It’s funny that they manually blacklisted 333-999 while all 0 or all 1 is much more likely to be the first thing someone would randomly try. I wonder what they were trying to accomplish...
Well I think they weren't trying to use it the way most think. Just for support purposes, if you bought a Compaq with preinstalled 95 you would need to call Compaq for support. If you called Microsoft and provided them with your Product ID they would instantly see that you are not eligible for support. Same goes for OEM versions you bought elsewhere. It's not the software they're protecting, it's the support.
Wow, that's really interesting. I remember in NT4 days we'd install the entire computer lab with 111-1111111 serial key. Never thought to ask why it was valid or what was valid. Total blast from the past to find out that serial keys through at least win95 were.... basically pointless.
This is what happens when legitimate way is too cumbersome - people will pirate even if they bought the thing to escape lots of meaningless manual work.
Back then you couldn't even save a password with more than 8 characters. Seriously. I complained to a provider. They didn't change anything. They left it at 8 characters. The national provider for British internet. Obviously they preferred it that way.
Alright then, I'll upgrade from invalid Windows 10 to this legit Windows 95. Edit: Wow, 1.8k likes. No way. Thanks people! I have now resolved my invalid key issue.
I think Win2K was probably the best version of Windoze... It wasn't that bloated back then, but it seems to have gone downhill since then... All too often though a "new version" is just seems to be a repackaging of the previous version, but with all the menu options changed so that you can't find what you're wanting to do anymore... :(
Seems you had about a 1 in mod 7 chance! I’m so entertained by this, and expect these days it’ll be a bit more complex, likely requiring crypto computations to identify if the key can be legit created by a private key used, but the funnier thought is that may not be the case.
@@strictnonconformist7369 1 in mod 7? you mean 1 in 7? Also technically it's slightly less than that since 333, 444, ... 888, and 999 don't work. So instead of 1/7, it's 992/6951. Or to put it another way, instead of a 14.285714% chance, it's a 14.271327866494029636023593727521219968349877715436627823334771975255358941159545389152639907926916990361099122428427564379226010645950222989497913969213062868651992519062005466839303697309739605812113364983455617896705509998561358077974392173787944180693425406416342972234210904905768954107322687383110343835419364120270464681340814%. Insteringly, both of those 14% numbers' decimals are repeating, starting at the beggining. The longer number has 330 digits that repeat. Btw the 992/6951 came from 1/7 * (1-1/(1000-7)). the 1000 came from how many 3 digit numbers there are, and the -7 came from excluding 333, 444.... 999. You want more math? Ok then. Those two decimal numbers are off by 0.10070493454179254783484390735146022155085599194360523665659617321248741188318227593152064451158106747230614300% (repeated again, 110 decimal digits), also known as 1/993. 993 being one more than the 992 from earlier. edit: oh and that long percentage chance, it's a 1/7.00705645161290322580 chance, although only the last 15 digits there (the numbers after 705) are repeated
About 25 years ago my uncle lent me a burned copy of the windows 95 installer which had a portion of the license key on it but I had to call him to call him to ask what the rest of the code was. He said to enter all 1's. I did and it worked.
The "digit sum divisible by 7" thing also worked for Office 97. Pretty much everyone I knew hat 0401-1111111 as a key back in the day. I wouldn't be surprised if the initial part was also jsut checked against a short blacklist. (I never tried back then).
I believe that the OEM format is DATE-OEM-[OEM ID]-NUMBER. Essentially, an OEM could have generated a batch of keys, and the day would ensure that they didn't have to keep a database of all previous keys issued, and they didn't run out after 100000 computers.
@@J_i_m_ Well, remember Steve Jobs saying the Mac would never need more than 128Kb of ram. What a slug the original Mac was. (I did a major term paper using write soon after the machine came out. While it turned out looking fantastic, it was a pain to write it on a single disk drive mac...)
Someone reverse-engineered the “PAK” (“Product Authorization Key”) algorithm that DEC introduced for its VMS OS about a decade before this, and even that is more complicated. It involves CRC-32, some bit-swizzling, and something called a “Purdy hash”. Of course, it is not so easy to deduce any date information just from looking at the resulting key. Microsoft: “26 drive letters ought to be enough for anybody!” (Oh, and the mastermind behind VMS went to work at Microsoft a few years after this, where he was responsible for ... Windows NT.)
@@lawrencedoliveiro9104 Even Nintendo 8bit games had stronger security for their game level passwords, than what Microsoft had for Windows. :D Most games used encrypted and checksummed passwords.
Quake 3 simply has a set of acceptable characters. It accepts any combination of acceptable characters. I remember astonishing some people at LAN parties by entering a bunch of "G" letters as my serial key.
The old Half-life also accepts the CD-Key if you type the number "3" 13 times... Obviously it didn't work to play on-line since the authentication servers refused that Key, so it just worked to play the game off-line or in LAN servers.
I think with insanely cheap Windows 8 upgrade you could do something similar. Install the software without a Product Key as an inactivated version. And then repeat the install to “upgrade” to the full version.
Wait. It doesn't check for identical keys in the connected games? I got another one: C&C3 checks for the disk when starting the game. But only when starting it, after the game is running you can hand it over to the next guiy
@@HappyBeezerStudios security is always a tradeoff between costs of complexity for legit users versus getting in the way of those they’re trying to protect against: either extreme is typically undesired. A car door lock only ever keeps out those that don’t want to take the risks of getting caught breaking into a car: anyone can get into a car with enough effort.
I've 2 considerations: - in the worst scenario, I can try random sequences and get a valid key after 7 attempts - nowadays this would sound ridiculous, but in '95 the Internet wasn't so much widespread, so if someone found the trick, it had to spread only with word of mouth
I remember getting my hands on Corel Draw 4 (I think) disks back in the 90s. Running the install, it would immediately ask for a license key. It said the license key will look like this example and would be on the license certificate. Unfortunately, I didnt have the license key certificate. I remember throwing random letters and numbers at it for a while and got nowhere. Then I thought, what if I use the example they show. Of course that wouldnt work. Why would they try to prevent piracy with a license key, yet give everyone who copied the floppies a valid key? I typed in the example license key... It worked. It was both amazing and sad.
There was an urban legend during the AOL days that all shareware distributed had to have a valid unlock code somewhere in case it had a nefarious payload. The first program I tried I for some reason tried the zip code on the dialogue box. It accepted it. Only time my 1337 skillz ‘cracked’ anything !
I remember back in the days I managed to crack the encryption for excel password protected files. Another juvenile algorithm. It seems that back in those days security was not a priority
In case of software licenses, I guess, partly because it wasn't as easy to obtain the distribution itself. Also, there was no telemetry, so no piracy statistics.
Excel (and other Office programs) allowed you to write scripts / macros in VBA language (Visual Basic for applications). You could set a script to be run upon document open and it would run even if you didn't know the password. In that moment I realized that the password is not protection (encryption) but just obfuscation.
@@pugh.josephecurity through obscurity is like this: You have a big doorway leading into your house. You know it's there, but you never close it, because your house is a little off the beaten path. You figure that any burglars will only strike populated cities and just not care enough to notice. And maybe you're right. But if one *does* happen by your house, and sees that door still wide open... you wouldn't exactly get much sympathy for having your house ransacked because you _could_ have at least taken basic security measures. You just didn't, because you were so confident that it would never happen to you.
I was always told by IT techs that the 1s codes was for system and network technicians to save time when installing multiple copies on a network or computer lab. As they didn’t need to be checked for activation online like modern windows, and the institution would have a site licence. I heard it so much in the late 90s that I wonder if rather than being by design, Microsoft sales and after sales got wind of it and told IT techs this when they had issues.
Well, you have to balance the key algorithm complexity vs the number of the product that you are expected to sell. You can't choose too restrictive of an algorithm, otherwise it would not support the needed number of unique keys... The good thing about having the key validation algorithm built into the software like back then was that you could buy the software and use it without ever having to contact Microsoft to verify the serial number... At some point, they changed it to needing an internet connection and they use that to validate the key and whether they key has been previously used... And then there was that obnoxious bit where the O/S might decide to quit working because you upgraded the hardware enough on your machine that it thought you were using it on a new machine... When I buy a piece of software, I want to be able to use it on however many machines I might own since I'm only using them one at a time... These days, I've switched to Linux for most of my home PCs, but there's still two PCs that can boot Windoze for software that does not have a acceptable Linux replacement...
The Win9x login login was just for show, like the whole "user" system, as there was nothing actually protecting anyone from opening another user's stuff IIRC.
RUclips's algorithm truly is amazing. I remember watching this video a while ago. I since switched accounts and watched maybe 100 videos on the new one. Apparently enough for RUclips to (correctly) guess that out of billions of videos out there, this one suits me.
well think about how long the install would be if it had a more complex check then just if it is divided by 7 with 0 left over it is valid. One a 133MHz CPU which was common to have back then it already took hours now if you had a complex key that was hard to crack due to the math behind it was more than just 1 math symbol then done it would take more than the minute it already took to get past there. Newer computers while it is a cloud key check not a local key but in the 1990s requiring your user to have the internet was not a good business plan for mass adoption. Apple was still trying to over take them at only 30% of the market for Apple back then too. win95 kind of took the market share away from apple. Windows never gave it back either.
@@radiance8940 i agree it would have been easy to have a better checksum but we don't know what the actual math the system did is we just saw the simplified version of it.
@@yumri4 they could have absolutely used PKI in using a private key to encode a number of digit combinations, and included a public key on the CD to see if it made sense, it would almost certainly have required a much longer serial number, which would have been more user-hostile by a lot, but it’d not be any problem to compute the check on any machine, and no network access required if done this way. Eventually people determined to do so will just tell others “hey, this key works, have fun!” even if nobody ever traces through the OS binary to reverse-engineer how it works. Not being able to depend on network access definitely limits any ability to enforce a key is only used once, and mass production CDs also are static, with each unique printing costing more than a single mass production run: I worked in the CD production plant where they were manufactured, in CD-ROM premastering.
me getting angry at the windows 95 pc because I need a key but i don't have one me: *slams head on keyboard* windows 98: yes correct key also me: *confused*
@@ishid_anfarded_king I remember working for a company that had old, legacy, *obsolete* software. I immediately wondered "wth? Piracy on obsolete software - with inspectors 'round the corner - how idiot can one be?" (Yeah, we dumped the whole thing...what else should we have done anyway...?)
Haha I almost didnt remember this, but 1111111111 was what i tried as a kid without any knowledge :D the point that i got reinstalled our family pc with 7 years accidentally was a huge pain for my parents... the pc was present of my uncle but after all it went well and since that time I'm always hungry for knowledge! Nice video, great to follow through
For either MSWin95 or MSWin98 I remember there being a simple hack (two edits readily done with "debug") that would cause the setup command to skip the key check altogether, and you could type whatever you wanted. What you had to do was exit the setup when it asked for the key, go into DOS mode and edit the dll, then reboot and let it continue. Or if you were building your own installer CD, you'd extract and pre-edit the appropriate DLL and have it in the installer directory.
About a decade ago, I was playing with a piece of software that my company owned a license to and figured out their method of checking serial numbers was simply if you entered exactly 13 numbers, it was accepted. It would allow you to enter as many numbers as you want, but any more or less, it would not accept. Exactly 13 was the right amount. I don't remember how I discovered this, but I did.
I can remember the all 1s key being fairly common knowledge in the 90s, at least around here, though the divisibility by 7 (among other things) wasn’t as known. Changing the last digit to a 2 worked for something else from that era (Office? OSR2? Win98?) but I forget which. Thankfully nowadays, I’ve acquired numerous CDs from this era with their product keys intact as throwaways (sometimes not even opened!) Acquiring old software and hardware has always been one of many perks of being in I.T.
Original StarCraft had a 1234567890123 key. I remember having entered it by accident because I was too lazy to look up the actual key. Not really sure what I was expecting to happen, but I certainly didn't expect it to work. XD. They probably used a hashtable, or something like it, and that key was just used for testing and not taken out. I doubt a lot of people used algebraic key checks. Such approaches are either so secure you can't generate your own keys, or they are completely useless, as is the case with W95. In contrast, a hash table with a good cypher can be made arbitrarily secure.
The first game I did this with was Sims 3. I lost the game case, but figured out that a certain set of keys works. You can even put those CD keys directly into EA Origin and get Sims 3 for free, as this was before internet validation of CD keys. That's how I got the digital version of it ~2-3 years ago. Unfortunately nowadays keys are created, registered, and validated by servers so you can't use duplicate keys, or make ones up.
At the time, I was under the impression that MS was practically giving win95 away with the easily-cracked serial number because they want more people to use it.
@@thepwrtank18 there are videos of some people in Microsoft explaining why piracy was beneficial to them. I am not sure if it was intended people, thought, there are very clever people out there, but some times they just do things with other intention, then it works and suddenly you can create a story of how succesful and brilliant you were. Specially some managers are expert on this.
Through nineties till mid-2000ies Microsoft raked money with large shovels. Profit from enterprise realm was more than enough to not care about petty piracy between home users and occasional small busineses. It was up to local anti-piracy agencies who in some countries (Germany, ahem) tried to be more saint that Papa. Easy entry in MS software realm via piracy indeed was a thing and I believe that MS deliberately exploited that.
They gave free updates to everyone from Win 7 to Win 10. It's pretty common knowledge that they don't make money from individuals like you and me. They make money from corporations that actually have to buy licenses.
You can install Windows versions that ask for the key after copying the files without any valid key. You only have to start in safe mode after the files are copied (or when he asks for the serial number you hit restart and then boot into safe mode) In safe mode you can start the registry Editor, look for the registry that contains the serial number (it is empty when you look for it), type any number you want to, safe that entry, restart and after restart the setup skips the serial key procedure and will continue setup by looking for non pnp capable Hardware. Tested with windows 98se but might work with Windows ME as well.
@@jaaplallie there will be a quantum ai validation and today's Technique will be easily broken Below 1 second. Side info, also there will be no need for humans
@@robertmazurowski5974 still waiting for the hoverboards and flying car conversion kits that were promised for 2k15. Lets just wait and see what the future will bring 😉
Back in the day this was used, the people weren't as aggressive at stealing as they are these days. And without a fast internet connection, people didn't have as much a chance to break these things. If they did, this would have been broken within a day or so. Dave Plummer, the guy that designed this has an interesting channel called 'Dave's Garage', where he talks about his time at Microsoft.
With Win98, you could reboot it into the safe mode when it wanted the key, then fill in anything in its place in the registry, then reboot normally and the setup would always accept it and not ask for a proper number!
I wonder if this would be possible with later versions of Windows since I know you can script the start up and registration with a certain type of server whose name is escaping me at the moment.
@@traugdor Nope, they tie it down more with every release. With Windows 10, it automatically deletes cracks even on network shares even if you disable the antivirus.
@@zwz.zdenek it wipes anything it thinks is even closely related to a crack (without notifying you) even just plugging your USB drive into your buddies WIN10 computer it gets wiped.... ask me how I know. It is in the TOU when you install
I found out about this during the time period, just by sheer accident. Went back and did another install just to be sure. And sure enough, it worked! Really interesting stuff
A more important question; why did my copy of windows 95 OSR2 accept the serial key from an OEM copy of some random Scooby Doo game that came with my Gateway computer?
i remember that, did use that when we had to install lots of pc's back in the day. it did work with office97 too and with win98 and or win2000 and maybe with other ms soft too from the time period. not the same key ofcourse but there was a similar simple key that was very easy to remember.
I was working in IT during win95/NT 4 rollout, and we all assumed the 111-1111111 was so IT teams could reinstall users’ 95 easily if they needed to, lol. Interesting there was actually a real reason.
boss: bob, bill said we need to implement a check on input serial numbers. bob: why? it doesn't mean anything, since we require the installation to verify the serial key anyway when they come for updates. boss: bob, I'm not the boss, bill said we need to have a check, get it done! so bob got it done expending least amount of effort possible...
Looking at the OEM keys, could the first 3 digits be the day the key was generated? In a leap year there are 366 days. In combination with the next two digits being the year, it does have a certain logic to it
Interesting! I remember a while back I tried installing Monster Truck Madness with Gex’s product key, and it accepted it. I assume that a lot of Microsoft’s products from around that era use the same algorithm shown in this video then.
I remember Win98 had a weird key where every symbol is just a Z. Doing this caused it to simply cancel the installation progress, so on next reboot you had a half working Win98 (without any start menu entries, ...). Would be interesting to know what all this is about.
Yep I remember this was spread around a lot very quickly when win95 came out. I mentioned it to somebody on IRC and a guy messaged me and ripped into me for it. Only boxed copy of Windows I ever legit bought ironically :)
Man I wish I had known this back when I worked in IT. The amount of times I had to do Windows 95 reinstalls. I did it that many times, I memorised our key - which I can still remember to this day. 14195-0012155-55595 (OEM key). I also still know the barcode for a Cadbury Creme Egg as they wouldn't scan at the register when I worked in a grocery store. 5020-1600
@@thepwrtank18 yeah but they are still validated on the clint side first. Its only validated online when you have a connection, so theres still a chance that there are some conditions in the validation process that may be interesting.
2:03 Summing up the digits of a base-10 integer actually gives you the remainder on division by 9. So the valid keys have a remainder of 7 on division by 9.
back in the 90s, when I was a kid, when our 486 PC was in need of reinstallation, friend of my father would come to our house with a bunch of 1.44 disquettes with windows 95 installation, and he always had some install keys with him, written on a paper, some complex ones :)))
btw the all 1's key was the microsoft presentation and trade show key ... it did limit some of what windows could do BUT it allowed it to be shown in a presentation with internal loopback ... later a patch added net access to the key and it became a full use key ... old school windows users and beta testers used that key to install beta versions to test ... I used to do it all the time .
Except there's no functions to check for a specific key. It's valid because the first three digits aren't on the blacklist and the sum of the seven digits is divisible by 7.
I once found out how simple this algorithm is, and a friend and I used it to generate all valid windows 95 keys. it took up 10 gb uncompressed (200 mb when compressed)
My guess is that they allowed 111-1111111 to be a valid key throughout testing and then forgot to make it unvaldid. And by adding the feature that allowed 111-1111111 it automatically allowed these other valid simple keys aswell.
When they were narrating they probably improvised some small details to sound better, or just forgot the exact words and didn't bother to re-record because it didn't affect the meaning of the sentence. Then, they copied and pasted the original script into the subtitles when they uploaded it.
It was a valid code for a *LOT* of games too, even allowing you to enter into dev mode for certain ones, because that's the key the devs used to test the game
![I.N "HALLUCINATION" | [Stray Kids : SKZ-PLAYER]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/n5B5q1Hwt_U/mqdefault.jpg)
You should have uploaded this a 25 years ago
I did, my 9k6 line was just slow :(
yes, as a youtube95.com owner i can tell he really did have an account and had uploaded some troubleshooting inatructions.
@@strangedude9008 Your site is down.
He did. It just finished uploading this year
@@jarod1701 It's a joke link relating to the fact RUclips didn't exist in 1995.
Sweet! Now I can finally finish installing win95 after all these years! Minesweeper, here I come!
@Marcus Mysteriously New? Minesweeper on win 95 rocks!
Yeah, and Windows 10 doesn’t even come with Pinball. Worst OS ever.
Oh the memories
Winæro is pretty cools softtwaee
ah yeah, i remember win95 - the last one where mode 13 int 10 was possible
It’s funny that they manually blacklisted 333-999 while all 0 or all 1 is much more likely to be the first thing someone would randomly try. I wonder what they were trying to accomplish...
security by intimidation
increasing the user base with weak keys
Well I think they weren't trying to use it the way most think. Just for support purposes, if you bought a Compaq with preinstalled 95 you would need to call Compaq for support. If you called Microsoft and provided them with your Product ID they would instantly see that you are not eligible for support. Same goes for OEM versions you bought elsewhere. It's not the software they're protecting, it's the support.
@@gentuxable Did Microsoft seriously ever support end customers? I guess Indian fake callcenters are doing that much better.
@@mrechbreger They do. I got my key replaced with working one, because there were issues with upgrading from 8.1 to 10.
Wow, that's really interesting. I remember in NT4 days we'd install the entire computer lab with 111-1111111 serial key. Never thought to ask why it was valid or what was valid. Total blast from the past to find out that serial keys through at least win95 were.... basically pointless.
This is what happens when legitimate way is too cumbersome - people will pirate even if they bought the thing to escape lots of meaningless manual work.
Back then you couldn't even save a password with more than 8 characters. Seriously. I complained to a provider. They didn't change anything. They left it at 8 characters. The national provider for British internet. Obviously they preferred it that way.
Alright then, I'll upgrade from invalid Windows 10 to this legit Windows 95.
Edit: Wow, 1.8k likes. No way. Thanks people! I have now resolved my invalid key issue.
Probably *is* an upgrade
@@MadScientist267 He he.
It's gonna be 9.5 times better!
I like how he said "upgrade"
I think Win2K was probably the best version of Windoze... It wasn't that bloated back then, but it seems to have gone downhill since then... All too often though a "new version" is just seems to be a repackaging of the previous version, but with all the menu options changed so that you can't find what you're wanting to do anymore... :(
sounds like someone did the windows key security check one friday night overtime unpaid
Or 10 mins to end of shift. And on a promise 😉
@@dogwalker666 manager: "make sure you finish that key validation before you clock out"
@@llVIU ha ha yup!
@@llVIU *that guy half way home*
"Ah fuck i forgot"
i think it’s technically easier to forget about mistakes the stupider they are
That's amazing, it seems easier to guess correct keys than to find incorrect ones!
Seems you had about a 1 in mod 7 chance!
I’m so entertained by this, and expect these days it’ll be a bit more complex, likely requiring crypto computations to identify if the key can be legit created by a private key used, but the funnier thought is that may not be the case.
@@strictnonconformist7369 1 in mod 7? you mean 1 in 7? Also technically it's slightly less than that since 333, 444, ... 888, and 999 don't work. So instead of 1/7, it's 992/6951. Or to put it another way, instead of a 14.285714% chance, it's a 14.271327866494029636023593727521219968349877715436627823334771975255358941159545389152639907926916990361099122428427564379226010645950222989497913969213062868651992519062005466839303697309739605812113364983455617896705509998561358077974392173787944180693425406416342972234210904905768954107322687383110343835419364120270464681340814%. Insteringly, both of those 14% numbers' decimals are repeating, starting at the beggining. The longer number has 330 digits that repeat.
Btw the 992/6951 came from 1/7 * (1-1/(1000-7)). the 1000 came from how many 3 digit numbers there are, and the -7 came from excluding 333, 444.... 999.
You want more math? Ok then. Those two decimal numbers are off by 0.10070493454179254783484390735146022155085599194360523665659617321248741188318227593152064451158106747230614300% (repeated again, 110 decimal digits), also known as 1/993. 993 being one more than the 992 from earlier.
edit: oh and that long percentage chance, it's a 1/7.00705645161290322580 chance, although only the last 15 digits there (the numbers after 705) are repeated
@@baraka629 dont you also get less features and denied support?
@@pugh.joseph Oh yeah, the legendary windows tech support we all know, love, and rely upon.
@@lambdaman3228 alright, good point 😅
NEXT VIDEOS : WHY AAAAA-AAAAA-AAAAA-AAAAA-AAAAA is a valid Counter-Strike 1.6 key
Everyone is guarding B
Nah it should be Door-stuck-door-stuck-pls-i-beg-you is the valid key
@@npcraywar2907DOOR1-STUCK-PLEAS-IBEGU-DILIH
@@HaukeHaien Where is your P90?
Actually a good idea lmao
About 25 years ago my uncle lent me a burned copy of the windows 95 installer which had a portion of the license key on it but I had to call him to call him to ask what the rest of the code was. He said to enter all 1's. I did and it worked.
The "digit sum divisible by 7" thing also worked for Office 97. Pretty much everyone I knew hat 0401-1111111 as a key back in the day. I wouldn't be surprised if the initial part was also jsut checked against a short blacklist. (I never tried back then).
imagine the poor guy with that telephone number
@@HappyBeezerStudios Back in '95 that 0 in front of the number would have just called the operator.
I believe that the OEM format is DATE-OEM-[OEM ID]-NUMBER.
Essentially, an OEM could have generated a batch of keys, and the day would ensure that they didn't have to keep a database of all previous keys issued, and they didn't run out after 100000 computers.
Ah interesting, I didn’t think about that! Should be easy to confirm with two keys from the same ODM, might have to do some digging
Probably... as that database wouldn't fit in Bill Gates' computer which has only 640K of ram :)
@@J_i_m_ Well, remember Steve Jobs saying the Mac would never need more than 128Kb of ram. What a slug the original Mac was. (I did a major term paper using write soon after the machine came out. While it turned out looking fantastic, it was a pain to write it on a single disk drive mac...)
Someone reverse-engineered the “PAK” (“Product Authorization Key”) algorithm that DEC introduced for its VMS OS about a decade before this, and even that is more complicated. It involves CRC-32, some bit-swizzling, and something called a “Purdy hash”. Of course, it is not so easy to deduce any date information just from looking at the resulting key.
Microsoft: “26 drive letters ought to be enough for anybody!”
(Oh, and the mastermind behind VMS went to work at Microsoft a few years after this, where he was responsible for ... Windows NT.)
@@lawrencedoliveiro9104 Even Nintendo 8bit games had stronger security for their game level passwords, than what Microsoft had for Windows. :D Most games used encrypted and checksummed passwords.
Quake 3 simply has a set of acceptable characters. It accepts any combination of acceptable characters. I remember astonishing some people at LAN parties by entering a bunch of "G" letters as my serial key.
I remember using all A's.
The old Half-life also accepts the CD-Key if you type the number "3" 13 times... Obviously it didn't work to play on-line since the authentication servers refused that Key, so it just worked to play the game off-line or in LAN servers.
@@MCA0090 ironic...
@@MCA0090 I used 1234-12345-1234 (or something *very* similar to that) and it always worked for online/LAN.
All 7's for me.
Your videos keep getting better, keep it up!
Thank you!
Thank you for activating my Win95 VM!
Another fun thing is being able to point the upgrade validator at its own installation CD as proof of existing product ownership. :-)
Seriously? How did I never stumble across that?
thats fking amazing how have I never heard that lol
I think with insanely cheap Windows 8 upgrade you could do something similar. Install the software without a Product Key as an inactivated version. And then repeat the install to “upgrade” to the full version.
i remember that „jjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjj“ was a valid quake3 key ;)
same with half life and "aaaaaaaaaaaa" i can't remember how many digits
Brah you don't need to type the Q3 code. It just works
emabrace t h e *J*
@@mrylmz7754 valve and 3? Yeah right :D
Autodesk: 666-69696969
Been waiting for this for 25 years
Jonesing to upgrade from windows 3.1 eh?
For the og Starcraft release you were able to get past the cd key entry filling it with 3’s. Saved many a lan party...
Wait. It doesn't check for identical keys in the connected games?
I got another one: C&C3 checks for the disk when starting the game. But only when starting it, after the game is running you can hand it over to the next guiy
@@HappyBeezerStudios security is always a tradeoff between costs of complexity for legit users versus getting in the way of those they’re trying to protect against: either extreme is typically undesired.
A car door lock only ever keeps out those that don’t want to take the risks of getting caught breaking into a car: anyone can get into a car with enough effort.
I've 2 considerations:
- in the worst scenario, I can try random sequences and get a valid key after 7 attempts
- nowadays this would sound ridiculous, but in '95 the Internet wasn't so much widespread, so if someone found the trick, it had to spread only with word of mouth
Ok grandpa, let's get you back to bed.
@@n646n 😂😂🤣🤣
You forgot about USENET and other BBSes
you could do the same with office back in the day so it was know and shared at the time. Always used 0's and a 7 on the end.
IRC was the social media then.😉
today only the hardcore hackers use it for risky information
I remember getting my hands on Corel Draw 4 (I think) disks back in the 90s. Running the install, it would immediately ask for a license key. It said the license key will look like this example and would be on the license certificate. Unfortunately, I didnt have the license key certificate. I remember throwing random letters and numbers at it for a while and got nowhere. Then I thought, what if I use the example they show. Of course that wouldnt work. Why would they try to prevent piracy with a license key, yet give everyone who copied the floppies a valid key? I typed in the example license key... It worked. It was both amazing and sad.
There was an urban legend during the AOL days that all shareware distributed had to have a valid unlock code somewhere in case it had a nefarious payload. The first program I tried I for some reason tried the zip code on the dialogue box. It accepted it. Only time my 1337 skillz ‘cracked’ anything !
ahh the days before online key validation
YO A LITTLE HELP HERE?
stand back son
1 1 1 uhhh 1111111
Ah, tf2 reference
The brief case is still here
It’s an older joke sir, but it checks out.
@@generalralph6291 old but gold, bro
nice to see a tf2 refrence
I remember back in the days I managed to crack the encryption for excel password protected files. Another juvenile algorithm. It seems that back in those days security was not a priority
In case of software licenses, I guess, partly because it wasn't as easy to obtain the distribution itself. Also, there was no telemetry, so no piracy statistics.
Excel (and other Office programs) allowed you to write scripts / macros in VBA language (Visual Basic for applications). You could set a script to be run upon document open and it would run even if you didn't know the password. In that moment I realized that the password is not protection (encryption) but just obfuscation.
U can remove the password edition protection from office files woth 7zip
That is to a point true with all software back in the day. Operating systems such as Android and iOS has security as a priority from the beginning.
People today pay 35 bucks or more in labor to install RAM. I dont think they really are worried about making security an issue :-)
If anyone asks me why security through obscurity is bad, i'll just send them this video
This is security through bluffing.
But it did work
You seem to be assuming that you know what the threat model was.
Why is security through obscurity bad?
@@pugh.josephecurity through obscurity is like this: You have a big doorway leading into your house. You know it's there, but you never close it, because your house is a little off the beaten path. You figure that any burglars will only strike populated cities and just not care enough to notice. And maybe you're right. But if one *does* happen by your house, and sees that door still wide open... you wouldn't exactly get much sympathy for having your house ransacked because you _could_ have at least taken basic security measures. You just didn't, because you were so confident that it would never happen to you.
I was always told by IT techs that the 1s codes was for system and network technicians to save time when installing multiple copies on a network or computer lab. As they didn’t need to be checked for activation online like modern windows, and the institution would have a site licence.
I heard it so much in the late 90s that I wonder if rather than being by design, Microsoft sales and after sales got wind of it and told IT techs this when they had issues.
Lol someone said "fuck it, it's friday afternoon, this'll do!"
Nah just Microsoft saying let's screw the public by thinking we did some work... and charge them 200 bucks
Well, you have to balance the key algorithm complexity vs the number of the product that you are expected to sell. You can't choose too restrictive of an algorithm, otherwise it would not support the needed number of unique keys... The good thing about having the key validation algorithm built into the software like back then was that you could buy the software and use it without ever having to contact Microsoft to verify the serial number... At some point, they changed it to needing an internet connection and they use that to validate the key and whether they key has been previously used... And then there was that obnoxious bit where the O/S might decide to quit working because you upgraded the hardware enough on your machine that it thought you were using it on a new machine... When I buy a piece of software, I want to be able to use it on however many machines I might own since I'm only using them one at a time... These days, I've switched to Linux for most of my home PCs, but there's still two PCs that can boot Windoze for software that does not have a acceptable Linux replacement...
everyone: serial key
me: cereal key
Primary keys - Organic milk and quality sugar.🙂
Press escape to bypass the login
And other "late to the party" stories
The Win9x login login was just for show, like the whole "user" system, as there was nothing actually protecting anyone from opening another user's stuff IIRC.
I'd heard of Ghidra before, but now I know I really need to check it out. This is super cool.
I used to love guessing at CD keys just to feel like an elite haxor and this would've been a power fantasy.
RUclips's algorithm truly is amazing. I remember watching this video a while ago. I since switched accounts and watched maybe 100 videos on the new one. Apparently enough for RUclips to (correctly) guess that out of billions of videos out there, this one suits me.
I used this serial number at that time but wow ! I never thaught that the serial number check was so trivial ! 😲
well think about how long the install would be if it had a more complex check then just if it is divided by 7 with 0 left over it is valid. One a 133MHz CPU which was common to have back then it already took hours now if you had a complex key that was hard to crack due to the math behind it was more than just 1 math symbol then done it would take more than the minute it already took to get past there. Newer computers while it is a cloud key check not a local key but in the 1990s requiring your user to have the internet was not a good business plan for mass adoption. Apple was still trying to over take them at only 30% of the market for Apple back then too. win95 kind of took the market share away from apple. Windows never gave it back either.
@@yumri4 regardless of that it would still be very easy to have better rules for the key to make it harder to crack
@@radiance8940 i agree it would have been easy to have a better checksum but we don't know what the actual math the system did is we just saw the simplified version of it.
@@yumri4 they could have absolutely used PKI in using a private key to encode a number of digit combinations, and included a public key on the CD to see if it made sense, it would almost certainly have required a much longer serial number, which would have been more user-hostile by a lot, but it’d not be any problem to compute the check on any machine, and no network access required if done this way.
Eventually people determined to do so will just tell others “hey, this key works, have fun!” even if nobody ever traces through the OS binary to reverse-engineer how it works. Not being able to depend on network access definitely limits any ability to enforce a key is only used once, and mass production CDs also are static, with each unique printing costing more than a single mass production run: I worked in the CD production plant where they were manufactured, in CD-ROM premastering.
me getting angry at the windows 95 pc because I need a key but i don't have one
me: *slams head on keyboard*
windows 98: yes correct key
also me: *confused*
I'd be confused too if slamming my head on the keyboard changed my operating system
@@chuckleshelicopterwigwamjo7315 lmao
LOL :D
@@chuckleshelicopterwigwamjo7315 lmao
@@chuckleshelicopterwigwamjo7315 Best comment i have read all day.
Microsoft: *Forbids Decompiling and Reverse Engeneering of their OS*
Stacksmashing: HOLD MY BEER!!!
probably due to stupid legacy mistakes like the video showed
@@ishid_anfarded_king unless it blow up and goes viral probably not
Ukraine/Russia: your powers are useless here...
@@ishid_anfarded_king I remember working for a company that had old, legacy, *obsolete* software. I immediately wondered "wth? Piracy on obsolete software - with inspectors 'round the corner - how idiot can one be?"
(Yeah, we dumped the whole thing...what else should we have done anyway...?)
I have no idea why thus was in my recommendation but since I’m here, bro ur too smart for YT
A modern-day warrior
Mean, mean stride
Today's 0:12
Mean, mean pride
Haha I almost didnt remember this, but 1111111111 was what i tried as a kid without any knowledge :D
the point that i got reinstalled our family pc with 7 years accidentally was a huge pain for my parents... the pc was present of my uncle
but after all it went well and since that time I'm always hungry for knowledge!
Nice video, great to follow through
Funny you talk about "7 years" despite mostly about the video is about 7.
And I actually read this comment 7 hours later.
???
@@Trimint123 I almost give you a like but I realize that you have 7.
@@giatu1 samee
This video must've been such an awesome realization for you. It already was from me and I've never seen a computer on W95 before
For either MSWin95 or MSWin98 I remember there being a simple hack (two edits readily done with "debug") that would cause the setup command to skip the key check altogether, and you could type whatever you wanted. What you had to do was exit the setup when it asked for the key, go into DOS mode and edit the dll, then reboot and let it continue. Or if you were building your own installer CD, you'd extract and pre-edit the appropriate DLL and have it in the installer directory.
Wow, I remember typing carefully the entire string from the booklet so I don’t make a mistake when I can just type some stuff and get it working
Next video: upgrade this installation to a licensed Windows 10 Pro.
lol
And upgraded Windows 10 must work on Pentium 166 MMX with 32 MB RAM.
About a decade ago, I was playing with a piece of software that my company owned a license to and figured out their method of checking serial numbers was simply if you entered exactly 13 numbers, it was accepted. It would allow you to enter as many numbers as you want, but any more or less, it would not accept. Exactly 13 was the right amount. I don't remember how I discovered this, but I did.
so 12 wouldnt work but 13 did?
@@TheWieger01 Yes, any combination of numbers would work as long as they were exactly 13 of them.
@@ralphwiggum3134Are you sure you need exactly 13?
Thanks for the Subtitle, it's useful for me!
Perfect, glad they are helpful!
I can remember the all 1s key being fairly common knowledge in the 90s, at least around here, though the divisibility by 7 (among other things) wasn’t as known. Changing the last digit to a 2 worked for something else from that era (Office? OSR2? Win98?) but I forget which.
Thankfully nowadays, I’ve acquired numerous CDs from this era with their product keys intact as throwaways (sometimes not even opened!) Acquiring old software and hardware has always been one of many perks of being in I.T.
Corel draw 7 had 111111111...1112 (don't remember how many ones there was, actually. Just type them all and replace the last one with 2.
Windows 98 had the 1112-1111111 key
@@squiddardmusic Just got a Win 98 Ce in the mail today, might be worth having a look at!
after 10 seconds me thinking: probably accepting every prime number
Original StarCraft had a 1234567890123 key. I remember having entered it by accident because I was too lazy to look up the actual key. Not really sure what I was expecting to happen, but I certainly didn't expect it to work. XD. They probably used a hashtable, or something like it, and that key was just used for testing and not taken out. I doubt a lot of people used algebraic key checks. Such approaches are either so secure you can't generate your own keys, or they are completely useless, as is the case with W95. In contrast, a hash table with a good cypher can be made arbitrarily secure.
id be curious to see the actual algorithm used back then
@@viper440 uint_64 default_key = 1234567890123; if(key == default_key) return true;
wish I knew this years back when I lost my jewel case w/ the ley
The first game I did this with was Sims 3. I lost the game case, but figured out that a certain set of keys works. You can even put those CD keys directly into EA Origin and get Sims 3 for free, as this was before internet validation of CD keys. That's how I got the digital version of it ~2-3 years ago.
Unfortunately nowadays keys are created, registered, and validated by servers so you can't use duplicate keys, or make ones up.
hash... function?
hash table doesn't filter...
You guys are so good at recalling what I just saw in the video. Good job!
At the time, I was under the impression that MS was practically giving win95 away with the easily-cracked serial number because they want more people to use it.
That's what they do today, they give Windows 10 and 11 out for free to get people in
@@thepwrtank18 there are videos of some people in Microsoft explaining why piracy was beneficial to them. I am not sure if it was intended people, thought, there are very clever people out there, but some times they just do things with other intention, then it works and suddenly you can create a story of how succesful and brilliant you were. Specially some managers are expert on this.
Through nineties till mid-2000ies Microsoft raked money with large shovels. Profit from enterprise realm was more than enough to not care about petty piracy between home users and occasional small busineses. It was up to local anti-piracy agencies who in some countries (Germany, ahem) tried to be more saint that Papa. Easy entry in MS software realm via piracy indeed was a thing and I believe that MS deliberately exploited that.
They gave free updates to everyone from Win 7 to Win 10. It's pretty common knowledge that they don't make money from individuals like you and me. They make money from corporations that actually have to buy licenses.
so OWO-0069420 is a valid key, good to know
SUBG0123445 will do it too... ;-)
YOLO0042069 works also
He said it has to be divisible by 7 with no remainders so 69426 for the first and 123459 for the second!
@@davidwilliams1720 u got my typo. thx.
man, this would have been very useful when i never existed
This would have been very useful to me about 25 years ago. Now it’s just fascinating!
You can install Windows versions that ask for the key after copying the files without any valid key. You only have to start in safe mode after the files are copied (or when he asks for the serial number you hit restart and then boot into safe mode) In safe mode you can start the registry Editor, look for the registry that contains the serial number (it is empty when you look for it), type any number you want to, safe that entry, restart and after restart the setup skips the serial key procedure and will continue setup by looking for non pnp capable Hardware. Tested with windows 98se but might work with Windows ME as well.
I randomly guessed 437 (for codepage 437) -0959595 way back and that worked, and now i know why.
Wow, as a software developer i'm am shocked at how dumb this validation is. holy cow
To be fair it was pretty early on in their validation schemes, Windows 3.1 didn't have any at all except to look for a certain name of file from DOS
In 30 years people will probably say the same about current day validation
@@jaaplallie there will be a quantum ai validation and today's Technique will be easily broken Below 1 second. Side info, also there will be no need for humans
@@robertmazurowski5974 still waiting for the hoverboards and flying car conversion kits that were promised for 2k15.
Lets just wait and see what the future will bring 😉
Back in the day this was used, the people weren't as aggressive at stealing as they are these days. And without a fast internet connection, people didn't have as much a chance to break these things. If they did, this would have been broken within a day or so.
Dave Plummer, the guy that designed this has an interesting channel called 'Dave's Garage', where he talks about his time at Microsoft.
Finally I can get my computer activated. This is a relief...
This is amazing. Having someone explain it really helps!
This was enjoyable to watch on a sunny Sunday afternoon :)
I found that key after going to a technet event in the 90’s and the nfr software I got had that key on it :D
Checking for isPrime, bruh thats a lot of work. Better check for %7==0, way easier xD
I remember when I was in college, using NT 4, we always used 111-4111111 I think.
Workstation and server.
NT4 workstatiin didn't use a key
With Win98, you could reboot it into the safe mode when it wanted the key, then fill in anything in its place in the registry, then reboot normally and the setup would always accept it and not ask for a proper number!
I wonder if this would be possible with later versions of Windows since I know you can script the start up and registration with a certain type of server whose name is escaping me at the moment.
@@traugdor Nope, they tie it down more with every release. With Windows 10, it automatically deletes cracks even on network shares even if you disable the antivirus.
@@traugdor a kms server?
@@zwz.zdenek it wipes anything it thinks is even closely related to a crack (without notifying you) even just plugging your USB drive into your buddies WIN10 computer it gets wiped.... ask me how I know. It is in the TOU when you install
@@zwz.zdenek I hardware activated my Windows 10 and the MAS files are still on my desktop. Never been deleted, windows has never deactivated.
This channel has 111k subs at the time of watching this and it makes me very happy
Hahaha, true! That's awesome
I found out about this during the time period, just by sheer accident. Went back and did another install just to be sure. And sure enough, it worked!
Really interesting stuff
A more important question; why did my copy of windows 95 OSR2 accept the serial key from an OEM copy of some random Scooby Doo game that came with my Gateway computer?
Digits 4-10 added up to seven, I guess!
What game
@@DaVince21 I assume you mean 5-11?
@@wta1518 Yes, thanks!
@@wta1518 Common programmatic error, off by one.
i remember that, did use that when we had to install lots of pc's back in the day. it did work with office97 too and with win98 and or win2000 and maybe with other ms soft too from the time period. not the same key ofcourse but there was a similar simple key that was very easy to remember.
I was working in IT during win95/NT 4 rollout, and we all assumed the 111-1111111 was so IT teams could reinstall users’ 95 easily if they needed to, lol. Interesting there was actually a real reason.
Your IT team should've use "YOLO0000000" as reparation key to troll customers.
boss: bob, bill said we need to implement a check on input serial numbers.
bob: why? it doesn't mean anything, since we require the installation to verify the serial key anyway when they come for updates.
boss: bob, I'm not the boss, bill said we need to have a check, get it done!
so bob got it done expending least amount of effort possible...
You just explained how produced keys work and how it doses in windows 95 at the same time. THX
Windows 95 keys were really easy to crack, you could generate your own back in the day with simple maths!
Care to explain?
@@1.8millionvolts87 watch the video.
@@1.8millionvolts87 This video by Flytech Videos explains it pretty well, a lot better than I could ruclips.net/video/3DCEeASKNDk/видео.html
@@waltercomunello121 ahhh sorry mate, was taking a loo back then. so i was just reading the omments lol
So technically 000-0000028 isn't a valid key but 000-0000056 should be?
I reinstalled windows 95 and 98 so many times back in the day i memorized the keys to this day
Same
31097-oem-0026677-61768
XJ8JV-PXGJW-3J38Q-FD49K-RV7BY
Looking at the OEM keys, could the first 3 digits be the day the key was generated? In a leap year there are 366 days. In combination with the next two digits being the year, it does have a certain logic to it
Very informative! love how u decode the serial key algorithm and the use of codebrowser..
Im glad that I just found this awesome channel
Interesting! I remember a while back I tried installing Monster Truck Madness with Gex’s product key, and it accepted it. I assume that a lot of Microsoft’s products from around that era use the same algorithm shown in this video then.
Someone's #1 keyboard button was stuck and 💥 secret revealed 😆
You immediately feel old after realizing it was 25 years ago 😔
His net was slow
That is the most secure way of checking a product key I've ever seen.
i love this kind of channels, thanks YT for the new recomendation
I remember Win98 had a weird key where every symbol is just a Z. Doing this caused it to simply cancel the installation progress, so on next reboot you had a half working Win98 (without any start menu entries, ...). Would be interesting to know what all this is about.
i second this, it sounds like a zombie OS
Win98.exe
It's funny how this guy is checking windows files with an apple product
Yep I remember this was spread around a lot very quickly when win95 came out. I mentioned it to somebody on IRC and a guy messaged me and ripped into me for it. Only boxed copy of Windows I ever legit bought ironically :)
Really good channel! Keep up the good work
Man I wish I had known this back when I worked in IT. The amount of times I had to do Windows 95 reinstalls. I did it that many times, I memorised our key - which I can still remember to this day. 14195-0012155-55595 (OEM key). I also still know the barcode for a Cadbury Creme Egg as they wouldn't scan at the register when I worked in a grocery store. 5020-1600
this key also worked on some other Microsoft products from that era. I think Visual Basic, no idea which version this was. Probably 5 or 6
Visual Studio 6.0 was like this. I remember using all 6's for the serial key.
now im curious.....would it be too much to ask for videos in the 98, ME and maybe NT 2k and XP product keys too?
Fckgw
Yes! Because those were actually made to put off pirates.
Win 10 keys when
XP keys are a lost cause, since that's when Microsoft added online DRM to it
@@thepwrtank18
yeah but they are still validated on the clint side first. Its only validated online when you have a connection, so theres still a chance that there are some conditions in the validation process that may be interesting.
Thanks youtube for recommending this video.
2:03 Summing up the digits of a base-10 integer actually gives you the remainder on division by 9. So the valid keys have a remainder of 7 on division by 9.
back in the 90s, when I was a kid, when our 486 PC was in need of reinstallation, friend of my father would come to our house with a bunch of 1.44 disquettes with windows 95 installation, and he always had some install keys with him, written on a paper, some complex ones :)))
Looks like the RUclips algorithm is doing the thing.
seems like the apprentice did that one :D
Wanna know how flawed it was?
You could close the login screen by clicking the X in the corner and that would send you logged in the admin account.
@Moonwo Yes!! But i believe the "cancel" was removed from 95 SE but the window could still be closed
I loved that at the start when you said “simply entering 10 1’s” you messed up and entered a 0 😆
btw the all 1's key was the microsoft presentation and trade show key ... it did limit some of what windows could do BUT it allowed it to be shown in a presentation with internal loopback ... later a patch added net access to the key and it became a full use key ... old school windows users and beta testers used that key to install beta versions to test ... I used to do it all the time .
Except there's no functions to check for a specific key. It's valid because the first three digits aren't on the blacklist and the sum of the seven digits is divisible by 7.
111-1111111? Hey, that's the combo on my luggage!
I once found out how simple this algorithm is, and a friend and I used it to generate all valid windows 95 keys. it took up 10 gb uncompressed (200 mb when compressed)
My guess is that they allowed 111-1111111 to be a valid key throughout testing and then forgot to make it unvaldid. And by adding the feature that allowed 111-1111111 it automatically allowed these other valid simple keys aswell.
If that were the case, they would have put an == '111-1111111' instead. This system seems to be on purpose.
The moment i saw a command box, i knew this video will be more difficult than bunch of 1s.
2 years layer and still it's a fire video
For some reason, the subtitles say "And funnily enough" while you say "And interestingly" (0:52)
When they were narrating they probably improvised some small details to sound better, or just forgot the exact words and didn't bother to re-record because it didn't affect the meaning of the sentence. Then, they copied and pasted the original script into the subtitles when they uploaded it.
That’s exactly what happened :)
It was a valid code for a *LOT* of games too, even allowing you to enter into dev mode for certain ones, because that's the key the devs used to test the game
yay
more keygen related plz
In some parallel universe, somebody I know will need a windows 95 CD key. I'll tell them to use 111-1111111 and they'll think im a genius.
Who the f*** is giving here thumbs down?? Thanks for this extremely interesting video and your analysis. Greez from CPUGALAXY 👍🏻👍🏻