A license verification certificate expires and when it expires, Microsoft Office for Mac assumes it's unlicensed even if it has been fully paid for.

So, any idiot who paid for Office 2019 for Mac "perpetual" will lose access to it next month.

The same will happen with Office 2021 and Office 2024 in the future.

Pirates are unaffected, only who paid for the product gets punished

Good job 👍🏻

TL;DR: bitlocker does not like grub

Full story:

Months ago I installed fedora on my desktop, dual booting Windows 11.

In all this time I never had the need to boot into windows. I remembered that it worked fine after install, good, and then I forgot about that.

Today I needed a specific windows only software, so at grub I chose the microsoft bootloader and... BITLOCKER.

Huh? Bitlocker? Me? What? Searched frantically for that decryption password in my keepass, did not find. What?? How???

After a few minutes staring at that screen I thought, ok let's just wipe that shit and reclaim the space. I went back to linux, opened the partition manager, then remembered that i had something important in single copy over there. Noooooo

Went back to the boot screen to try again, still failed password.

Then I notice the error:

e_fve_pcr_mismatch

that mismatch lets me think that maybe I had something wrong in my booting.

I try to put windows first in the bios and it works! WHAT THE...?!??

So, if i put linux first, then launch windows from grub, bitlocker takes the windows partition under ransom, i can only access if windows is first. And of course in windows 11 x64 is no longer possible add linux partitions in their boot manager (previously it was possible)

Incompetence or maliciousness?

I downloaded a cracked install from tpb (haxnode). It was a loader exe that loaded the original exe and supposedly removed the drm in RAM. It required admin permissions, I didn't trust it, but i ran in a vm and nothing happened.

Then i told myself "i have microsoft defender and windows firewall control, they will warn me" and I ran it in my main laptop, and still nothing happened. Like, literally nothing happened. The original program would not start. It would simply exit. Nothing. The other 6 almost identical torrents from the same uploader but with a different program version had a similar result. I gave up.

Then i reboot, and firstly i notice a couple DOS prompts flashing on the screen, and windows firewall control asking me if "aspnet_compiler.exe" is allowed to access the internet or not.

Suspicious, i go to check that "aspnet_compiler.exe" and it's located in the .net system folder, i scan it with microsoft defender and it doesn't report as a virus. I do not pay attention to the fact that it doesn't have a valid Microsoft signature, and i tell myself "probably just a windows update" and i whitelist it on the firewall.

After a few hours I realize "wait a minute: it's impossible that an official windows exe isn't signed by microsoft!" I go back to scan it, not infected... or it looks like, defender says "ignored because in whitelist". What? The "loader" put c:* in the whitelist!

The "crack loader" wasn't a virus per se. It dropped an obfuscated batch in startup, which had a base64 encoded attachment of the actual malware, that was copied in the .net framework directory with unassuming names...

And this for a $60 perpetual license program that i should buy anyway because it's for work

Including inkjet paper!

different sources:

• https://www.ilfordphoto.com/faqs/advice-vegans-faqs
• https://www.gelatine.org/en/applications/photography-and-art.html

Somehow the EFI partition doesn't mount and it's impossible to troubleshoot via phone, she asked me to put back the old system 😞