Time of death: 4:22 PM UTC September 26th
Notes, please read:
For those of you who don't know, HWID was the holy grail for Windows activation, letting you generate licenses straight from Microsoft licensing servers, being registered as fully legitimate in microsofts servers and letting you keep the activation permanently, even after windows reinstalls being completely undetectable and with nothing on your system being modified. If you're still using outdated activation methods and you missed out on this, I'm sorry
Existing HWID licenses are left unaffected. Only new requests are blocked, no licenses were revoked.
By the way, MAS still works and is the best option for Windows/Office activation. For permanent Office activation use it's Ohook method (supports subscription products such as 365 as well) and KMS38 for Windows
ALL OTHER ACTIVATION METHODS ARE STILL WORKING, ONLY METHOD AFFECTED IS HWID.
All HWID activators are affected, not only MAS
Around that time, Microsoft servers unexpectedly started blocking the licensing requests HWID activation method sends to Microsoft. This was a slow rollout that spanned over a few hours, at the moment the exploit is completely dead. The best options for Windows activation now is KMS38 or vlmcsd.
Patching this would boost illegal key reselling websites which causes more harm to Microsoft than HWID exploit. We can only wonder why they patched this.
{"code":"BadRequest","data":[],"details":[],"innererror":{"code":"PermanentTSLRejection","data":[],"details":[{"code":"113","message":"avsErrorCode","target":null}],"message":"The Purchase Service rejected the provided TSL; the client should destroy the TSL.","source":"PurchaseFD"},"message":"The calling client sent a bad request to the service.","source":"PurchaseFD"}
TLS=Temporary Signed License=The tickets HWID activation sends. Microsoft servers are now just responding with "kill it."
Transferring existing HWID licenses to other computers using Microsoft account is broken too.
If they invested the same few weeks of time, all of the important ones and then some!
But people don't want to learn for even 5 minutes when it comes to computers. This is exactly parent commenters point.
Yes there is, but people don't want to learn the fundamentals that enables them to see behind the instructions. Online tutorials for computer stuff are the music equivalent of a guitar tutorial going like "place index finger on position A. Strum with middle finger and thumb at position B for 3cm for a duration of 200ms touching strings 1 theough 3. Then...." instead of a bunch of notes. Obviously this series of excruciatingly boring instructions won't translate to even another guitar yet alone a piano. Same goes for computers. They have tonnes of things in common (just like instruments) but to see that you first have to learn the basic principles behind them.
To your last point about guitar not translating to piano - that's not true at all which is exactly my point. Regardless, I'm not disagreeing that computers need to be learned, my point is that they have been marketed specifically against that.
Ease of use is a huge part of computers existing in our world as they do today.