Microsoft Corp. acknowledged Wednesday that it needs to better inform users that its tool for determining whether a computer is running a pirated copy of Windows also quietly checks in daily with the software maker. The company said the undisclosed daily check is a safety measure designed to allow the tool, called Windows Genuine Advantage, to quickly shut down in case of a malfunction. For example, if the company suddenly started seeing a rash of reports that Windows copies were pirated, it might want to shut down the program to make sure it wasn’t delivering false results.

“It’s kind of a safety switch,” said David Lazar, who directs the Windows Genuine Advantage program. Lazar said the company added the safety measure because the piracy check, despite widespread distribution, is still a pilot program. He said the company was worried that it might have an unforeseen emergency that would require the program to terminate quickly.

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Source: Yahoo! News via MSFN

All the Microsoft servers worldwide (Singapore, Redmond, California Server Farm, Dublin, and India) have been prepped for the distribution of the beta 2 of Windows Vista. At this current moment the links provided may not be “live” as of yet but keep trying as these are the official links! There is still no world for the public release of Windows Server “Longhorn” as of yet.
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Support for Microsoft Windows XP Service Pack 1 (SP1) and Service Pack 1a (SP1a) ends on October 10, 2006. Microsoft will end support on this date. This also includes security updates for these service packs. Microsoft is providing final notifications to customers regarding the end of support for these products.
Microsoft is ending support for these products as part of the Microsoft Support Lifecycle Service Pack support policy. We recommend that customers who are still running Windows XP SP1 or SP1a upgrade to Windows XP Service Pack 2 as soon as possible.

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Source: Microsoft via Flexbeta

Today, Phillips has announced a new Blu-ray optical drive and media, providing up to 50GB of storage on a single disc. This is a considerable amount more than current dual-layer DVDs that can fit up to 8.5GB.

The two speed “triple writer” drive is also capable of burning DVDs and CDs, so only one drive is necessary in a machine. The drive will be shipping in August, while writable media (BD-R) will be available from July. Re-writable media, or BD-RE, will be available around September.

Initial media will only be single layer and will fit up to 25GB, compared to the 50GB of the dual layer discs, which won’t be available until Christmas. At 1x speed, it will take roughly 135 minutes to burn 25GB, or close to 70 minutes when at 2x.

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Source: Trusted Reviews via Neowin

So, maybe you weren’t quite ready to set you lap on fire with that JoyTech LCD portable Xbox 360 setup — we understand. Might we recommend a slightly more portable way to get your old school Xbox out and about? Hacker extraordinare “Dave” has managed to squeeze that beast into a custom case, along with a battery, screen, and front mounted controls. We can’t say we’ve discovered our new commuting companion, but for sheer leet-ocity, this really takes the cake. We aren’t spying a drive bay anywhere on here, so we’re guessing this is one those modded Xboxen all the kids are talking about these days. There’s even an Ethernet jack for subway LAN parties and other frivolities. Has Ben Heckendorn met his match?

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Source: Engadget via Flexbeta

I chatted with Bryan Starbuck and his team about the new mail client that works with Windows Live Mail and all your POP3 and IMAP accounts as well… and RSS… and seems to go way beyond the feature set of Oulook Express. The new Windows Live Mail Desktop beta that is shown in the video will be released in early June. Users can sign-up on http://ideas.live.com/ in order to receive an invite as the beta scales up over the next several months. Note that the name “Windows Live Mail Desktop beta” is a place holder name until the final name comes in.

Video: Windows Live Mail Desktop Beta

Mozilla’s Firefox browser has been updated to fix 13 security vulnerabilities, five rated critical. The open-source group on June 1 shipped Firefox 1.5.0.4, a security and stability release to correct flaws that could cause security bypass, cross-site scripting, system access and HTTP response-smuggling attacks.

Security alerts aggregator Secunia rates the update as “highly critical” because of the risk of remote code execution exploitation. According to Mozilla’s advisory, the most serious flaws occur because of errors in the browser engine that could be exploited to cause a memory corruption. This may allow arbitrary code execution attacks.

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Source: eWeek via MSFN

Though it was designed as the heart of the upcoming Sony PlayStation3 game console, the STI Cell processor has created quite a stir in the computational science community, where the processor’s potential as a building block for high performance computers has been widely discussed and speculated upon.

To evaluate Cell’s potential, computer scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory evaluated the processor’s performance in running several scientific application kernels, then compared this performance against other processor architectures. The results of the group’s evaluation were presented in a paper at the ACM International Conference on Computing Frontiers, held May 2-6, 2006, in Ischia, Italy.

“Overall results demonstrate the tremendous potential of the Cell architecture for scientific computations in terms of both raw performance and power efficiency,” the authors wrote. While their current analysis uses hand-optimized code on a set of small scientific kernels, the results are striking. On average, Cell is eight times faster and at least eight times more power efficient than current Opteron and Itanium processors, despite the fact that Cell’s peak double precision performance is fourteen times slower than its peak single precision performance.

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Source: HPC Wire via ieXbeta

As expected, The Pirate Bay is back online – in the Netherlands. An IP check shows it’s hosted at Leaseweb, the same server Newnava and Torrentspy use. This provider doesn’t easily move when threatened with law which is probably the reason for the choice.

Appearantly the owners of the Pirate Bay had a full backup of the servers, because all the torrents are back online. Not all functions are fully functional yet, but that’s only a matter of time.

The MPAA who was cheering loudly last week when the servers where confiscated won’t be so happy now. An image of the Pirate Bay logo has a small change in it, saying the movie industry can well…. that.

Because the Pirate Bay isn’t afraid of legal actions, these actions will probably come. Meaning for the Netherlands it’s going to be made clear if torrentsites are legal or not.

Source: The Pirate Bay via Flexbeta

CCleaner is a freeware system optimization and privacy tool. It removes unused files from your system – allowing Windows to run faster and freeing up valuable hard disk space. It also cleans traces of your online activities such as your Internet history. But the best part is that it’s fast (normally taking less that a second to run) and contains NO Spyware or Adware!

What’s New:
- Added Opera 9 detection and cleaning.
- Fixed bug in Uninstaller tool.
- Fixed overflow error when Secure Deleting large files.
- Fixed bug in ActiveX/COM Issue cleaning.
- Updated Desktop shortcut cleaning to include Quick Launch.
- Added Windows Defender cleaning.
- Updated Nero Burning ROM cleaning.
- Startup speed increase.
- Minor bug fixes and display tweaks.

Download: CCleaner 1.30.310 Standard Build (1,423KB) | Basic (559KB – No Toolbar) | Slim (417KB – No Toolbar, English Only)
View: CCleaner HomePage
Source: MSFN