if anything bad ever happened after using MAS there would be piles of evidence because MAS is brought up every time people discuss Windows license price. Equating piracy to malware is disingenuous and malware is not the only bad factor. If you consider all of them it turns out that there is a lesser chance you'll get screwed if you pirate be it music, movies or operating systems
I gotta be honest man, I do not understand someone who pirates executable code. I (and I assume most of the hn audience) am not some starving student with nothing to lose. I would much rather run linux than pirate windows.
The OS installation images come from Microsoft. They're the same amount of malware as the OS that comes preinstalled on your laptop. Probably a tad less, depending on the brand.
So instead of downloading the OS, you're downloading a patching executable? How do you trust this? Is it open source and auditable? Otherwise you're opening yourself up to the same concerns.
I assume you haven’t checked on this since the Windows 7 days, but Massgrave is open source, and the activation logic boils down to about five lines of PowerShell, using only native Windows utilities. I think they even have a tutorial on their website that explains how to perform the activation manually if you want to avoid running their scripts.
If you are worried about malware from your pirated content you are going to the wrong websites. The good ones are hard to get on and have severe consequences for the uploader and whoever invited them.
However severe those consequences are, I'm sure it's not 'cryptolocker hard drive' or worse 'lose hundreds of thousands from my brokerage account' severe. I am happy to pay for my bits. It's wild to me this is somehow a controversial opinion on a board supposedly populated with well paid software engineers.
Agree with you but not every answer is move to Linux. A lot of us help family member with IT stuff. People I help use excel, quicken, and one drive to run their businesses and finances. I could see myself running into GPs license issue with my father in law.
I tried to get a few of them to use chromebooks but the need for quicken or another app they used for decade(s) keeps them windows based.
I agree. Some people don't really think about licences, they buy a PC with Windows and only buy another when that one stops being usable. Even this forced upgrade to 11 is still the path of least resistance.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45504231.
Using a pirated OS does not sound like a good idea lol. Who knows what could be added during "cracking" of the license.
Nuthing. You could manually reproduce what massgrave does.
How much time would you need to manually reproduce their 20k lines of activation code? And what qualification would you need?
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Whatever it is, I'm sure it's not half as bad as things that Microsoft puts there. After all, who knows what's in Windows source code.
if anything bad ever happened after using MAS there would be piles of evidence because MAS is brought up every time people discuss Windows license price. Equating piracy to malware is disingenuous and malware is not the only bad factor. If you consider all of them it turns out that there is a lesser chance you'll get screwed if you pirate be it music, movies or operating systems
and it comes with free malware!
I gotta be honest man, I do not understand someone who pirates executable code. I (and I assume most of the hn audience) am not some starving student with nothing to lose. I would much rather run linux than pirate windows.
You might not be up to date on how this works.
The OS installation images come from Microsoft. They're the same amount of malware as the OS that comes preinstalled on your laptop. Probably a tad less, depending on the brand.
So instead of downloading the OS, you're downloading a patching executable? How do you trust this? Is it open source and auditable? Otherwise you're opening yourself up to the same concerns.
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What about the crack executable?
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I assume you haven’t checked on this since the Windows 7 days, but Massgrave is open source, and the activation logic boils down to about five lines of PowerShell, using only native Windows utilities. I think they even have a tutorial on their website that explains how to perform the activation manually if you want to avoid running their scripts.
Is it 5 lines of PowerShell or 19861 lines of cmd?
https://github.com/massgravel/Microsoft-Activation-Scripts/b...
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If you are worried about malware from your pirated content you are going to the wrong websites. The good ones are hard to get on and have severe consequences for the uploader and whoever invited them.
However severe those consequences are, I'm sure it's not 'cryptolocker hard drive' or worse 'lose hundreds of thousands from my brokerage account' severe. I am happy to pay for my bits. It's wild to me this is somehow a controversial opinion on a board supposedly populated with well paid software engineers.
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Agree with you but not every answer is move to Linux. A lot of us help family member with IT stuff. People I help use excel, quicken, and one drive to run their businesses and finances. I could see myself running into GPs license issue with my father in law.
I tried to get a few of them to use chromebooks but the need for quicken or another app they used for decade(s) keeps them windows based.
I agree. Some people don't really think about licences, they buy a PC with Windows and only buy another when that one stops being usable. Even this forced upgrade to 11 is still the path of least resistance.
The ones who're pirating the non executable code are who I don't understand. Oh and I'm a starving PhD student.
Shouldn't talk about things that you don't know much about so confidently
Lmao what? Microsoft gives the ISO's away and the MassGrave tools literally use Microsoft's own code to activate it.
What???
Commenter was suggesting using original Microsoft ISOs and verifying through massgrave.
Zero malware