Chairman Meow explained on 06/01/2013 :
On Sun, 06 Jan 2013 12:28:29 -0500, Ron Rosenfeld wrote:

On Sun, 06 Jan 2013 08:13:02 -0800, Chairman Meow
wrote:

They have not implemented these things for a while. There must be some
way for a John Doe OEM Machne maker who buys Joe Bloe MOBO maker's cheap
run MOBO series in M quantities to go in and set these parameters.

I'd bet the main drawback is that each BIOS chip would have to be
individually burned with a unique code block, as opposed to mass burning
a bank of BIOS chips all at one time with the same code. But a modern
flash chip could do both. Burn the base code, and update the S/N later.
but that STILL requires individual chip attention and handling, as well
as the tracking aspect imposed on the maker.

That explains a lot. Even the UUID can, according to some stuff I've read,
change if the MB loses all power (including the battery backup).

I wonder how MS ties an installation to a particular motherboard? Do they
use the machine GUID in the registry? Or something else?


They use the HD UUID and whatever other HW UUIDs they can find and even
S/Ns that get extracted and published via vendor drivers in operation.

I have had to call them in the past after a HW change and rectify my
re-activation.

This is precisely why I use BSNs for locking my software to a machine.
Albeit that it only takes up 1 element in my 4 element MachineID, in
cases where there is no BSN I generate a SHA256 hash value in its
place.

What I'm saying here is that I don't rely on a BSN solely as a
MachineID because of the associated ambiguities. There's enough other
(unambiguous) system info that I use that I can afford to generate my
own BSN where/when necessary.

A license profile has 17 elements. MachineID is only 1 of those. Each
profile element can have as many item elements as I want! That should
give you some indication of the weighted value a BSN has overall!

So, some "found and stored" s/N or ID figure(s) in the registry get
tested, and if they change, the activation gets negated. That way, they
do not have to do any specific phone-home type snooping. The machine has
the engine built in, and then they service the customer with the raised
flag when they call... if they call. Much less labor for them that way.

--
Garry

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