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| Anonymous |
 Posted: 24-03-2003 16:07 Post subject: |
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| Excuse my ludditeness, but what is this content.ie folder, then? And why is it so hidden away? |
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pizzed_off with the luggage Joined: 06 Nov 2002 Total posts: 9664 |
| Posted: 26-03-2003 14:47 Post subject: |
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off track but
this what ive been "THINKING!!!!!"
how many of these companys that "offer free downloads like anti this, anti that, which may or not already be hacked"? have no allegded conection with mircolimp
this is only a writen thourght
(here come the lible/slander court appearences  )
Last edited by pizzed_off on 26-03-2003 14:49; edited 1 time in total |
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| Anonymous |
| Posted: 27-03-2003 15:08 Post subject: |
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| Great. I've got Windows XP... |
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| Zoffre Joined: 23 Nov 2002 Total posts: 604 |
| Posted: 09-05-2003 09:27 Post subject: Microsoft Word 2002 |
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Hello there, I wonder if someone can enlighten me on this. I recently bought a new computer with Windows XP. It came with a software package of Microsoft Works Suite 2003, which included Word 2002. I installed Word, filling in the serial number on the back of the packaging, so it knows it's not a pirated copy - all well and good, until I tried to use it and then it tells me that I also have to "activate" the software via the web (or you can ring a telephone number that they give you). I haven't activated it yet because my internet is not set up at the moment (I'm moving house so I want to set it all up when I have access to the new phone line) but I'm a little dubious as to the reasons for this "activation". Can anyone tell me what is actually involved in this (I assume you have to give them your address and other details  ) or any theories they have about the need for this "activation"?
I do think it's a liberty when I've already paid for my software, and then Microsoft come along and tell me I can't use it unless I'm willing to give my details away (the actual message says that if I don't activate it the software can be used another 49 times before being disabled)...!
Hmm, I don't think I've explained this too well - basically I'm just suspicious of Microsoft. I would have bought a Mac but I couldn't afford it  |
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| _schnor Stand back boy!
Joined: 14 Aug 2001 Total posts: 990 Location: Llangollen Gender: Male |
| Posted: 09-05-2003 09:53 Post subject: |
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hmm, doesn't sound good - link 1 and link 2. TBH the best thing you can do is visit the MS site and have a root, it looks like the same thing  |
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| mejane1 miaow, miaow... purrrr Joined: 17 Jan 2002 Total posts: 1637 Gender: Unknown |
| Posted: 09-05-2003 10:03 Post subject: |
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Madcat, it probably is just an anti-piracy measure. Just set up a new Hotmail account (this really annoys them) and make up a name & address.
Jane.
PS the days of macs being "the computer for the rest of us millionaires" are long since gone - they're quite cheap now  Whether Apple is more trustworthy than Miscrosoft is a different matter... |
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| Zoffre Joined: 23 Nov 2002 Total posts: 604 |
| Posted: 09-05-2003 11:53 Post subject: |
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| schnor wrote: |
hmm, doesn't sound good - link 1 and link 2. TBH the best thing you can do is visit the MS site and have a root, it looks like the same thing |
Ah yes, thanks Schnor - I did just that and came up with this. They claim that you won't have to give them any of your personal details and that it's all "anonymous" but I still don't believe them. Paranoid? Me? 
| mejane wrote: |
PS the days of macs being "the computer for the rest of us millionaires" are long since gone - they're quite cheap now Whether Apple is more trustworthy than Miscrosoft is a different matter... |
Yeah, I suppose they are actually - I saw a few in PC World (mmm, shiny... ) but what with me being a right miserly bugger I plumped for a boring old PC that was £100 cheaper... |
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| butterfly27 Hanuman Joined: 28 Feb 2002 Total posts: 788 Gender: Female |
| Posted: 09-05-2003 12:55 Post subject: |
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| melf wrote: |
off track but
this what ive been "THINKING!!!!!"
how many of these companys that "offer free downloads like anti this, anti that, which may or not already be hacked"? have no allegded conection with mircolimp
this is only a writen thourght
(here come the lible/slander court appearences ) |
The only libel/slander litigation is likely to arise from your signature, pal!
I don't know where you're coming from but us butterflies never carry chipped vibratory equipment. |
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| StePickford I've got a title! Joined: 15 Jan 2003 Total posts: 69 Gender: Unknown |
| Posted: 09-05-2003 13:40 Post subject: |
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While I think there is plenty to dislike about Microsoft's policies as a company, I don't really go along with the paranoia about what nasty tricks Microsoft's software is actually up to on your machine.
There are so many microsoft haters out there in the hardcore computing / hacking community that the effects and workings of Microsofts OS's etc are looked at very closely. MS just couldn't get away with releasing unannounced spy ware without it being virtually instantly discovered and shouted about all over the net - and they have plenty to lose from more bad publicity.
Remember the fuss when NT4 was released in server and workstation versions, and it was discovered (after about 2 days) that the cheaper workstation version was identical to the server version except for a coded software limit to only 10 network connections? Microsoft software gets *closely* scrutinised.
A lot of the scare stories in threads like this are largely computer ignorance. Hidden system files? Nothing scary or insidious about them. The hidden / system flag has been there from the first days of MSDOS (I think!), but recent versions of windows have started not displaying such files by default to stop non-computer literate users from accidently breaking their systems. They can be easily made visible within windows. Its all just part of the efforts to make computers into consumer goods.
I personally hate my computer doing anything I haven't explicitly instructed it to do, but so much of Microsoft software is based on a different philosophy - that of improving the 'experience' of the user by attempting to help you (taking paper clips!!!) or automatically storing info you don't want (big web cache's etc). There's no conspiricay about this, its all just an attempt to make more money by widening their market to non computer literate consumers, whom presumably they've decided want all this crap.
Microsoft have some pretty insidious plans for the way we buy their software and the way their consumers get locked in, but they announce all these things in advance, there's just not much you can do about it. |
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| wilbur42 Howling at the Half Moon Joined: 17 Sep 2002 Total posts: 44 Gender: Unknown |
| Posted: 11-05-2003 00:45 Post subject: |
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hi folks.
was just looking on the bbc news website for a link i found the other day on the subject of internet security/spyware and the like, and what should appear but this -
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/3013665.stm
funny, that... must be a lot of it about
will look out the other link too, 'fraid i seem to be too much of a luddite even to bookmark these things... |
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| wilbur42 Howling at the Half Moon Joined: 17 Sep 2002 Total posts: 44 Gender: Unknown |
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| Anonymous |
| Posted: 18-05-2003 16:11 Post subject: Re: Can we trust MicroSoft? |
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| St.Clair wrote: |
Does anyone else have a Micosoft conspiricy theory?
.....oh no....a black van has pulled up and my doors been.......
.....Only Jokin' |
Don't worry - if it was a Microsoft van it would have crashed on the way to your house. |
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| WhistlingJack Joined: 29 Oct 2003 Total posts: 4297 Location: The Sewers of The Strand Age: 9 Gender: Unknown |
| Posted: 31-05-2006 11:26 Post subject: |
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Seeing as this thread discusses MS' shady dealings, I think it's appropriate to post this story: -
| Quote: | Amnesty: Microsoft helped Israeli Police in Vanunu probe
Human rights group says company complied with request by Israel police to hand over information on nuclear whistleblower
Amnesty International's British branch chief, Keith Allen, said Microsoft helped Israeli Police interrogate Mordechai Vanunu, who leaked nuclear secrets to the foreign press.
Allen, writing in the British Sunday newspaper, the Observer, wrote: "Amnesty is concerned about its co-operation with the Israeli authorities in prosecuting nuclear whistleblower Mordechai Vanunu for communicating with foreign journalists. Vanunu was imprisoned for more than 18 years after disclosing Israel's nuclear capabilities to the UK media, and only released on condition he stays in Israel and does not talk to foreigners. Microsoft is reported to have complied with government demands for his computer records, which could lead to him being sent back to prison."
Amnesty International did not give further details about its claims. The organization's website claimed that the judge in Vanunu's case agreed not to base his decision on information obtained by Microsoft, but added that the details in the hands of the authorities could limit Vanunu's freedom in the future.
Readers of the site were asked to send a formulated petition on what Amnesty International called Microsoft's "repression of human rights" in Israel and other countries.
Copyright © Yedioth Internet. |
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| WhistlingJack Joined: 29 Oct 2003 Total posts: 4297 Location: The Sewers of The Strand Age: 9 Gender: Unknown |
| Posted: 31-05-2006 12:25 Post subject: |
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| Quote: | Chinese Blogger Slams Microsoft
By Kevin Poulsen Kevin Poulsen, 02:00 AM Jun, 20, 2005 EDT
SHANGHAI, China -- Twenty-eight floors above the traffic-choked streets of China's most wired city, blogger and tech entrepreneur Isaac Mao sums up his opinion of Microsoft and its treatment of the Chinese bloggers with one word. "Evil," says Mao. "Internet users know what's evil and what's not evil, and MSN Spaces is an evil thing to Chinese bloggers."
Mao, 33, knows something about the topic. In 2002, he was one of China's first bloggers, and since then his ideas on harnessing blogs, peer-to-peer and grass-roots technologies to empower the Chinese people have made him a respected voice in the global blogosphere.
Today, Mao is a partner in a venture capital firm that funds Chinese internet startups, including a blog-hosting service occupying part of the market Microsoft hopes to move in on with MSN Spaces.
The Chinese version of MSN Spaces is linked to the new MSN China portal, launched last month in partnership with Shanghai Alliance Investment, a company funded by the city government here. Last week that partnership plunged Microsoft into the long-standing controversy surrounding the Chinese government's internet censorship policies, after Asian blogs and news reports revealed that MSN Spaces blocks Chinese bloggers from putting politically sensitive language in the names of their blogs, or in the titles of individual blog entries.
The words and phrases blocked by Microsoft include "Taiwan independence," "Dalai Lama," "human rights," "freedom" and "democracy."
In a statement, lead MSN product manager Brooke Richardson said, "MSN abides by the laws, regulations and norms of each country in which it operates. The content posted on member spaces is the responsibility of individuals who are required to abide by MSN's code of conduct."
Mao dismisses that statement as disingenuous. The company, he says, is going above and beyond official censorship practices, which deal decisively with speech critical of the ruling communist government, but don't outright ban words like "freedom."
"They could try to reach a balance, so the users will understand, but the government won't try to make trouble for the business," says Mao. "Instead, they're just trying to flatter the government."
Existing Chinese blog-hosting companies strike that balance by policing their members' blogs for postings that might get the company and its users in trouble: The phrase "China needs democracy," for example, would set off a red flag. But "democracy" itself is not a dirty word, says Mao. Likewise, text about human rights abuses outside of China is not banned.
That Microsoft is using technology to impose new limits on Chinese speech seems particularly galling to the entrepreneur. An engineer by training, Mao lived for a time in Silicon Valley developing chip technologies for Intel, then returned to China and started an educational software business that he later sold to a publicly traded company. He now spends much of his time working out ways people in China can use the internet to communicate and collaborate more easily and efficiently.
A website he co-founded, cnblog.org, is a blog about blogging that did much to incubate the Chinese blogger movement. He's guided his VC firm into investments in Chinese blogging and social-software startups. And Mao is lending his support to a grass-roots Adopt a Chinese Blog program that aims to help bloggers move their hosting offshore, ducking a new regulation requiring owners of websites hosted in China to register with the government by June 30.
Chinese netizens numbered 87 million last year, and about 1 million of them -- evenly split between genders -- are now blogging. When the number of bloggers grows to 10 million, the Chinese government may find itself unable to control the content, says Mao, even with its vast array of human and technological resources devoted to the task.
Chief among those resources is what's colloquially called the "Great Firewall," a notorious filtering system that prevents Chinese netizens from visiting websites of which the government disapproves.
The firewall was in evidence last week during a late-afternoon visit to a sprawling, smoke-filled internet bar in the Xi Jia Hui district, where an after-school crowd of fashionably dressed young people streamed in to nearly fill the nearly 200-plus PC stations.
Major news sites like CNN.com, MSNBC and Wired.com were freely accessible from the PCs. Google could be reached at first, but the caches were blocked, as was Google News. The BBC's front page was accessible, but individual stories were not. Anonymizer.com was blocked.
Amnesty International's website was blocked, suggesting that the Chinese government holds the international human rights group in the same regard as the Bush administration. Human Rights Watch was blocked, along with nine of the top 10 results from a Google search on "China" and "human rights." After running that search, Google was blocked from the PC for about 10 minutes.
Whatever its effect, the Great Firewall was not a great hindrance to the youthful netizens resting in wide, comfortable chairs, drinking soft drinks and smoking cigarettes. They were all playing video games, ranging from online poker to World of Warcraft, with nary a web browser or RSS reader in sight.
© Copyright 2006, Lycos, Inc. |
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| Degrizzzz Great Old One Joined: 04 Feb 2003 Total posts: 169 Gender: Unknown |
| Posted: 31-05-2006 12:44 Post subject: |
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| _schnor wrote: | Just uninstall KaZaA (start - settings - control panel - add remove programmes) and then manually delete your kazaa folder, and then install KaZaA lite, which installs in exactly the same way you would with kazaa
To remove spyware, look at St.Clairs post or find and install AdAware |
Simply remove Kazaa and dont reinstall it at all, bloody thing will only ever give you problems, its full of fake files, virii, and is one of the most watched p2p systems out there, mainly because
so many novice computer users use it.
If you must use it, get yourself peerguardian2, dont share ANY copyrighted files, hug your imaginary guitar and get a good job. |
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