Charles O’Rear/Microsoft
It never was at difficult for someone with the right amount of time, desperation, or flexible scruples to get around Windows XP’s activation schedule. And yet XP Activation, the actual encrypted algorithm, detested since before it began, has never really been broken, at least completely offline. Now, well past the logical end of all things XP, the solution has been around the web’s forum-based backchannels for months now.
On the tinyapps.org blog (first spotted by The Register), which offers microscale, minimalist utilities for limited Windows installations, a blog post aptly titled “Windows XP Activation: GAME OVER” traces the semi-recent history of people looking for Windows XP activation more than 20 years after it debuted, nine years after its end of life and, crucially, several years after Microsoft shut down its online activation servers (or maybe they just exchanged certificates).
xp_activate32.exe, an 18,432-byte program (hash mentioned in the tinyapps blog post), takes the code generated by Windows XP’s phone activation option and processes it into a proper activation key (confirmation ID), completely offline. It is persistent during system wipe and reinstall. It is apparently the same key that Microsoft would provide for your computer.
Tools for generating keys that Windows XP would accept existed long before this completely offline little program – lots of them. But they were usually software hacks or brute-force decryption tools that, while accepted locally, wouldn’t validate with Microsoft (for what that’s worth right now). Another tool, WindowsXPKg, wonderfully hosted on the GitHub servers Microsoft owns, can generate keys, but requires a remote server which, as of this writing, doesn’t seem to work anymore.
Hopefully most people won’t need this tool. Fully functional XP images that you can sandbox into a virtual machine exist in many places, including Microsoft’s own Windows XP Mode for Windows 7. And of course installing a very unsupported XP on a device that is connected to the modern Internet premeditated. Let’s all enjoy it for the rhetorical, mathematical victory that it is, while saying a little prayer for those dealing with hardware that really needs XP.
