Wohler Paraita

Ingénieur en développement et tests fonctionnels financiers. Originaire de Tahiti, je suis intéressé par l'IT et la finance. / former blue check

[Brigitte Lecordier @LecordierB]

Mauvaise Nouvelle.

[Wohler Paraita @paraita]

@terkelg Please support Mac Intel 🙏

[Wohler Paraita @paraita]

@elonmusk Dude https://t.co/tjPEFgpShd

[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!

[forloop @forloopcodes]

⚠️⚠️ LINUX KERNEL SOURCE CODE LEAKED!!!

this guy named linus torvalds just reverse engineered linux source code and leaked it on github, all computer systems running on linux are vulnurable

billions of lines of code, 1.5 million commits, 240k stars

all linux users are suggested to switch to windows as soon as possible

[Wohler Paraita @paraita]

@IntCyberDigest Imagine watching tv broadcast ads and on top Hisense ads in an overlay

[Wohler Paraita @paraita]

@Frederic_Molas La Mafifa

[Wohler Paraita @paraita]

@MKBHD Hoping for liquid frost

[Silviᐰ * back from hiatus* @XFchemist]

#GuessTheStargateEpisode
Round 3096

#WeWantStargate
#TimeForStargate
#WeWantBradGate
#52WeeksOfStargate

@StargateNow_EU
@PrimeVideo
@AmazonMGMStudio

[Nice-Matin @Nice_Matin]

La une de Nice-Matin du jeudi 14 novembre

[George from 🕹prodmgmt.world @nurijanian]

Every PM needs to grab this OKR cheat sheet from Microsoft

Seriously, share it with your team 🤝🪄

[marty @Sellingvol]

BlackRock slides

[Wohler Paraita @paraita]

@kaelavirusagain Hello !

[Satan @s8n]

be safe out there!

[Wohler Paraita @paraita]

@cronosartwork Wooooow on peut les avoir où ces magnifiques stickers ??

[🍂 @Lovandfear]

How to stay in love .

[CRONOS @cronosartwork]

SAVE THE DATE ! 🥳 Je vous donne rdz-vs le 26 Septembre à la @galeriewinkler pour le vernissage de la 4em exposition en solo. 😁✌️
#cronosartwork #polystripes #cronostahiti

[ActiveEon @activeeon]

Activeeon presents ProActive Workflows & Scheduling for Job Scheduling, IT Orchestration and Workload Automation, on premise and in the cloud. Create modern automation and build efficient workflows for a better ROI! #Activeeon #WorkloadAutomation
https://t.co/NAVeKihEmp