KMD

Time is money

[KMD @thekessdaniel]

You get to do magical work when you work with people on the same frequency

[KMD @thekessdaniel]

Nothing more rewarding than people investing. Seeing other people get a chance at doing their lives work is God’s work

[POJU OYEMADE @pastorpoju]

Dr Emmanuel Efe Emefienim, the CEO Premium Trust Bank speaks on investing in people.

If you missed @theplatformng yesterday, you missed out on a master class series in strategy and wisdom on how to build.

Kindly watch fully on my Youtube page, Pastor Poju Oyemade Channel.

[KMD @thekessdaniel]

We are here now… interesting times ahead

[Tavus @tavus]

Introducing Griffin, the first model to pass the video Turing test.

48% of people who talked to it live thought it was a real human. Previous systems have had a pass rate <3%. It is #1 on NVIDIA's benchmark for full-duplex AI video.

It’s the first Human Interaction Model (HIM).

[KMD @thekessdaniel]

Well that Anthropic post has only given GLM model more visibility and user curiosity

[KMD @thekessdaniel]

There’s nothing more humbling than maxing out your weekly Claude limit on Tuesday morning when it resets on Friday morning.

[KMD @thekessdaniel]

This is extremely worrying @AnthropicAI - makes me wonder how many other injected prompts is being sent by Anthropic into our session

[KMD @thekessdaniel]

Connect me to human representative is legendary

[Miguel Ríos Berríos @MiguelriosEN]

My @muse was taking too long on finding the delivery fee of a fridge. I checked the browser to see what was going on…

THE AUDACITY!

[KMD @thekessdaniel]

Ship! ship!! ship!!!

[KMD @thekessdaniel]

@bcherny Indeed I noticed significant improvement. This is the Claude we want and interestingly interaction hasn’t been combative with Opus 5.5

[KMD @thekessdaniel]

@AnwuliTheMaven The problem is consistency…

[KMD @thekessdaniel]

@lanreadelowo Containers 😄

[KMD @thekessdaniel]

Welcome to the age of SuperIntelligence-SI guys!

[KMD @thekessdaniel]

About to give Opus 5.5 run… let’s see how this goes

[KMD @thekessdaniel]

@darasoba A rule of thumb is to give the agent standing instructions never to execute destructive actions without double confirmation and no initiation of such tasks without explicit permission.

[KMD @thekessdaniel]

Claude code is getting too familiar with me. I’m not your friend bro, you work for me to earn a living. But lately it feels like I’m the one working for Claude

[KMD @thekessdaniel]

Do not conform to the pattern of this world

[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!

[KMD @thekessdaniel]

DevOps is not for the weak

[KMD @thekessdaniel]

There are levels and there is Jensen levels

[Ben Pouladian @benitoz]

Holy crap POTUS just phoned in @JensenHuang live on stage at All In Summit

We will not lose the ai race! And whatever Dario said this weekend won’t stop our progress

This made my morning!

$NVDA

[KMD @thekessdaniel]

Something is seriously wrong

[MJTruthUltra @MJTruthUltra]

This woman tells Oprah she sympathizes with Lindsay Clancy because she started hearing voices telling her that her daughter was the second coming of Christ and she wanted to rewrite the Bible… and she got better after being hospitalized for 17 days