It's not a new method, but there is a very easy way of getting Windows & a whole host of other application's installation keys & serial numbers from the web.An extremely useful system analysing tool (which I often use myself) displays it's results as an html page and these have been posted on the web by individuals, I assume purposefully. Part of this analysis is the reporting of the actual installation keys and serial numbers. A simple Google search for the application or Windows version and the name of the tool and you have a stack of keys at your disposal, in my case 92 keys for Windows XP Professional to choose from.
I am not one to advocate the piracy of software so I am going to let you readers figure it out how to do this for yourselves.
The thing that interests me is the where & how this information is available. All it took was a simple Google search.
I am no advocate for internet censorship, in fact I have purposefully stayed away from the Bloggers Code of Conduct debate in the hope that it all fades into nothing, but is this something that should be so easy to find through a search engine? Should Google be self censoring? The keys actually show up in the search result, you don't even need to click on the resultant link. Then again, if they start cutting certain pages then where does it stop? Tough one I think. Google in it's quest to do no evil will always have this two-way debate centred around it's search engine. It capitulated when challenged by the almighty Chinese government and took a fair bit of flack for that.
So what should we expect from Google? After all, it's not public service in the true sense, it's a business. It wants, and needs as many searches to be done on it's platform as possible. In order to do that it needs to ensure it's users will have faith that it will supply the result the 'searcher' is looking for.
Somewhere in there is the answer to quandary.
Btw, come back tomorrow for a nifty Firefox add-on that I used for the little graphic above.
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