Morph3ous’s Weblog

Windows Vista’s Hideous Wakeup Support at The NeoSmart Files:

Throughout the beta, Deep Sleep in Windows Vista went great. It’s the default option (so long as it’s configured in the BIOS) when you click the shutdown button. It would put your computer in a low-power mode that recovered in a matter of 2 or 3 seconds, and didn’t crash! But in the final version of Windows Vista, something is very, very majorly wrong.

Gizmodo: How To Use The Zune as a Hard Drive

Fantastic news for the handful of people who actually own a Zune. Someone’s found a way to enable a sort of hard drive support, which although doesn’t assign a drive letter to your Zune, does allow you to drag and drop files from it.

Turns out it’s just a registry value to enable visibility in the shell.

This sounds like way too much work, but here you go.

Gizmodo: How To Bypass The Zune’s WiFi Sharing DRM:

…rename whatever files—MP3s, movies, programs—to have the extension “.jpg” in order to fool the Zune into thinking it’s an image. This hack works because Zune doesn’t apply DRM to images!

Then what?

Now, take your Zune and send the folder containing these files to your buddy along with a real photo. If you only send a fake photo, an error is thrown. The last step is to have your friend sync the Zune with their computer, open the “containing folder” where the files were downloaded, and rename the files back to their correct extension.

ArsTechnica: Cell phone unlocking legal (for three years)

Every three years, the Copyright Office develops a list of approved exemptions to the DMCA’s anti-circumvention protections. This is the third time through the process, and the government has approved the largest number of exemptions to date—though they’re still incredibly narrow.

Exemptions are allowed for 1) the educational library of a university’s media studies department, in order to watch film clips in class; 2) using computer software that requires the original disks or hardware in order to run; 3) dongle-protected computer programs, if the the dongle no longer functions and a replacement cannot be found; 4) protected e-books, in order to use screen-reader software; 5) cell phone firmware that ties a phone to a specific wireless network; and 6) DRM software included on audio CDs, but only when such software creates security vulnerabilities on personal computers.

Bravo Microsoft! The video embeded below shows how to change the password of the current user account that you are logged in under without entering the previous password. This kind of thing should not work. I will have to test to see if Vista is susceptible to this “hack”.

The operating system should always ask you for the old password before allowing you to change it. Hopefully this only works when logged in to an administrator account. In Unix the superuser can change other user’s passwords without knowledge of the old password. If logged in as any other account you can change only your own password after typing in your old password.
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JohnChow.com: The Internet’s Biggest Google Whores:

The following is a list of the Internet’s eight biggest Google AdSense publishers. The information was compiled from interviews and articles found on the Internet. Whenever possible, I list the source of the information.

All I can say is “WOW.” It takes a lot of pageviews to earn that kind of money! I need to think up the next killer idea…

MiamiHerald.com | 09/18/2006 | Securing sensitive data

Recently, The Miami Herald brought to light the threat of identity theft facing Floridians because of the prevalence and accessibility of personal information online Public records easy targets for ID thieves, Aug. 27.

This follows the announcement by the Transportation Department that two computers containing sensitive data — in one case, the personal information of more than 133,000 Floridians — have been stolen in the last several months.

NASA’s World Wind software is definitely as good as, if not better than, Google Earth. World Wind’s largest downside is that it only runs on Windows.
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BusinessWeek recently reported on the growing trend of using fog machines to deter criminals. Stores fill up with fog when the alarm is triggered making it much more difficult for the criminal to steal anything. I read this in the magazine and only found one reference to it online from which I have quoted below.
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You may have noticed that certain words on this site have a double-underline. These are ads from Kontera. The company has developed a javascript application to choose words and phrases for which they may have a useful advertisement. If you wish to see what they have to offer, you can mouse over the link. If you are uninterested in any offers, simply do not roll your mouse over the double-underlined words and you will not be bothered.
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