Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ @lemmy.dbzer0.com gemew26 @lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 mo. ago

Have there ever been reports of MAS pirated Windows 10 being unsafe, stealing passwords etc.?

I'm installing windows 10 right now and even though it's not required to activate it, I'd rather do it until I can.

I've googled quite a bit about it and there's no complaints, but I'd like an additional confirmation by the piracy community here.

I appreciate any opinion

16 comments

As long as you are using official Microsoft install media downloaded from Microsoft (or verify the hash to ensure what you downloaded matches the official Microsoft isos) then you should be fine.

MAS is just a PowerShell script you run after install. It's open source, and PowerShell scripts aren't compiled, so you can examine it yourself to see what it's doing. It tricks Microsoft servers into issuing your hardware an official "free upgrade" license key. The one I'm familiar with as reliable is MASgrave.

That's not an 100% guarantee that it couldn't be doing anything shady, but it would be incredibly hard for it to hide anything if it was.
- Mass grave uses the exact same method as a real Windows validation would. To MS it’s undetectable and if you register your hardware, permanent (unless you swap your motherboard). I have my old NAS registered at the hardware level so no matter how many times I’ve reinstalled Windows, it sticks.
  
  Mass grave is bullet proof and 100% safe. The only way MS can kill it is if they completely retool their Windows registration system and the odds of that are about the same as them making Windows respect your privacy.
- TIL about this. My son will be pleased for his gaming rig he's upgrading his MOBO on in a few days.
MAS is open-source meaning anyone with the skill can verify what the powershell code does. This does not mean it's absolutely safe and trustworthy but does give it a big plus.

(the way I understand it is that) It also uses a loophole in the free upgrades from older win versions to 10/11 to get you a valid license from Windoze servers directly - it is not a keygen or cracker.

So, I will vouch for MASgrave but care has to be taken to download it from the official site/repository.
- What about the Office license that you can get from MAS? Is that also using a loophole?
  
  No, that one uses a patched DLL.
- windows 10 iso are not available for download, so I used the one from MASgrave, dunno if I did something wrong. By the way, apparently my notebook had a HW license already lol
  
  windows 10 iso are not available for download
  
  You mean this isn't available to download; https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/software-download/windows10ISO
  
  Or something else?
  
  Yes they are. Downloaded 22H2 ISO Thursday at work. In fact, with the correct script, every single Win10 ISO is still available to download, all the way back to the very first version.
i have used the MAS script probably 20+ times. for my family, friends, also my own computers and virtual machine back when i still used windows. no complaints with it, 100% safe.
Probably not any more unsafe than Windows in general. Microsoft already steals all your data, so not sure why you'd be more scared of a script that you can inspect to know exactly what it does
Other people have made accurate posters here about MAS, but if you are concerned you can always set up a KMS server in docker.

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