Now You See It, Now You Don't

1:51 PM

As we've all recently heard, Windows Genuine Advantage, the supposed new scourge of Microsoft software pirates everywhere, was circumvented one day after going live on July 26, and all it took was a clever guy, an IE scripting tool called Trixie and a mere fourteen lines of code. ;)

Though Microsoft promised to never disable neither the Automatic update option built into Windows, nor the manual downloads of various updates and patches (to prevent unlicensed machines from infecting licensed machines), WGA asks the user to validate his product key before releasing many of Microsoft's downloads. Needless to say, a generated key fails and yields the following annoying screens. Click to Enlarge

Trixie to the rescue! Download, install, drop this script into Trixie's /scripts folder, close all instances of Internet Explorer, start it again and click on Tools -> Trixie Options in IE, et voila! Click to Enlarge
Click on Reload Scripts and the "WGA Workaround" script should appear in the window; check it. Uncheck all the scripts you don't need and go to Windows Update, and not a minute too late, to find fourteen critical updates ;) Click to Enlarge

Bah, it's all good.

P.S. There is only one caveat: Ad Muncher seems to interfere with Trixie's work if, say, one adds Microsoft Update to the "no filtering on site" list.

P.²S. A new method to bypass WGA has been found.

P.³S. There is no end to human ingenuity, heh; here is another one.

P.⁴S. There is now a service, called WindizUpdate, which gives full access to Windows Update using Firefox or Opera.

P.⁵S. All existing WGA-bypassing solutions have been disabled by Microsoft as of March 17, 2006. Refer to this wiki discussion for more recent developments. As of May 31, 2006, a working solution is the installation of a cracked LegitCheckControl.dll file (version 1.5.532.0), available here.

P.⁶S. As of November 11, 2006, the WGA Patcher Permanent Kit supersedes all previous hacks. It basically allows one to substitute one's likely-blacklisted Windows XP key for another, and then hack Windows, so that any illegitimate copy of Windows XP would permanently appear genuine. After applying the patch, all software downloads, installations and updates requiring WGA will work...at least for now. ;)

Comments

[Text moved to a separate file.]

Posted by I did it on July 17, 2006 7:38 AM

OMFG, why don't you just go ahead and paste War and Peace into the comment field next time. Jesus.

Well, thanks anyways.

Posted by Mike on July 25, 2006 2:25 PM

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