Imagine a race. A race between Microsoft and Crackers. Whenever Microsoft releases a new operating system that they say is absolutely secure and uncrackable some crackers find a way after days, weeks or even months. Vista was designed to be the first operating system that would not be copied en masse because of the way it had to be activated to function after a trial period. The first workarounds popped up pretty quickly buying time for the one real workaround to rule them all.

The weakness was first discovered by the famous (underground) group Paradox which discovered a way to emulate so called “Royality OEM2″ which require no activation at all. Those special OEM versions are only issued to major computer manufacturers such as Dell and Asus to take the hassle of activating the operating system away from their clients. These manufacturers embed license information into their hardware products which is equivalent to a online or phone registration.

Categories: Operating Systems, Windows

Did you know that you can add ifilters to the search function in Windows Vista ? The new ifilters, think of plugins if you like, add content indexing for various formats that the default Vista search (and desktop search) does not support, those include Adobe Reader documents, mp3, wmv and wma files as well as various other formats including zip, rar and help files. This is a great addition to the search in Windows Vista, especially if you do work with those file formats regularly.

Categories: Operating Systems, Tools, Windows

Yesterday I was writing about a method to get a working Windows Vista key by bruteforcing. The method would generate random keys and check them locally for validity. If the local check would be successful the user had to try and use the key to activate his version of Windows Vista. This could of course still be rejected if someone else did already use the key to activate his version.

Categories: Hacking, Operating Systems, Windows

As if it would not be easy enough to circumvent the activation of Windows Vista some clever guys managed to bruteforce working Windows Vista keys. Bruteforcing simply means that the script is testing about 20000 keys per hour changing the product key to a possible working one if one is found. I’m not sure why Microsoft has no protection against this kind of attack but they surely will add some sort of protection soon – something in the like of banning IPs that check more than x keys per minute.

Categories: Hacking, Operating Systems, Windows

The Zune seems really hackable, wonder if that is on purpose or just laziness. Anyways, the following registry hack makes it possible to add Divx movies to your Zune player and sync them successfully. Once that is done the Zune automatically converts them to the native format which makes it possible to view them just as any other video that you have stored on your Zune player. Copy and paste the following lines into a text editor, save it and rename the file extension to .reg afterwards.

Categories: Hacking, Zune

I do not own a Zune and will probably never own one but I know a few people who do own one, this article is for them. You can enable a hard drive mode in the Zune which is similar to the hard drive mode of the iPods. All you need to do is change some registry keys in windows which enables this.

Categories: Hacking, Zune

Windows Vista offers a way to quickly perform a system check which results in a so called System Health Report. It takes about 60 seconds to gather the information and display them in a list. You find the option to generate a system health report in your control panel. Click on System and Maintenance, then Performance Information and Tools. Select advanced tools from the menu and click on generate a system health report to start the program.

Categories: Operating Systems, Windows

A reader was asking me if there was an easy way to migrate his data – that is cookies and bookmarks – from Internet Explorer to Firefox. I can see that this could pose a problem for some users that want to use Firefox but don’t want to manually add all their bookmarks again. The process of exporting and importing cookies and bookmarks on the other hand is relatively easy and can be done in a matter of minutes.

Categories: Browsing, Firefox, ie

It is human to forget passwords, this is actually happening to everyone once in a while. Fortunately there are ways to recover passwords if you fail to remember them. Many web based services send it to you again, you can use tools like Snadboys Revelation to check on passwords in Windows that are hidden with *****. There is however no obvious way to recover or change a forgotten password in Windows.

Categories: Hacking, Operating Systems, Windows