Microsoft uses cracks/serial/keygen to get software for free

[bloodbob]

Stolen from /.

An anonymous reader writes "German PC-Welt magazine reports that Microsoft used an illegal copy of SoundForge 4.5 (Google translation) for editing Wave files shipped with Windows Media Player. You can check that yourself by opening any file in the [Windows location] \Help\Tours\WindowsMediaPlayer\Audio\Wav\ folder in notepad or other editors of your choice and looking at the last line. There you will find a reference to SoundForge 4.5 and also a user called "Deepz0ne" who happen to be one of the founders of an audio software cracking group called Radium."

http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/11/13/0036243&tid=133&tid=201&tid=109&tid=1

Verified that my files contain the signature.

 

[Vadi]

 

[DemoCoder]

It's more correct to say that a random Microsoft employee did this, not that it is Microsoft policy. That employee probably no longer works there.

This is why some companies snoop on their employees big time, because people do things on their work PCs that can cause serious legal and financial trouble for a company.

I confess to pirating software at my workplace to solve emergency problems where I could not wait for a purchase order to go through normal channels.

 

[RussSchultz]

Or it may be they owned legitimate licenses, but used a cracked copy for ease of use.

 

[cloudscapes]

Or it may be they owned legitimate licenses, but used a cracked copy for ease of use.

Where I used to work, we had legitimate copies of 3DS Max 4.2 but we could not get the legit keys to work for some ungodly foresaken reason. Rather than reformating like what was suggested to us, we went ahead with keygens.