Archive for March, 2007

Microsoft allows bypass of Vista activation

Thursday, March 29th, 2007

Heard about this hack on Leo Laporte’s Tech Guy show #335. As a way totally bypassing all the activation features of Windows Vista.

Why does SkipRearm even exist in Vista?

The Vista development teaam apparently inserted the SkipRearm loophole to help major corporations work around Microsoft’s new Volume Licensing Agreement. This new program, which the Redmond company calls “Volume Licensing 2.0,” requires buyers to set up a Key Management Service (KMS) host, as described by a Microsoft FAQ. Companies must choose from two types of digital keys and three different methods of activation to validate thousands of individual Vista machines within the corporate LAN.

The following describes the Registry key that’s involved.

Step 1. While running a copy of Windows Vista that hasn’t yet been activated, click the Start button, type regedit into the Search box, then press Enter to launch the Registry Editor.

Step 2. Explore down to the following Registry key:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE \ SOFTWARE \ Microsoft \ Windows NT \ CurrentVersion \ SL

Step 3. Right-click the Registry key named SkipRearm and click Edit. The default is a Dword (a double word or 4 bytes) with a hex value of 00000000. Change this value to any positive integer, such as 00000001, save the change, and close the Registry Editor.

Step 4. Start a command prompt with administrative rights. The fastest way to do this is to click the Start button, enter cmd in the Search box, then press Ctrl+Shift+Enter. If you’re asked for a network username and password, provide the ones that log you into your domain. You may be asked to approve a User Account Control prompt and to provide an administrator password.

Step 5. Type one of the following two commands and press Enter:

slmgr -rearm
or
rundll32 slc.dll,SLReArmWindows

Either command uses Vista’s built-in Software Licensing Manager (SLMGR) to push the activation deadline out to 30 days after the command is run. Changing SkipRearm from 0 to 1 allows SLMGR to do this an indefinite number of times. Running either command initializes the value of SkipRearm back to 0.

Step 6. Reboot the PC to make the postponement take effect. (After you log in, if you like, you can open a command prompt and run the command slmgr -xpr to see Vista’s new expiration date and time.)

Step 7. To extend the activation deadline of Vista indefinitely, repeat steps 1 through 6 as necessary.

Fraps

Sunday, March 25th, 2007

Fraps is a universal Windows application that can be used with all games using DirectX or OpenGL technology. In its current form Fraps performs many tasks and can best be described as:

Realtime Video Capture Software – Record video while playing your favorite game. Come join the Machinima revolution! Throw away the VCR, forget about using a DV cam, game recording has never been this easy! Fraps can capture audio and video up to 1152×864 and 100 frames per second!

Benchmarking Software – See how many Frames Per Second (FPS) you are getting in a corner of your screen. Perform custom benchmarks and measure the frame rate between any two points. Save the statistics out to disk and use them for your own reviews and applications.

Screen Capture Software – Take a screen shot with the press of a key! There’s no need to paste into a paint program every time you want to capture the screen. Your screen captures are also automatically named and timestamped.

Democracy Player

Tuesday, March 20th, 2007

Now if your like me and you like podcasts but only have an iPod nano then this program might be what you need. Back in september when the new iPods were released i wanted the nano. For some reason the bigger iPods have never appealed to me. Then i discovered this great web application that suits alot of my video watching needs. From Vidcasts to YouTube, this has it all and the best thing is that it is Open Source meaning that it is free!

To get in depth about some of the features one of my favourite features would be the ability to search websites like YouTube via the application and then be able to subscribe to a user or search and then download it. The whole interface is fairly intuitive. Combined with RSS integration for downloading podcasts and if you don’t feel like paying for a video iPod this is the perfect application for you.

Link

Skype

Tuesday, March 13th, 2007

Skype is one of the best and most popular Web telephony service out there. With Skype, you can easily make calls from one PC to another PC, from a PC to Telephone, or Telephone to PC with Skype IN, anywhere in the world. You can use webcams and have a conference with up to 10 people. Its Free to use and download thats the best part!!!

Dark Tip : Use LM Hashes to crack Windows Passwords

Sunday, March 11th, 2007

I am back with another dark tip. This time I am going to talk about how to crack Windows Passwords and will teach you the most simple way to prevent the crack from happening to you.

So firstly we need to get ourselves some Rainbow Tables. A Rainbow Table is a pre-computed set of LM hashes. LM is short for Lan Manager and that hash is what stores your Windows password because it would be “suicide” to keep windows passwords in plain simple text. A LM hash can range from 300 MB’s to 40 GB’s. You can crack most windows passwords with just about 1 GB’s worth of a Rainbow Table.

Once you have the table you could get rcrack but if you find that Command Prompt is just a pain to handle then you probably would not want to use it. So what you can do is get a program called Cain & Abel and that will store the Rainbow Table hashes in its interface when you tell it to crack. You should click the cracker tab and then the + button and for this example just tell it to pick up your local system. Now right the click the account you want to crack and select dictionary attack then LM Hashes. Now add your Rainbow tables and simply select start. Once it has finished off and if it does tell you your password then you need to secure that. There is a link included on how to stop LM hashes.

Microsoft’s How – To stop storing LM hashes

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