Pirates are successfully upgrading to Windows 10 for free

Over the past few months, there has been a lot of hype surrounding Windows 10, in part because Microsoft is offering free Windows 10 upgrades to those running Windows 7, Windows 8.1, and Windows Phone 8.1. In March, reports suggested the offer would extend to pirates, though when we followed up with Microsoft, it turned out the Windows licenses would stay non-genuine and would be unsupported. In May, the company reaffirmed this stance, but today we’re learning that pirates are successfully upgrading to Windows 10 for free.

Over on these two Reddit threads in the subreddit Piracy, both Windows 7 and Windows 8.1 users are reporting they have managed to successfully upgrade their pirated copy of Microsoft’s operating system to the latest and greatest. That part isn’t a huge surprise — Microsoft did say pirates would be able to get Windows 10 — but the fact that Windows 10 is showing as “activated” is eyebrow-raising: