It’s not really a surprising headline. I think anytime a proprietary vendor tightens the screws a bit to limit piracy they are going to force people to other, competing products. Especially when there’s a significant cost difference involved. If there are three t-shirts for sale, one for $5 with no logo and another for $50 with a brand logo (we’ll say nike) and yet another (pirated) with a nike logo for $10 and everybody thinks the nike logo is cool and in… they’ll buy the $10 “pirated” shirt unless they know that it’s pirated and are morally compelled to spend the $50. If piracy is cracked down on and you have a choice between the $50 logo shirt and the $5 no logo shirt….. hmmm I’d rather have $45 extra dollars than a swoosh on my shirt.
Tag: Windows
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Updating Windows XP SP2 serial number
Intelliadmin published this earlier today… with all the problems some people have had with the Genuine advantage notification that their copy of Windows may not be legitimate (many reasons for this…) it may be necessary to buy a new copy of Windows and it would be a nuisance to have to reinstall. So, there is a way to just update the serial number to the new copy. The download from Microsoft can be found here and checks the main system files (for patching/changes to circumvent WGA) and then asks for the new Product Key. Reboot and it should have updated the serial number and maybe WGA will let you do updates.
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Preventing the automatic update to Internet Explorer 7
Internet Explorer 7 is set to be released this month (October 2006) and it will likely be an automatic update for Windows users either November or December of this year. (I’m thinking November.) Now, it’s been a long time in the making, at one point Microsoft said there wouldn’t be another version past 6 of IE, but… it’s finally coming and some people will not want it installed automatically until they’ve had more time to investigate it and test with their critical uses.
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October Microsoft update advance notice….
11 patches will be released by Microsoft on the 10th of October. Bulletin is here, 6 for windows, 4 for Office (at least one in each of those two batches is critical) and 1 .NET (moderate) – yes the Windows updates will likely require a restart. Betanews has a bit more coverage hoping the WebViewFolderIcon ActiveX control vulnerability will get fixed in this batch.
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Microsoft Internet Explorer patches for unsupported OS versions (Windows 98 and ME)
For starters, if you’re using Windows 98 or ME still in a production system, you REALLY need to be looking at migration options and you should realize that the architecture of those systems is NOT conducive to a good secure platform. No XP isn’t perfect, but it is an improvement in many areas. That much said, if you don’t have too many choices and are wondering how you can protect the old system against the recent Windows Internet Explorer vulnerabilities…. here you go. The zero-day emergency response team has released a version of the VML vulnerability patch for older versions of Windows. So, if you REALLY need to patch an old windows 98 or ME install, you can give that a try. (No guarantees.)
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How Microsoft could patch VML vulnerability before October’s patch day
SO, there’s the second big vulnerability exploit for Internet Explorer making the rounds in about a week and Microsoft’s advisory says that the most recent flaw will likely be patched on October’s patch day (“unless the need arises…”) So, what would trigger that need? Lot’s of browsers being subjected to unwanted drive-by downloads? I suppose that doesn’t trigger need for an out of cycle patch. True, “lot’s” is hard to quantify – how many people are really affected by this, home users? office users? etc. After all there IS a way to mitigate this (unregistering the vml dll….) not for the faint of heart but, it’s your computer and you’re responsible for it, right? Last month, a program offered people the capability of removing DRM from Microsoft DRM protected windows media files… it took about 3 days for Microsoft to release a fix…..
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Microsoft Update day for September…. AND Flash… AND Apple
Yesterday, of course, Microsoft released it’s monthly patches. I found the Windows update site to be painfully slow (and in some cases unresponsive.) It wasn’t quite a huge update day by recent standards, but here’s the summary…. Incidents.org has a nice chart showing the two re-released patches (one is actually re-re-released…) They are MS06-040 (server service patch – critical) and MS06-042 (IE 6 patch). Both of those vulnerabilities addressed are well known and could be actively exploited. The “first release” updates from this month affect Microsoft Queue System MS06-052 which is the most important of the releases….
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ANOTHER Microsoft patch problem
This is getting to be like clockwork, but it sounds like this may be one of the nastiest problems so far. It appears that there is a problem with one of the recent patches from Microsoft MS06-49. It looks as though the problem is data corruption for small files (under 4096 bytes.) There’s a google groups thread here. The key factor seems to be that IF the folder is compressed, the data within is subject to this possible corruption.
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Microsoft’s priorities…
I didn’t really think of this in context, but George Ou points out that Microsoft issued an “out of cycle” patch for their DRM software in response to the FairUse4WM software that stripped DRM protections from Windows Media Files. It took a mere 3 days from being made aware of the issue to releasing a patch. In context, we have seen numerous instances in the last year of “zero-day” vulnerabilities becoming known just after a monthly patch day, and Microsoft waiting until the next patch day to release a fix. So why the different response?