MS Secretly Marking WinXP CD-ROMs
WinInfo | at | by Mike
Technical beta testers that downloaded Windows XP Home or Professional Edition from Microsoft's servers last weekend might want to be careful about giving out copies of the CD-ROMs that they generated: Microsoft has embedded a security check into each CD that uniquely identifies each tester, so the company will be able to tell if another user installs Windows XP using that tester's CD-ROMs. The security measure was unwittingly uncovered by a tester, wondering about a unique UUIDREF number in the header of the CD-ROM .ISO images, software files that are used to generate the XP CD-ROMs.