Yep. Basically its to do with music and digital restrictions management; DRM from hereonin.

Some while back, in order to compete with Apple and their iTunes, Microsoft made PlaysForSure, a system thats in certain music files, and means you can only play them on certain machines, which is basically DRM. All of the music brought from MSN Music is affected with PlaysForSure.

PlaysForSure works by asking some Microsoft servers if the file is legitimate every time you go and open it. The problem is, on August 31st 2008, Microsoft will turn off these servers that are used. That means, yep; you guessed it, the music files are going to try and connect to the servers, but they aren’t going to be able to because they’re turned off. The Microsoft music player will then conclude, incorrectly, that the music files were downloaded illegally and that the victim is a filthy pirate, and it will refuse to play them.

That really concludes it. Destroying the customer’s music collection will really help DRM catch on. And they wonder why people pirate music…

I actually find this video quite funny, like most computer-related music videos (i.e. It’s All About The Pentiums by Weird Al). Anyway, take a look at this one:

If you can’t see it, click here to check it out directly from YouTube.

You’ll probably have seen numerous posts around the web if you came here by search engine.

I, for one, like my computer to boot up fast. I realised that on my fast PC, that Vista wasn’t too fast, but I’ve came up with some tips to help you make your copy of Windows Vista boot up quickly.

Lets start off by getting rid of that horrid screen with the green bar at the bottom when its loading. To do this, press Win + R, which will then launch “Run…”, in the box, type in msconfig and then press return. A smallish window will appear and all you simply have to do is choose the tab called “Boot”. Now check the box labled “No GUI Boot” and set the timeout to 15 seconds. Now press the button appropriately named “Apply”. Now you can restart your system to see the changes take place – and hopefully your computer will boot a lot faster.

I know that a new computer never seems to stay new for long, by that I mean all of those “startup” programs that slow down your computer while the desktop environment is loading. So in the same msconfig utility, find the tab called “Startup” (not services) and uncheck the names of programs you don’t really need that YOU’VE installed, the reason for this is that if you didn’t install it, chances are it was preinstalled with your system and therefore required when you turn your computer on, most probably by some hardware.

After completing these few steps, I found my computers boot up perfomance increased – all without the need for those awful “system tuning” applications (especially registry cleaners, which in most cases can cause more damage to the system than the current registry database).

Yep. I caught a virus, a nasty one aswell. First of all I noticed adverts keep on popping up in Internet Explorer windows, when IE wasn’t even running, then when I next booted up I was confronted with a fake anti-virus window and some thing telling me to download WinAntiVirus pro, so I did – not really, I wouldn’t download that. Anyway, next boot and nothing happened. I just logged on, and nothing came up. I hit “ctrl+alt+del” to bring up the “Windows Security” dialog box and opened Task Manager. Guess what, no “explorer.exe”! I hit “New Task…” and typed in “C:\WINDOWS\explorer.exe”, and I was confronted with a “You do not have the correct permissions to open this file” message. Damn! The main system file, and I couldn’t even open it. Something had to be seriously wrong, in the end I used IE’s file manager (similar to Windows Explorer) to back up my important files and decided to do a reformat.

Shame that I had to do one really, but thats viruses. When the installation was complete I loaded some crucial files and programs back on to it and immediately downloaded Avast! 4 Home Edition. Once it had installed, I was faced with 7 virus alerts! 7 virus alerts! My installation of Windows XP was less than 2 hours old, how could 7 viruses have got into my system? Anyway I moved them to the chest and everything seemed okay.

Lets hope it stays this way, since I’m on my forth XP installation in just under 2 years! Should operating systems really need reinstalling this many times?

Research

I did some research on the virus that I had caught, tracing back everything I had downloaded. It appears that the site http(colon)//www.theserials.com have changed their “textbox” attempt to a download.

I investigated where these downloads were coming from, it appears that the following addresses are spyware generators:

http(colon)//d.theserials.com/files/ANYTHING-HERE.exe
http(colon)//keys.thekeys.ws/files/ANYTHING-HERE.exe

If you type in a non-existing address such as:

http(colon)//d.theserials.com/some-non-existing-file/
http(colon)//keys.thekeys.ws/some-non-existing-file/

You will find that Apache (server) will return a 404 error for the server:

http(colon)//storage.ss.ru

Which obviously is a Russian server, not just from the domain extension but from the domain report, which says the server is located in St. Petersburg, running off the Davis Zao Network. The only whois information available for this is:

domain: SS.RU
type: CORPORATE
nserver: ns.avmgroup.ru.
nserver: ns2.avmgroup.ru.
state: REGISTERED, DELEGATED
org: JSC "Dewis"
phone: +7 812 5289637
phone: +7 812 5289685
fax-no: +7 812 5289637
fax-no: +7 812 5289685
e-mail: (removed)
registrar: RUCENTER-REG-RIPN
created: 1999.08.06
paid-till: 2008.09.01
source: TC-RIPN

Which really doesn’t tell us much about who owns this domain, note that the email address has been removed for anti-spam purposes. My conclusion is that the following addresses CNAME to http(colon)//storage.ss.ru:

http(colon)//d.theserials.com/
http(colon)//keys.thekeys.ws/

This is the end of this rather long blog post, but just be warned; think your safe without an anti-virus, think again!

So I got home from school, did what I do (drink a coke, and chill for a bit), and turned my computer on. All seems okay, I unlocked it (as I just hibernate, because its faster) and opened up MSN Messenger 7.5, my favourite MSN client. I hit “Sign In” and then to my disgust, I got a “You must upgrade to a later version to continue” message. WHAT! I downloaded, thinking it was some critical update and then I got a “Windows Live Messenger” installation window! ARGH! I HATE WINDOWS LIVE MESSENGER! Now I’ve had to download and install it, all of my settings have been lost, such as my tabbed conversations and the removed adverts. Its lucky I downloaded Messenger Plus Live! and MSN A-Patch to take care of everything.

I am still very angry at Microsoft for making not only me, most probably 100′s of others who used MSN Messenger 7.5 upgrade to what they think is a “better” product, I just think its silly, and why rebrand? Why rename MSN to Live? These questions remain unanswered, and Microsoft, you really are fools…

I think that a good beginning to this post would have been ‘Okay’ but I’ve used that too much to begin previous posts, so it all starts like this…

One day I was browsing the internet and came across this www.orangeproblems.co.uk website, because Orange are my ISP. I thought it was quite odd that they were voted worst ISP of 2007, they’re not that bad from my experience. Anyway I found this article of how to set up your printer with a Inventel Livebox (the routers that Orange you get ‘free’ with their wireless and talk packages but as soon as you cancel you’ve got to send them back to Orange – I would have prefered to have used my old NETGEAR router but the Livebox seems to be faster plus it has a phone plug for Orange’s talk service), so I followed this guide and got to the point where it came to select the drivers, and I thought i’m not digging out the printer disk, it’ll take ages and under my computer desk is a right mess; pieces of paper, lots of blank disks that have data on them but not labelled, random disk cases without the disks in them, etc. So I decided to use the nearest driver on the list, since the actual driver I want wasn’t on the list. I wanted a HP PSC 1510 driver but the closes to that was a HP PSC 950 so I just chose that and completed the guide. Then I set up the other machine (the one running Vista) exactly the same and printed a test page. When it started printing, first of all it took about three sheets of paper with it and began. It was about a third through the first page when it stopped and the light kept on flashing, and continued not to do much. Maybe it will continue, but no it didn’t so I checked the “See what’s printing?” screen and nothing was there. I thought a good old unplug would do the job. It did sort of but I’ve still got the problem of it locking up and not doing much.

When I get the time to dig out the printer disk then I’ll hit the “Have disk…” when resetting everything up. So the moral of this story is never choose the closest driver to the one you need if its not there because if you do then something really bad could happen like in my case where I nearly broken my printer and also using ‘Okay’ to begin a post too many times isn’t good so you should start off with something like “I think that a good beginning to this post would have been ‘Okay’ but I’ve used that too much to begin previous posts” when blogging.

Just browsing the internet and I came across…

Yes, Windows Vienna, Microsoft’s new “next generation” operating system. Not much info on it yet though, still newish news. I do know that its estimated that it won’t be avaliable until 2010. Long wait and XP will still probably be better.

I recently found myself downloading a copy of the ReactOS platform. Ofcourse I did download the Live CD but wasn’t able to run it, because this stupid machine decided it didn’t want to after I deleted all of my partitions. I haven’t had chance to try it out on ‘the other machine’ but will do. Don’t think it’ll work because it didn’t in Parallels. It was only 22.[something I can't remember]MB, well it was an ISO but it was all safely zipped up. I thought that it was quite small for a operating system, because Freespire took several hours to download on a somewhat fast connection, but the actual ISO file is little more than a shocking 75MB.

So after all that kerfuffle of the live cd, I just downloaded the QEMU one, which was again very small, obviously because it was all zipped up. I extracted it and ran the “boot.bat” file. I must say how very fast QEMU was at emulating it, it didn’t lag at all and took less than 20 seconds to load up fully. So I started exploring, but soon realised that it was a huge work in progress. The main reason I downloaded was because its claimed that it has the ability to run EXE files. If you don’t know what they are, they’re executables, or programs for short. Those of you may know that I have made some software in the past, namely AMV Studio and AMV Studio Utilites (they’re both different programs) and I wanted to test them on they’re. One problem is that because it was emulating in QEMU that has no options, it automatically chose the wrong network adapter, my internal one for Parallels, not my Local Area or Wireless (but my LAN cable wasn’t plugged in at the time, only Wireless was connected), I couldn’t access the internet. I could hardly find the browser, since it wasn’t in the ‘Internet’ menu, what a minute, there wasn’t even an ‘Internet’ menu. I had to run the ReactOS Explorer program, which when I pressed the ‘Web’ button, prompted me to download some Mozilla ActiveX control thing.

To illustrate some problems I’ve had and what ReactOS is currently capable of doing, I compiled a small gallery with about 6 screenshots. To see it, visit http://www.callumhaywood.com/services/reactos/screenshots/.

As the title of this post describes; it wasn’t my shiny new nice shiny (its not a mistake I’ve put it twice, it really is shiny!) Ubuntu disk that was causing the problem, because I downloaded my copy of Freespire. It was 686MB, and it only took about half an hour (fast DSL plus GetRight, which I told to do the 4 part thingy). I booted it up, selected the ‘FreespireLive’ option, waited about 5 minutes for it to load and guess what… as soon as it had finished loading, my damn screen turned off! WHY IS IT DOING THIS TO ME! It never did it before, that was before I deleted all of my hard disk partitions, and then started again with the ‘XP Recovery Disk’…

You may have read in some previous post, that I had the same problem with my Ubuntu 7.04 disk. Both of them, since I ordered 3 just to be safe (2x Intel x86-based systems compatible disks and 1 AMD64 or EM64T-based systems compatible disk). Its now really beginning to bug me, since ALL of my Linux disks work on that other laptop (argh! Its running Windows Vista aswell)…

I even Google’d for updates to my GPU (graphics processing unit, for those of you who didn’t know ) and graphics card (c’mon, you gotta know what one of those is, no? Well thats what Google is for…) but have found nothing. One thing I did find was that by pressing my ‘FN+F11′, FN is short for function (only for laptops) and F11 is the function key next to F12 at the top of your keyboard – anyway, pressing those combinations turns my screen on and off. So I pressed it (obviously) and the screen turned on (this was after it turned on after Freespire had loaded), but no luck… no it didn’t turn off again but it came up light grey with vertical black lines. Why? I don’t know… So I just hit the power button for 5 seconds, and left it to boot as usual.

I’ll post any updates Don’t forget to post your comments if you’ve experienced the same or similar issues. (But please remember, that I’m only 13 years old)…

Argh! So after reinstalling Windows (I won’t go into those details, I already posted about them), I remember that I need to install some printer drivers. I have the HP Installation Disk, somewhere, but its bundled with a load of rubbish (sorry HP, but its true), this ‘rubbish’ includes the somewhat useless “HP Digital Imaging Monitor” to make the ‘Start Scan’ button on the printer WORK! Its just easier to just go to the ‘My Computer’ screen and double click the scanner and choose the ‘Microsoft Scanner and Camera Wizard’ option to do a fast, reliable scan. Also it includes some “HP Service Support” (or something like that), to basically ‘assist’ you if you are in any sort of difficulties. What a load of bob that was! If I need to be assisted with any sort of difficulties, I’ll go and Google it, not launch some 30-minute load time, screwed up application. So I just downloaded the drivers WITHOUT the rubbish software as described above.

But my problem obviously wasn’t to do with the printer. Oh no, it wasn’t, you know. It was Windows File and Folder sharing. For some odd reason, I can access shared files and stuff on my server (thats not the ‘odd reason’, please read on), but I either can’t host any shared files, folders or printers with Windows XP or Windows Vista cannot connect to them :S. Mind you, what do you expect with Windows Vista:

Unless of course it was the problem with Windows XP, but highly unlikly in my opinion, since I can access shared folders, files and printers, from my server hosted on my machine, and as I already described, I can access my servers’ shared folders, files and printers (if I needed to). Now, even more obviously, its all Vista’s fault, since it can’t connect to shared folders, files and printers on my server or my machine (as I already described).

Off topic to the printer problem, if you use Windows Vista or are thinking of upgrading to it, I highly recommend that you visit the BadVista website. After that, you may wish to destroy your copy of it, or demand your money back (just don’t point your computers’ manufacturer to this blog post if you are thick enough to destroy a perfectly working machine), since after all, when you buy Windows Vista, you don’t own it. Microsoft lease you a copy of their sofware, emphasis on ‘their’. Thats the same with all Microsoft products (so I am aware of), thats also why they don’t release there source code.

“If only Microsofts philosophy was the same as Linux’s”

Post your comments on this issue!