Haxors have discovered how to trick Vista into thinking its running on an OEM machine and bypassing the activation and validity check entirely. The hack involves adding a BIOS certificate specific to a certain OEM which Vista then accepts as legitimate.

After the brute-force keygen — which seems to be hoax — and the things like this hack its abundantly clear that Vista activation is a speed-bump and little else. However, I can suggest you go out and pay for Vista. It’s a good product, a strong upgrade, and a worthy adversary in the cat-and-mouse game called hacking.

It’s official: Pirates crack Vista at last [APCMag]