USS Clueless              Voyages of a restless mind

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Stardate 20010709.2316 (On Screen via motion detectors): Microsoft is trying to clamp down on piracy, which is understandable. As the world's largest seller of software, both by dollar volume and by unit count, they've got the most to gain from it, as long as they don't alienate their legitimate customers when they do so. Back in the 1980's when there was a lot of copy protection going on in the software industry, the ISVs finally came to realize that they were losing more than gaining, because their copy protection was so onerous and inconvenient for legitimate users as to drive them away.

Way back in 1995, during the beta of Win 95, Microsoft implemented a mechanism which took an inventory of the computer and uploaded that information to a server in Redmond. That feature was rapidly removed after knowledge of it became public, and ever since then any time there's even the faintest glimmer of a possibility that they're doing the same thing again, the hysterical cries of "They're spying on us!" rise to the rafters.

So now Microsoft is attempting to add a someone stronger form of protection to Win XP to prevent it from being stolen, and part of that is to create a hardware fingerprint which is given to Microsoft either through the internet or by phone. Microsoft then encrypts that number and gives back the result. Each time your system powers up, it recomputes the fingerprint, and then decrypts the stored value. If the two are too different from each other, you have to register again. And yet again we're hearing cries of "They're spying on us."

No, they're not. The actual algorithm which creates the fingerprint has now been reverse engineered, and there's much less to it than many people suspected. Even given the number, Microsoft can tell little about your system. The entire fingerprint is just 136 bits, and that is not really a lot of space. I've mirrored it on my own server (which is the link above). The original can be found here. (discuss)