Vista crack a hoax, what a surprise

I'll admit I was a little excited when I heard the news that someone had created a brute force hack to tackle Vista's licensing. I have legitimate licenses for all of my copies of Windows, but I chafe sometimes under the draconian licensing schemes and assumption that I'm a pirate by default. I feel a slight sense of satisfaction when I hear the licensing was cracked, especially by something as simple as trying different combinations of letters and numbers until you find one that works. It would have been quite a condemnation of Microsoft's licensing schema if true. Alas, this time it was the hackers who couldn't do it.

When you really sit down and do the the math, the Windows licensing key is pretty daunting: thirty-six alphanumeric possibilities in twenty-five spots or 25^36 = 211,758,236,810,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 possible combinations. If you have a billion real keys out there, the number of possible keys you have to go through to get a real key is still approximately 2e+41. For those of you who've forgotten your high school math, that's an eight with twenty-nine zeroes after it. Even by the standards of today's computing power, it would take a long time to try all of these possibilities. A few millisecond delay between attempts would mean it would take longer than your lifetime to figure out a valid key. This is very similar to the math used in symmetric key encryption today; if you use a big enough number, guessing that number becomes practically impossible.