que vous vous rendez compte que c'est immense ? Sur cette image, le système solaire ne ferait qu'un pixel.
La sonde voyager, qui quitte le système solaire n'est qu'à 19 heures-lumière!
© marcusen

[Patrick Campbell @Patticus]

10 years ago today @aaronsw took his own life after overly aggressive prosecution.

He invented internet infrastructure.

He defeated the greatest threat the Internet had ever seen.

And you probably don't know who he is.

You should.

Here’s his story 🧵

[Curiosity @MAstronomers]

A beautiful photo, of a work of engineering art 📸
Photograph by Richard Silver.