alt Hacker News1) They’ve started again to crack down on black-market activation methods
https://windowsforum.com/threads/kms38-shut-down-windows-act...
2) It’s not legal, obviously. I’d always have a tinge of worry that if I join a Teams call or something then my employer is on the hook for me doing something naughty.
(given how Microsoft has decided to “upgrade” my local account to a Microsoft account before when logging in to outlook)
Replies
gruez • today at 1:11 PM
>https://windowsforum.com/threads/kms38-shut-down-windows-act...
Seems AI generated?
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Interesting. And worrying. I see a good number of those Kamrui (and competitor) Mini PCs from Amazon replacing a lot of the far more expensive and lower-powered industrial PCs for various uses in smaller machine shops. I was not surprised since they're inexpensive and have a decent kick to the hardware, but I've noted that the version of Windows they ship with is fairly free of a lot of the usual bloat, so I assumed they were just using one of the available scripts to remove it...which likely included the KMS38 work-around? And I can tell you first-hand that most of the smaller shops are far too busy penny-pinching to spend even a few hundred dollars a year on licensing one or two of those machines properly.
I never looked that deep into it since nobody came to me with any issues about it, but you have me wondering. I don't personally use Windows, either, despite my HN handle (it's just a reference I thought was funny), and I am finding myself more and more ignorant to what Microsoft is actually pushing. Thanks for the heads up. Will spend some time looking at this deeper.