Microsoft To Relax WGA

Friday, December 7th, 2007 | Posted in Microsoft | No Comments »

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

Wednesday, December 5th, 2007 | Posted in Firefox | No Comments »

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.