this post was submitted on 08 Aug 2025
562 points (98.6% liked)
Technology
73896 readers
3605 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
A key, exactly like they did it for decades? Same way they verified you paid for that copy of Windows?
I mean... I have valid keys for various Windows versions I never paid for 🤷♂️
As someone who has actually never bough a Windows key even though I started with Win 98, and I before this Win 10 installation have never genuinely activated any them, I quite easily understand why they don't do it that way any more. I also do remember back when Windows 7 was going through this exact same thing how trivially easy it was to get those updates without paying - so easy in fact that most people assumed MS did it on purpose just so that people would rather pirate them than run an unpatched installation for three years.
It's not an assumption, it's the reality. They made it easy so they could obtain marketshare, same shit every company does before they bend you over.
Don't you need a Windows account to buy a key?
Back in the days of Dinosaurs and AOL CDs, you could just go to Best Buy and buy a CD with the Windows software and a key was printed on a scratch-off panel.
You could even just buy a key electronically from some grey market websites.
It was still like that up until Windows 8, at least.
Right, well, its not 2003 anymore
What's your point? Is it now somehow no longer physically possible to sell product keys in store due to some higher decree?
Because it doesn't prevent piracy. Are you dense ?
Why yes, our bodies, and our brains, are designed to be as dense as possible to be more efficient! This is why our brains' gray matter has a lot of crevices so it can fold onto itself.
You can prevent piracy using a stronger keygen algorithm and online activation.
Valve sells product keys all the time, you don't hear about them having a keygen problem. People just bypass the authentication altogether and simply torrent the software, which is something people still do with Windows 11.