Pirates crack Windows XP Service Pack 1
Microsoft's efforts at making life difficult for pirates of its flagship Windows XP product have been thwarted yet again. One techie site, Tweak Town, put up a downloadable tool and a guide explaining how to get round the 'obstacle' of being prevented from installing the upgrade.

The real problem has been leaked corporate keys that can jus be applied to a standard XP distribution (as opposed to a patched one). These are used by pirates, by what Microsoft terms casual copiers, and by large numbers of techies who want to avoid the hassle of reactivation when they've changed too much hardware.

If Microsoft therefore tightened up on the protection applied to non-corporate copies while doing nothing about the corporate ones, it
could conceivably find itself in the bizarre situation where there were more installations using leaked corporate keys than ones that had
been activated via the approved procedure. It's clearly untenable, so either you pull WPA or you tighten up on corp.