Time of death: 4:22 PM UTC September 26th
Notes, please read:
For those of you who don’t know, HWID was the holy grail for Windows activation, letting you generate licenses straight from Microsoft licensing servers, being registered as fully legitimate in microsofts servers and letting you keep the activation permanently, even after windows reinstalls being completely undetectable and with nothing on your system being modified. If you’re still using outdated activation methods and you missed out on this, I’m sorry
Existing HWID licenses are left unaffected. Only new requests are blocked, no licenses were revoked.
By the way, MAS still works and is the best option for Windows/Office activation. For permanent Office activation use it’s Ohook method (supports subscription products such as 365 as well) and KMS38 for Windows
ALL OTHER ACTIVATION METHODS ARE STILL WORKING, ONLY METHOD AFFECTED IS HWID.
All HWID activators are affected, not only MAS
Around that time, Microsoft servers unexpectedly started blocking the licensing requests HWID activation method sends to Microsoft. This was a slow rollout that spanned over a few hours, at the moment the exploit is completely dead. The best options for Windows activation now is KMS38 or vlmcsd.
Patching this would boost illegal key reselling websites which causes more harm to Microsoft than HWID exploit. We can only wonder why they patched this.
{“code”:“BadRequest”,“data”:[],“details”:[],“innererror”:{“code”:“PermanentTSLRejection”,“data”:[],“details”:[{“code”:“113”,“message”:“avsErrorCode”,“target”:null}],“message”:“The Purchase Service rejected the provided TSL; the client should destroy the TSL.”,“source”:“PurchaseFD”},“message”:“The calling client sent a bad request to the service.”,“source”:“PurchaseFD”}
TLS=Temporary Signed License=The tickets HWID activation sends. Microsoft servers are now just responding with “kill it.”
Transferring existing HWID licenses to other computers using Microsoft account is broken too.
And it’s all managed by the IT department. I use Linux on all my personal devices, but on my work computer, I don’t deal with ads, bloatware, or most other things that people complain about Windows because IT took care of that already through group policy and whatnot.
My IT department likes to install antivirus software that makes it impossible to do your job because it will scan every compiled object file, inflating compilation times by an order of magnitude, even for distributed compilation jobs.
Or stupid “workspace management” software that will randomly uninstall work-related software and / or reboot your machine whenever it pleases.
Luckily I can use Linux at work, otherwise I’d have to either quit or tamper with my work machine to do my job.
And yes, the IT department knows. But they are always “understaffed” to fix stuff. Curiously, they are never understaffed to roll out new stuff that doesn’t work though.