Well, what's the story? How did it leak? Did it belong to a real vendor? What did Microsoft attempt to do about it?

Which is it? Can you use it today, or has the key long since been blacklisted? I guess both are probably true (the key’s been blacklisted for decades, but no one’s checking the blacklist anymore because the servers have been shut down) but this part of the anecdote was hard to follow.

Something the tweet doesn't mention is that the leak may have come from Intel: https://github.com/tongzx/nt5src/blob/daad8a087a4e75422ec96b...

I was always curious if the key was truly random and accidentally leaked.

The first five letters always reminded me of a jab at a certain rather polarizing(by standards of the time) person who'd just been elected president.

Probably, and hopefully, not. But the conspiracy theorist in me had always wondered...

there was another one with ...XRW9... like this? :-D