Experts such as Brian Livingston, editorial director of the Windows Secrets newsletter, say Microsoft is intentionally allowing a loop-hole to exist, which enables more advanced users of Microsoft's operating systems to upgrade to Vista SP1 without having the necessary previous versions of Windows.
The loop-hole exists in the Vista SP1 Upgrade Edition, which requires a previous install of Windows 2000, XP, or Vista but the upgrade edition will install even if they're absent. The Vista SP1 Upgrade Edition retails for about $110 less than the full version of Vista SP1, which means users can save money on upgrading to Vista by purchasing the cheaper upgrade box.
Livingston believes Microsoft supports the hole since the upgrade edition installs over itself in Vista SP1. Although it may seem absurd at first, Microsoft may benefit from such software pirates -- if they can be called that anymore.
The theory behind this is already at play and has been at play for many years. As more and more users install some version of Windows, others will see it as "the standard", and then they will buy it -- or they'll pirate it and indirectly influence others to buy it.
Life's getting mobile, and it seems that's the way it's always going to be. Humans don't come off as the traveling type, yet we do. From horse carriages to cell phones, we're always looking for ways to do more on the move, so what's missing from your mobile life in 2008 and how can you fix it? The following list may help.
1. Full access to YouTube in Windows Mobile: Everyone's got a solution for playing YouTube Mobile videos on a Windows Mobile phone, but it seems no one's giving Windows Mobile users a way to access YouTube.com's full, flash video library. Oh wait, there is a solution. It only requires users to install a specific version of TCPMP and the Flash Video Bundle, an add-on to TCPMP to give it the ability to play flash video. Use Pocket IE to navigate to YouTube (a few other flash video sites are also supported). Clicking on a video will open TCPMP to play it. Easy, right?
You could also install Orb on your PC and use the Orb mobile client to find YouTube videos on the go, but that solution requires you to leave your home PC on all the time.
One of the great things about the Eee PC is that, unlike a $400 PDA or phone, the $400 laptop is a full fledged computer that just happens to weigh less than 2 pounds.
And while Asus went through a lot of work to load a customized Linux interface onto the Eee PC, the company also made it pretty easy to slap your own operating system on there. In fact, the Eee PC ships with instructions for wiping the hard drive and installing Windows XP (if you happen to have a Windows XP installation disc and a USB DVD drive).
And if you can install Windows, that means you can install Mac OS X. Not officially, of course. Apple only sells OS X licenses for Apple-labeled machines. But the folks over that OSx86 project have been tinkering with ways to install OS X on PCs ever since Apple started to support Intel chips.
So it was only a matter of time until someone went and installed Leopard on an Eee PC. You'll need to get your hands on Leopard disc image, either by making one yourself or from other means that we won't go into here. Leopard reportedly is something less than a speed demon on the Eee PC's 900MHz celeron processor and 512MB of RAM. But we could have predicted that.
If you mess up your computer beyond belief, you can use the restore disc that Asus shipped with the Eee PC. But we still probably wouldn't recommend this hack for anyone who doesn't know what the word "kernel" means.
When Apple introduced the iPhone at this year's Macworld Expo, there was a great sigh of disappointment when Steve Jobs informed his developer community that only web-based applications would be supported on the iPhone. That is, no Software Development Kit (SDK) to create native programs. Among other things, this letdown limited developers' ability to harness the iPhone's coveted multi-touch user interface features.
But that may soon change. Business Week has a hunch that Apple has been waiting for the right moment to throw down with an iPhone SDK, and not for the reasons you might think. Instead of avoiding ticking off their wireless partner, instead of trying to maintain quality control, instead of assuming Dashboard-quality applications would keep iPhone code junkies happy, it seems Apple may've had a different reason altogether for the long wait: Leopard.
If Leopard is the official development platform for the iPhone (and who would expect Apple to release an iPhone development environment for Windows?), then the wait may've been warranted after all. After all, we've not seen any multi-touch technology from Apple except on the iPhone, and one wonders if multi-touch is hanging out in the background of Leopard somewhere, waiting to get called to duty. Meanwhile, Business Week openly speculates that Electronic Arts has already received the SDK, but this hasn't been confirmed. Madden 2009 on the iPhone? Sounds good to us.
Sometimes the cure can be more painful than the disease. Case in point: the federal government tried to help a California county website recover from a hacker's attack yesterday and wound up knocking every California state website offline for 7 hours.
Here are the details. A hacker had diverted traffic from the Marin County website so that visitors found themselves looking at porn. That's bad. But when the feds tried to lend a helping hand, the accidentally "deleted the ca.gov domain."
While that did prevent users from finding naughty pictures when searching for Marin County services, it also meant Californians couldn't get information about vehicle or voter registration or find contact information for Arnold Schwarzenegger's office. Oh yeah, and California state employees couldn't reliably send or receive e-mail.
By last night everything was restored to normal. but it just goes to show, it's hard to find good help these days.
While Apple has yet to authorize third party development on the Apple TV, hackers have been adding applications to the box pretty much since the day it was released.
The Apple TV is a $300 box designed to let you watch iTunes content on your TV set without plugging your computer directly into your TV. It streams content from your Mac and the internet over your home network.
Hackers have added RSS feeds, support for non-iTunes videos, and the ability to upgrade your hard drive. Now Jaman has released a commercial plugin for renting movies from the Jaman service. You'll need to hack your Apple TV in order to install the plugin, and you'll need to have the Jaman Player installed on both your computer and your Apple TV.
If we've learned anything recently, it's that these hacks might wind up causing more trouble than they're worth. Apparently Jaman is more than aware of this fact, because the company won't even support its own software hack.
Your open Gmail account could be in severe jeopardy, thanks to a malicious script that initiates itself when a website is viewed,
The tables have turned from hacking your computer, to hacking your virtually stored information. Supposedly hackers are not seeing the benefits of attacking your protected and firewalled computer these days, and are much happier to go after hacking Web 2.0 API's. Such is the case in a recent exposure of a critical process that executes a filter looking for specific incoming emails, sending them to another email address for snooping and prying. The filter would be in place until the Gmail account owner deletes it from the Settings>Filter menu.
Gnucitizen broke the news on this, and it has been verified by a few sources. He is not planning on demonstrating this process, or releasing more details on findings until Google has fixed this concern. He is also urging that others do not expose anything until they have notified Google and a fix is implemented. But does say that the hacks are out in the open for anyone searching Yahoo or Google.
Despite rumors that Dell might be working on a Windows Mobile-based phone, the company is pretty much out of the Windows Mobile business for now. And that leaves Axim X50/51 users pretty much on their own if they want to upgrade their devices from Windows Mobile 5.0 to Windows Mobile 6.
Overall, that might not be such a bad thing. Dell did an infamously poor job offering X50 users an upgrade from WM2003SE to Windows Mobile 5.0. The upgraded units ran slower and had more bugs than units running the older operating system.
But where Dell dropped the ball, the hacker community steps in. And after attempting to improve Dell's Windows Mobile 5.0 installation, one enterprising member of the XDA Developers forum has gone on to port Windows Mobile 6 to the Dell Axim X50v. Bear in mind, this upgrade is only for the VGA model. If you've got a Dell Axim X50 with a 320 x 240 pixel screen, this ROM will not run. Oh yeah, and installing any unofficial operating system upgrades like this could leave your PDA in an unbootable state. So this hack is not for the feint of heart.
That said, X50vs do seem to run much faster with Windows Mobile 6 than Windows Mobile 5.0. And you get upgraded versions of Word, Excel, Internet Explorer, Outlook, and other programs.
Update: If you've upgraded your X50v and are scratching your head trying to figure out how to revert back to Windows Mobile 5.0 or Windows Mobile 2003SE, check out our article on downgrading from Windows Mobile 6.
It hasn't been a good weekend for social ranking sites. Security vulnerabilities were uncovered at Digg-competitor Reddit and Pligg, a site that lets you create your own Digg clone. The security problems at each site were unrelated and have been patched.
Basically, the problem at Reddit was that the site let users upload malicious code in their comments that could grant access to your account login and other information. For the most part, Reddit users played with vulnerability by uploading benign code. The exploit has been fixed, and now any user who uploaded such code has had the text replaced with "I am a terrible person."
The Pligg vulnerability was even more serious, allowing an attacker to take over an entire website. Pligg has released a patch, and recommends anyone running a Pligg site upgrade immediately.
Despite proud boasts that Vista was the most hack-proof version of Windows to date, Microsoft Senior Product Manager Alex Kochis has written on a developers' blog that Microsoft has recognized two ways that hackers have cracked Vista's product activation.
Basically the hacks affect OEM copies of Vista that are meant to run on a specific piece of hardware. The first hack changes some code in a computer's BIOS to make Vista think it's installed on the correct PC. The other hack does something similar, but with software.
Basically, Kochis says Windows XP was vulnerable to the same sort of hack, but Microsoft never paid much attention because there were far easier ways to obtain a bootleg copy of Windows XP.
And it turns out Microsoft isn't going to place much priority on combating this hack now either. Since it's a relatively tricky and dangerous way to get an illegal copy of Vista running, the company figures most users won't try modifying their BIOS. Microsoft will instead focus on "organized counterfeiters and protect users from becoming unknowing victims."
Last month we told you how to extend your Windows Vista 30 day trial period for as long as 120 days. The process is 100% legal, and was put in Vista by Microsoft. All you have to do is enter a rearm command every 30 days or so.
We thought you could only do this 3 times, but now sites are reporting that there's a registry hack that allows you to rearm your system an indefinite number of times.
Of course, if you want a fully supported version of Vista, you're going to have to activate it. And if you want to avoid the hassle of having to reenter a key every thirty days or risk losing all of your data, you should activate your software. But if for some reason you might have a copy of the operating system and a reason not to activate it, this hack may come in handy.
The US was the source for 31 percent of attacks, with China following a distant second at 10 percent according to the report. To make matters worse, thanks to this vibrant underground run-amok, your credit card info can be purchased for as little as $1 US, and full sets of identification credentials (name, address, mother's maiden, etc) can be had for only $14 bucks. Yikes!
In unrelated news, my name will be Robert Paulsen from here on out. I got a sweet deal too!
Google Image Ripper is a nifty little Google hack that lets you search for Google Images without surfing through an endless sea of thumbnails.
All you have to do is enter a search term, an image size (icon, small, medium, large, xlarge, or xxlarge), and hit the rip button. The program searches for images that meet your specifications, and loads all the images onto one screen.
Of course, if you're looking for Creative Commons photos that you can reuse, you're still better off searching Flickr. But if you just need to see a ton of pictures of Angelina Jolie or Jeff Raikes, this might be the tool for you.
The author of the program that allegedly generates activation keys for Windows Vista (if you let it run long enough) is back. And now he says the key generator "is a joke, I never intended for it to work."
Further, he never actually got the program to work himself, and he says anyone who claims they have is either mistaken or lying.
Here's the thing. In theory, the brute force kegyen could work. It basically generates random combinations of 25 characters. Sooner or later, it's bound to come up with a valid product key. But while initial reports suggested that you could get a few keys by running the program for a few hours, there's little evidence that anyone has succeeded yet.
Well that didn't take long. Just over a month after the wide release of Windows Vista, a hacker over at KezNews has figured out a way to generate valid product activation keys.
This is a brute force hack, meaning it basically keeps throwing random keys at Vista until one seems to work. This can take hours. And then you have to manually check the key.
The KezNews main page includes a disclaimer suggesting that the program was an experiment, and that users should go out and buy a copy of Vista if they really want one. That said, it's just a matter of time before product keys start floating around the dark corners of the internet.
If you want to test out Vista for longer than the 30-day trial period and don't want to break the law, you can always extend your trial period by up to 90 days.
