IT LOOKS LIKE Microsoft’s unhackable OS activation malware has been hacked.

There is an active thread at the Keznews forums (account needed), and a summary on its main page about the crack.

It is a simple brute force attack, dumb as a rock that just tries keys. If it gets one, you manually have to check it and try activation. Is is ugly, takes hours, is far from point and click, but it is said to work.

Source: the inquirer

Coffee behemoth Starbucks has launched a new cell phone-based service that lets you efficiently locate the nearest store and get your caffeine buzz on. Starting today, when you send a text message with the ZIP code of your location to the number “MYSBUX” (697289), you’ll receive another text with the addresses of the three nearest Starbucks locations. It won’t cost you anything besides your cell phone plan’s normal texting fees.

Yahoo’s e-mail service is not infected with a computer virus, despite a warning from Symantec that says it is.

Starting sometime on Tuesday, accessing the beta version of Yahoo Mail on a PC with Symantec’s updated antivirus software caused alarm bells to go off. The security software reported finding the “Feebs” worm on the Yahoo Web pages.

That warning was in error, Symantec said Wednesday.

“Symantec antivirus products…triggered a false-positive alert with Yahoo Mail beta,” Vincent Weafer, a senior director at Symantec Security Response, said in an e-mailed statement.

Google has added real-time traffic data for several major cities to its mapping service, the company said Wednesday.

The traffic information is integrated with Google Maps and is available in more than 30 American cities, including San Francisco, Dallas, Chicago and New York.

The data is provided for major highways and is color-coded to signify traffic conditions: green means no congestion; yellow is for minor holdups; and red means significant slowdowns.

According to Google product manager Carl Sjogreen, the data is aggregated from several sources, including road sensors, as well as car and taxi fleets.

As a result, Sjogreen said, there is sometimes not enough data to report road conditions. In that case, the roads appear gray.

For the time being, he added, Google will provide traffic data only for major highways, but it may expand the offering eventually.

Computer maker Lenovo Inc. on Thursday recalled about 100,000 lithium-ion batteries used in ThinkPad laptops after receiving four reports of the Sanyo-built batteries overheating.

In one case, a consumer suffered minor eye irritation, the company said.

The Chinese PC maker, which has its world headquarters in Research Triangle Park, said consumers should stop using the batteries immediately. The batteries can overheat and pose a fire hazard if the laptop is dropped, Lenovo said.

Source: AP

A technology that allows movies to be downloaded and burned to blank DVDs using the same content-protection system as commercial discs received official approval on Thursday.

CSS Managed Recording was approved at a meeting of the DVD Forum in Tokyo, according to a source close to the forum.

The technology will require discs that are slightly different from the conventional DVD-Rs found in shops today. The burned discs will be compatible with the vast majority of consumer DVD players, according to the DVD Copy Control Association (DVD CCA), which proposed the technology. The DVD CCA is responsible for licensing the CSS (Content Scrambling System) copy-protection system used on most commercial DVDs.

Despite Thursday’s approval, services that allow consumers to legally download and burn movies in their own homes are unlikely to appear quickly. The DVD CCA said it will be initially restricted to professional uses. These might include kiosks in retail stores where consumers can purchase and burn discs in a controlled environment.

The European Union on Thursday threatened Microsoft Corp. with fines of up to $4 million a day, claiming the software giant had failed to live up to promises for providing affordable and useful information that could help rivals make software for workgroup servers compatible with its Windows system.

“This is a company which apparently does not like to have to conform with antitrust decisions,” said EU Commission spokesman Jonathan Todd.

A call was placed for comment to a Microsoft representative in Europe but there was no immediate reply.

An Australian state has banned the video Web site YouTube from government schools in a crackdown on cyber-bullying, a minister said Thursday.

Victoria, Australia’s second most populous state, banned the popular video-sharing site from its 1,600 government schools after a gang of male school students videotaped their assault on a 17-year-old girl on the outskirts of Melbourne.

The assault, which is being investigated by police, was uploaded on YouTube late last year.

Education Services Minister Jacinta Allan said the schools and their Internet service providers already filtered the Web sites that were available to students, and YouTube had been added to a list of blocked sites.

The state government “has never tolerated bullying in schools and this zero tolerance approach extends to the online world,” Allan said.