Rico ☁️ 💻

M365 / Azure Consultant

[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!

[Rico ☁️ 💻 @rm83]

@dhh OmSTarchy edition?

[Ramin Nasibov @RaminNasibov]

I totally understand you

[Ayoade Joshua Michael @AyoadeTheJoshua]

when you think the waiter is bringing your order

[MP10 @MusicPills10]

The 90s were so special and nobody knew it at the time... #Underworld

[gxjo @gxjo_dev]

Somebody turned GitHub profiles into FIFA cards and I'm obsessed 😭

[Nostalgic Gamer @16bitnostalgia]

Remember in FIFA when you could run away from the ref trying to give you a yellow card? Good times!

[Count Binface @CountBinface]

I enjoyed every second of this interview. Which makes one of us…

[BBC Sport Scotland @BBCSportScot]

The Tartan Army had a new member for their march in Providence earlier 🦆🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿

#BBCFootball #FifaWorldCup

[BijanBowen @bijanbowen]

Had Claude Fable 5 log network packets and display them as cars on a highway, different car types = different packet types

[Hayden Barnes @unixterminal]

NEW BLOG: wslc: A native Linux container runtime for Windows https://t.co/4EYPqNOzKY

[Glasgow Azure UG @GlasgowAzureUG]

9 years ago, the first Glasgow Azure User Group meetup happened… in a Starbucks ☕

Since then: 50+ meetups and an incredible community built around Azure and learning together.

Proud to be Scotland’s first (and UK’s second) Azure user group. When did you first join us?
#Azure

[Sung Drip Woo @YaBoyRoshi]

IM CRYING! 😂😂

[Reid Wiseman @astro_reid]

Only one chance in this lifetime…

Like watching sunset at the beach from the most foreign seat in the cosmos, I couldn’t resist a cell phone video of Earthset. You can hear the shutter on the Nikon as @Astro_Christina is hammering away on 3-shot brackets and capturing those exceptional Earthset photos through the 400mm lens. @AstroVicGlover was in window 3 watching with @Astro_Jeremy next to him.

I could barely see the Moon through the docking hatch window but the iPhone was the perfect size to catch the view…this is uncropped, uncut with 8x zoom which is quite comparable to the view of the human eye. Enjoy.

[Vinícius Apolinário 🇧🇷🇺🇸 @vrapolinario]

🚨New event alert! We're super excited to announce something the team has been working on!

Run #Azure in production? Microsoft Azure Infra Summit, May 19-21, 2026, is for #ITPro, SREs, and platform teams who want deeper technical content.

🔗https://t.co/RNXzF7OtnE

#AzOps

[Chris Combs (iterative design enjoyer) @DrChrisCombs]

ARTEMIS II AS SEEN BY THE OFFICIAL NASA CESSNA

THIS IS THE BEST LAUNCH VIDEO AND IT ISN'T CLOSE

[Titanic New York @TitanicNewYork]

114 years on, Belfast witnesses a full-scale drone Titanic depart into the night...a powerful tribute.

#titanic #rmstitanic

[Omar Shahine @OmarShahine]

🦞 TL;DR: New Job at Microsoft. Bringing OpenClaw + personal agents to Microsoft 365!

My goal is to help usher in a new generation of workplace proactive assistants, ones that lighten your load by taking on tasks end-to-end, and that can also step in proactively when they can help.

As part of this mission, I’ll be partnering with the @OpenClaw + M365 community to bring the energy of this work to our customers. We’ve already hit the ground running with a fully integrated Teams plugin for OpenClaw, and I can’t wait to help usher in the era of personal agents at work.

[Iain Cameron @theiaincameron]

The A90 south of Aberdeen looks like something from a video you see of Arctic Norway or Finland. One of the biggest snow events of the last 20 years in north-east Scotland for sure.

[CommodoreBlog @CommodoreBlog]

LIVE CNN BREAKING NEWS UPDATE!
Shots Fired at Nakatomi Plaza, untold number of hostages. #NakatomiPlaza #YippeeKiYay #SwissCheese