Microsoft To Relax WGA

When Vista was first released late last year Microsoft announced that they were to tighten their Windows Genuine Advantage system by making it so that if a user was found to be using a non-genuine version of Windows, they would slowly have their copy of Windows limited.

Since this system has been setup, Microsoft has had many complaints from their customers that their genuine operating systems have been limited due to this system being put in place.

WGA has been used in Windows since Service Pack 2 was released August 6, 2004 where they made you activate your copy of Windows with Microsoft. This could either be done online or over the phone. Microsoft has no plans of removing this feature, but in the latest build of their service pack (Windows Vista Service Pack 1) they are going to remove the system that limits users without a valid copy of the OS. This could either be a good thing for Windows hackers or it could mean that they are going to replace this with an even tighter system.

Whatever happens to the WGA system, this will all be revealed early next year when the service pack is released via Windows Update.

Firefox 3 Beta 2 Schedule Confirmed

At the last Firefox 3 Status Meeting, Mozilla planned the release schedule for the second beta of Firefox 3.

The development tree will close for checkins at midnight tonight, then several days will be spent fixing little errors before the QA and build teams start working on it. Code freeze is scheduled for December 7 and the final ship date for beta 2 is currently planned for December 21, but could still be postponed into early January.

I am currently running Firefox 3 beta one as my primary browser, and I’m quite happy with it’s performance, and I look forward to the release of Beta2 , too see if the little bugs have been fixed now.

GnuPG Shell

Team afterbug is proud to announce a new tool for your crypto toolbox: GnuPG Shell.

GnuPG Shell

GnuPG Shell is a cross-platform graphical frontend for GNU Privacy Guard.

GnuPG Shell can be used to encrypt, decrypt, and sign files, to verify signatures and to manage private and public keys.

In addition to source code, we provide pre-built installation packages for Debian Linux, RedHat Linux, and Microsoft Windows.

GnuPG Shell is built using:

• Python- An interpreted, interactive, object-oriented, extensible programming language.
• wxWidgets - A cross-platform GUI and tools library for GTK, MS Windows, and MacOS.
• Code::Blocks - A cross-platform IDE built around wxWidgets, designed to be extensible and configurable.

GnuPG Shell should make it a shell of a lot easier to keep your data secure.

Working Proxies

I just approved a bunch of new proxy sites. We now have over thirteen hundred working proxies in our proxy list.

The definition of what is a “working proxy” is one that comes up frequently. A person may try twenty proxies — and discover that none of them work for him. Are those proxies then not “working proxies”?

Not exactly. Those proxies still work fine - they have just been blocked by the content filter (such as WebSense) at their location.

Sometimes one of these users will say “Why don’t you delete this proxy from the list, because it is now blocked?” It’s not that simple, for two reasons:

• There are dozens of content filtering software packages, each with its own databases
• Each organization can define their own filter rule sets and individual site filters

The proxy might be blocked by SmartFilter, but allowed by WebSense. Or, it might be blocked only by one particular school.

There is simply no way for us to tell what proxies are blocked from what networks.

The best strategy for proxy users to follow is to use new proxies, as they are less likely to be blocked by content filters.

Hello Brazil, Germany, India, and Mexico!

Alexa shows that, after the United States, Brazil is the second largest concentration of afterbug readers.

The top five countries for afterbug readers are:

• United States: 13.1%
• Brazil: 3.8%
• India: 3.5%
• Germany: 3.2%
• Mexico: 2.9%

We welcome our visitors from these countries, and from all of the nations of the earth!

Free Audio Books

LibriVox volunteers record chapters of books in the public domain and release the audio files on the Internet. The goal of Librivox is to make all public domain books available as free audio books.

The free audio books are available in MP3 and Ogg formats.

LibriVox has over 1,000 free audio books in the catalog. Download one for your iPod today.

Cheap Laptops

When you think about buying a new laptop, WalMart may not be the first vendor that springs to mind — but perhaps it should be.

WalMart has great prices on laptops from vendors like Everex, Acer, Toshiba, Dell, Sony, and HP.

You may find the best deal by visiting your local WalMart instead of going online. WalMart’s web site offers a basic Everex NC1501 laptop for $398. My local Wal-Mart is selling a much more well equipped Acer for the same price.

Acer is a better brand than Everex. Toshiba, Dell, Sony, and HP are all premium brands which you can buy for very good prices at your local WalMart store.

For $648, you can purchase a Toshiba Satellite with a 15.4″ WXGA widescreen display, a 1.8 GHz AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual-Core processor, 1 GB RAM, and an 80 GB hard drive. That’s quite a reasonable machine!

In addition to comparing brands when buying a cheap laptop, you will also want to compare:

• Display size
• Display resolution
• CPU
• RAM (How much? How many available DIMM slots?)
• Storage (How much? How fast?)
• DVD drives (Read-Only or Read-Write?)
• Wireless (Built-in or add-on?)

When looking for the best deal, it pays to do your research and shop around. My recommendation is that you add WalMart to the list of places you look for your next laptop.

iMacs freeze for no apparent reason

As time passes by, more and more users reported that Apple’s new iMacs suffer from a nasty bug that locks everything, making the system unusable, until the owner reboots it.
Quoting the customers, the bug doesn’t actually stop and freeze the system. Everything is functional, but the computer is impossible to control by the user.

Here are two reports of this kind.

Whatever was going on at the time continues, so if you were listening to music it continues to play. The mouse pointer moves but you cannot select anything. Tabbing through apps doesn’t work.

Those reports didn’t went unnoticed to Apple. They are aware of the issue, but they haven’t found a permanent fix just yet. Since August when the iMacs launched, there were two software updates (1.0 and 1.1) that contained important updates regarding video drivers, but none of them actually had a fix for this freezing issue.

We’re waiting for more information as soon as possible.

KDE 4.0 to be launched within the Googleplex

Between January 17 and January 19, the KDE community will hold a releasing event for KDE 4.0 inside the Google HQ (Mountain View, CA). This event’s main purpose is meant to spread the word about the newest KDE release and its impact on the Free Desktop applications.

This looks like an informative and productive event altogether, therefore the schedule reflects that. The event will contain many interesting presentations related to technical and non-technical areas of interest. Over 200 members from the IT business and mass-media will attend and it will all end with a course with many members of the North-American KDE community.

Of course, all of the major keynotes will be available to watch live over the Internet.
The hopes for this event are to strengthen the KDE community from the United States and increase its popularity.

Flat Panel Monitor Advantages

There are two main types of computer monitors, the old, but extremely reliable CRT monitor and the newer flat panel monitors. If you have been computer shopping, you will immediately notice that the older monitors have all, but disappeared. You might be saying what gives? Well, for most computer users the flat panel monitor has definite advantages over the older CRT monitors. Read the rest of this entry »