Posts Tagged 'microsoft'

Windows XP still everywhere

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Category: Microsoft Vista

Published on Friday, 04 April 2008 00:00

Written by Administrator

Hits: 5649

Funny, in Zürich, Windows XP is everywhere...(pictures taken with Sony K750i)

Bus Line 89	Letzipark Alstetten
Zurich main station (HB)	My desktop

With Vista, it will be surely better. You can send me your Linux kernel panic screen shots,

I will publish them here as well :-)

A linux cluster using XBOX

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Category: XBOX

Published on Thursday, 11 November 2004 00:00

Written by Administrator

Hits: 6753

1400$ electricity yearly!!!!
"A few weeks ago, we started investigating the possibility of putting Linux on an XBOX. We played with some ideas in our heads, a render farm, a cheap office computer or a distributed crypto platform, just to start. The idea required a little bit of elbow grease, a mod chip, Linux and a bunch of free time. " MORE on Anandtech

Convert Your XBOX to NAS

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Category: HowTo

Published on Sunday, 29 January 2006 00:00

Written by Administrator

Hits: 18270

Tomshardware has an interesting articles for all XBOX modder which prefer having an original Network attached Storage instead of a game machine.

With the arrival of the Xbox360, there will soon be a buyer's market for its older sibling. Kevin Herring shows how to give an Xbox a new lease on life as a full-featured NAS.

• Part 1, convert Your XBOX to NAS
• Part 2, convert Your XBOX to NAS
• Part 3, convert Your XBOX to NAS
  

{mosgoogle}

Xbox 360 is running Linux?

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Category: Microsoft XBOX 360

Published on Thursday, 04 January 2007 21:18

Written by Administrator

Hits: 7687

From XBOX-SCENE forums

" An anonymous person at the German 23C3 Hacker Congress showed what could be an Xbox360 hack/exploit during one of the 'Lightning Talks'. Lightning Talks is a daily event at Chaos Communication Congress (C3/CCC). It consists in one hour of several short (limited to 5mins) talks.

In a very short presentation a masked 'hacker' showed an Xbox 360 booting up King Kong (the game, by ubisoft). After loading the game a screen pops up showing an Xbox 360 logo, a Mac logo and Tux (the Linux Penguin) and the words "coming soon...". I also noticed a small PCB is hanging out of his Xbox360 and he's using a laptop (Apple Macbook pro?), but it's not really clear what he's doing with it.
Those who followed hacking discussions might remember hackers did some research around the vector shaders in the King Kong demo on the Xbox 360 Kiosk Disc (that ran from recordable media). The demo (and final game too) allow to modify the shaders (they are not checked/signed). However no exploit to take control of the machine was found back then ... so either this hacker found something here, or he's just showing us his custom modified shaders ;)
That's all the details we got for now.

If you don't believe the presentation was really given at 23C3, you can download the +560MB WMV video of the complete 'Lightning Talks' Day4 from the CCC mirrors (direct: mirror1, mirror2, mirror3, mirror4, mirror5, mirror6, mirror7). Forward to the 5th presentation and you'll find it there. However note that the video encoding is far from perfect and the audio seems to be broken/missing. The youtube video below shows just the Xbox 360 presentation, with audio:

UPDATE1! Here are some updates from stuff people posted on our forums.
Here's another footage of the presentation filmed by someone in the public.

Some high-res pictures of the presentation. A bit easier to see that small PCB here. Pictures by Darkman at c3f2m.de:

Also interesting is the official description of the presentation on the CCC schedule site:
[QUOTE]
Title: Consolen Hacking Suprise (XBox360)
Language: German
Speaker(s): Anonym
Description: The XBox360 was live hacked in front of the audience - running Linux and Mac OS coming soon. Stay tuned - a Linux kernel is already booting..
[/QUOTE]
"

Conditional Access, Copy Protection, Digital Rights Management and Link Protection.

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Category: Microsoft Vista

Published on Sunday, 04 February 2007 11:12

Written by Administrator

Hits: 5584

Microsoft Vista, the big lie about reusing your hardware... Interview with Alex Ionescu, he has found a flaw in the driver installation to remove PMP locking functionalities in Vista. According to this very instructive article above, the PMP Digital Rights Management framework (Conditional Access, Copy Protection, Digital Rights Management and Link Protection) will force us to throw away our LCD monitor (having no HDMI plugs), videocard (being not HDCP). You can read also this WikiPedia entry about Digital Righ Management (DRM) Solution: Do not rush on a Vista box, but who is really doing this? yesterday in Zürich, I found a lot of Vista box lying and no one were looking at them except me...I think a lot of person are shocked by the price: 450CHF and 850CHF! the price of a middle range  computer! Only buy Vista with a new computer...paying it 100CHF is more acceptable. Find a DRM fair play use tool (allow You to remove DRM lock) and play the result with VideoLan (the famous open source video player) Simply refuse the Microsoft future  by sending email to hardware manufacturers asking them to better support Linux.

Microsoft Force-Installs Firefox Extension

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Category: Microsoft

Published on Tuesday, 03 February 2009 00:00

Written by Administrator

Hits: 4602

And alter the user-agent of Firefox!

Seems that Microsoft is considering now adding extensions to Firefox in order not to loose market share in the browser (a war is restarting?)

I've notice on Sunday evening the install of a new (HIDDEN) Firefox add-on

• XP don’t display this add-on so it CANT be removed easily using the add-on manager
• VISTA display the add-on “Microsoft .Net Framework Assistant” but uninstalling it in Firefox, restarting do not WORK

Attention: you will encounter this issue

• if you run Microsoft Update and install Microsoft .NET 3.5
• If you install Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 (which require the above component)

Removing it wont make you loose a lot of things:

"Adds ClickOnce support and the ability to report installed .NET versions to the web server”

How to remove it

You'll have to hack the registry of Windows for now :-(

1. Open your Start Menu and choose Run.
2. Type in regedit and click OK.
3. Within there, you have to look for something like calledHKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Mozilla\Firefox\extensions and delete the key there
   For Windows Vista 64-bit HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Mozilla\Firefox\Extensions
4. Type in Firefox about:config in the address bar in Firefox, accept the warning
5. Remove (right click reset) general.useragent.extra.microsoftdotnet
6. Remove (right click reset) microsoft.CLR.clickonce.autolaunch.
7. Open Windows Explorer and go to\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v3.5\Windows Presentation Foundation\DotNetAssistantExtension\ to remove the last remnants of the evil extension.

Links

• http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/02/01/2143218
• http://support.mozilla.com/tiki-view_forum_thread.php?locale=en-US&comments_parentId=265132&forumId=1
• https://tepin.aiki.de/blog/archives/363-.net-Framework-Assistant-in-Firefox-deinstallieren.html
• http://stadt-bremerhaven.de/2009/02/02/microsoft-installiert-heimlich-eine-erweiterung-fr-firefox/
• http://nambulous.wordpress.com/2008/08/23/remove-the-net-framework-assistant-10-from-firefox/
• http://wyday.com/blog/2008/how-to-uninstall-microsoft-net-framework-assistant-from-firefox/

This is such a way

Java creator questions Sun/Microsoft pact

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Category: Interoperablity

Published on Thursday, 03 February 2005 00:00

Written by Administrator

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James Gosling, fellow at Sun and father of Java, has called the relevance of the pact between Sun and Microsoft into doubt
It speak also about NDA, reverse engineering in Samba, openoffice
"In the United States a really vile law got passed a few years ago called the DMCA. It is legal for stuff except stuff doing Digital Rights Management (DRM). So what has been happening is folks like Microsoft, have been putting DRM into everything. DRM has been put into places you wouldn't think would make a whole lot of sense, like the document format being wrapped in DRM stuff…" more here [ZdnetUK]

Read more: Java creator questions Sun/Microsoft pact

XBOX360 DVD Firmware Hack release

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Category: Microsoft XBOX 360

Published on Thursday, 27 April 2006 22:52

Written by Administrator

Hits: 7018

As state by  Xbox-scene.com
The hack is a modified firmware of the (original) Xbox Samsung SDG-605B/616T/616F DVD-ROM drive.
As you (should) know, all Xbox executables (XBE files) are signed by Microsoft (with a private key only MS has). This means that if you try to change anything to the XBE file, the signature will be wrong and the file will not boot.
You will need to combine this hack with

• The Team-xecuter.com DVD adapter or build Your own following the guide at Team Devo-E

• KeyDrive Xtractor/Patcher: tool that will allow you to easily extract and write the unique DVD key to/from an Xbox 360 DVD firmware file (so no need to hex-edit it manually anymore)...

You will then be able to copy genuine game DVD and fake the system with using self burned DVD. Great but not as great as seing Linux booting on it ;-)

Real alternatives to Microsoft Groove are HERE!

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Category: Software

Published on Saturday, 25 August 2007 16:56

Written by Administrator

Hits: 12546

It has a lot of functionnalities, similar to Groove and run on Linux, Mac, windows. 100% Java - build on Eclipe RCP (Rich Client Platform).
View Demo - Read the FAQ - Blog

Work together and share information with team members anywhere, anytime, with anyone. Get started with the new Collaber.
Collaber brings a Virtual Office Environment for your team to share files, events, tasks, manage projects and get the work done as if they are all located in the same location, no matter where the members are physically located. It keeps your date safe and secure.

• Complete end to end data encryption, on the disk and on the network
• P2P architecture to leverage available processing and network power
• Easy customization of GUI with movable views and editors
• Context sensitive menus, help
• New Wizards for all the tasks involved
• File Sharing and Synchronization
• Picture Sharing
• Discussion and Chat Tools
• Task Management with Time Line and Reports
• Calendar Tool for organizing events
• Easy Messaging with attachments and history
• Works on Windows, Linux and Mac

www.collaber.com

You can search in workspace for files, and the new version 1.0.8 will have a basic file versionning system! (something Groove really lack).

It is also worth mentioning other projects:

• Collanos (Windows, Mac, Linux) - Java. Less functionnalities at the moment. Also using Eclipse RCP.
  
• Mira groupware quite advanced
• Lucane (java) groupware

SAD day for users Freedom

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Category: Krosoft case

Published on Thursday, 03 April 2008 00:00

Written by Administrator

Hits: 5297

Microsoft Open XML has been approved by ISO, corruption and money talk in action! Irregularities during the vote are popping up "Microsoft's embattled Office Open XML document format received ISO fast-track approval after receiving support from approximately 86 percent of the national bodies that participated in the vote. ISO approval will be broadly perceived as a sign of validation for the document format which has received widespread criticism from technical experts and standards advocacy groups." read more HERE

From the Washington Post
"Even if the votes were legitimately won , which I doubt , OOXML is not an open standard because it isn't
fully implemented on competing platforms, and its future shape is subject purely to Microsoft's control,"
[...]
"Confusingly, the Office Open XML format being assessed by the ISO "is not what Microsoft implements in
the Office suite," Vinje said, adding that "If you implement OOXML, you don't get interoperability with Office."

Groklaw (an award-winning website that covers legal news of interest to the free and open-source software
community)  is maintaining a page resuming the whole battle ODF/ISO/Open XML

So basically we are now stuck worldwide with a standard running only on windows and that has a custom XML
which is everything else than a real XML that you will be able to edit WITHOUT Office! if you want to test it
and see it on your own, go to  OOXML is defective by design

The only way to resist is to refuse creating Open XML pptx, docx file and use this
translator Sun ODF Plugin for Microsoft Office for creating REAL open format document.

The process of standardization of Open XML is available also in WikiPedia