In a few days Microsoft will be pushing out a new update for “Windows Activation Technologies (WAT)”. The update to WAT will be able to detect more than 70 known activation cracks for Windows 7 and, if detected on your computer, will flag your copy of Windows 7 as an illegal copy. Your desktop will return to a plain desktop and Windows will issue periodic notifications informing you of your illegal copy.

However what comes as a shock to many is that this update is not only voluntary (you can choose not to in stall it) it also does not reduce any functionality within Windows, meaning you won’t be locked out of your account and no services will be disabled.

Windows Activation Technologies Update [Windows Blog]

Steve Jobs has always had the reputation for speaking his mind, and he's done it yet again. In a recent 'Town Hall' meeting at Apple after the announcement of the iPad, Jobs expressed some candid views on the wonderful world of tech, specifically about Google, Adobe, Apple's answer to competition, and Blu-Ray. Find out more after the break.

The official iPhone SDK has always been exclusive to Mac osx operating systems with very few exceptions. Options for Windows users include programming Actionscript applications with Adobe CS5, and developement with web applications for Safari. Both of which are very limited and can't be submitted to Apple.

DragonFireSDK is a new solution which enables developers to code applications using Windows Visual C++. This application lets you code in C or C++ as opposed to in Objective-C on the official development kit. Once completed, your project will automatically be converted to Objective-C, then submitted to the App-Store through the DragonFire Distribution Portal, or through your own developer account.

"UnStacker" is a free application created with the DragonFireSDK which is currently on the App-Store, if you would like to check out its capabilities. This development kit will cost $49.95 when released. However, if you intend to buy the software, beta copies are given away for free by requesting one from support@dragonfiresdk.com. Make sure you provide a good reason why you should have a copy though.

Official Website: DragonFireSDK

The latest update for the free, open source internet browser, Mozilla Firefox has arrived and does it ever look beautiful. This update introduces a large variety of compelling features that may bring other internet browser users over to using it. To start things off, Firefox 3.6 is twenty percent faster than its previous version, which is a nice improvement if you switched to Chrome previously for increased speed. Check out the official new features list.

• Personas: Personalize the look of your Firefox by selecting new themes called Personas in a single click and without a restart.
• Plugin Updater: To keep you safe from potential security vulnerabilities, Firefox will now detect out of date plugins.
• Stability improvements: Firefox 3.6 significantly decreased crashes caused by third party software – all without sacrificing our extensibility in any way.
• Form Complete: When filling out an online form, Firefox suggests information for fields based on your common answers in similar field.
• Performance: Improved JavaScript performance, overall browser responsiveness, and startup time.
• Open Video and Audio: With the world’s best implementation of HTML 5 audio and video support, now video can be displayed full screen and supports poster frames.

Ever wonder what a firefox launch was like? Check it out on their official stream to see. Don't be fooled by their description. "MGMT" stands for management. They're not having an MGMT concert, unfortunately.

Source: Mozilla Blog

Google announced earlier today that in mid-December of 2009, it and 34 other large companies were targeted by a "highly sophisticated... attack." While not mentioning the Chinese government in their announcement, Google's response towards the breach definitely hints towards it. As it stands, their solution is simple yet huge; to completely shut down their services in China and close all offices located there. Google's unwillingness to continue censoring search results in China also appears to play a factor, with them citing  "...the attempts over the past year to further limit free speech..." as another factor for their possible closure. So far Google stands by it's assertion that they are still 'reviewing' the overall decision regarding China, but given that the company executives in the US ordered the review, the signs don't look good. Some positive things have come out of this however, namely Google furthering it's own security and other companies being highlighted to their own security concerns.

Regarding the third parties involved, United States cyber warefare expert, James Mulvenon, says the attacks came from Taiwanese internet addresses. The attacks also nearly all focused on Silcon Valley companies, perhaps hinting at a distaste with US companies. Furthermore, Mulvenon believes that "This attack highlights the fact that cyberwarfare has basically gone to the next level," as well as that "For Google to pull up stakes and basically pull out China, the attack must have been large in scope and very penetrating." The repercussions of what Google has done will definitely be a source of commentary for many weeks to come, but as for the content of those repercussions, it's anybody's guess.

There is an endless supply of tools for us to utilize to grant ourselves more control over our keyboards through macro creation and profiles but the same cannot be said about mice. While you can often find powerful mouse customization software accompanying your mouse, you'll be hard pressed to find a suitable replacement if you don't want to use the included software or if you do not have the mouse that that specific software was designed for.

Whether you choose not to use the software that was made for your mouse because it is buggy or forces mouse acceleration on you, our latest Curious Finding: X-Mouse Button Control by Highresolution Enterprises will give you more control over your rodent without needing to have a special model. Although X-Mouse Button Control is a powerful program that is not resource intensive, it only has support for 5 mouse buttons, a scroll wheel and tilt functionality.

Still, if you're like me and use your mouse to begin transmitting on Mumble or Ventrilo or if you just want to disable your mouse's backwards and forwards buttons, then you'll want to grab this program to save yourself from a lot of headaches.

System Requirements: Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows 2003 and Windows Vista, Windows 2008 and Windows 7. Both 32bit and 64bit. You will also need a mouse and driver that supports 5 buttons. NOTE: If your mouse has 5 buttons but the 4th and 5th buttons don't do anything in XP64 by default - this probably wont work for you.

License: X-Mouse Button Control is completely free.

Screenshot:

Download: [X-Mouse Button Control]

If you've already tried X-Mouse Button Control and know of a better alternative or need help using the program, please leave a comment.

When it comes to yelling at your teammates that you're being attacked and begging for cover, nothing brings your point across better than voice communication. Of course, most games come with good ol' text chat but having to stop defending yourself just to ask for help is sure to lose you the match or game. Although most games offer in-game voice communication, there are some modern games (like Shattered Horizon) that do not and, let's face it, the majority of the time the in-game voice quality is absolutely horrendous anyway. This is where today's Curious Finding Mumble comes in to save us from having to put up with robotic, static-filled conversation.

While Mumble isn't the first application to provide this functionality, it is arguably the program that does it best. Other voice communication (or VOIP) software like Ventrilo and TeamSpeak simply can't match the voice quality or the price of Mumble. When using Mumble I often find myself looking around to see where the person talking to me is standing, simply because it sounds like they are right there in the room with me. Whereas when using another voice communication application or in-game voice chat, I sometimes find it difficult to understand what people are saying because the voice quality isn't good or clear enough.

If you’re like me and you tend to wonder what things you have installed on your system or you want to take good care of your system, you’ll find yourself regularly looking at Add/Remove Programs to decide on what junk you can remove from your system.

When doing so, one thing will stick out like a sore thumb if you’ve been a good computer user and have been keeping your system up to date: multiple installations of different Java versions. Now, you could go and manually uninstall all the other Java versions – like I used to do – but why waste time?

Today’s Curious Finding makes that task as simple as clicking a few times. JavaRa by RaProducts allows you to easily remove older versions of Java and update your system to the latest version with a few clicks of your mouse.

RaProducts describes it best:

"JavaRa is a simple tool that does a simple job: it removes old and redundant versions of the Java Runtime Environment (JRE). Simply select “Check for Updates” or “Remove Older Version” to begin."

System Requirements: Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows 2000, Windows XP, and Windows Vista without UAC (although I can use it just fine with UAC).

License: JavaRa is completely free and open source.

Screenshot:

Download: [JavaRa]

With the advent of rich text formatting came the annoyance of having to deal with copying text with the formatting included. Usually, this isn't a problem but if you, say, use Microsoft Word to write-up articles and use WordPress's visual editor, then you'll see what I mean.

Whenever you copy text from Word to a WordPress visual editor, the formatting goes along with it. This usually results in oddly formatted articles because of a different font or colour that you use in Word and can be annoying to have to fix. In fact, it is so annoying that I usually just delete the whole article and re-paste it again, but this time I'll go through Notepad first: copy text from Word to Notepad then to WordPress - effectively removing all rich text formatting, as Notepad does not support it.

Or you also have the option of not using the Visual Editor and using the HTML editor instead. The problem with this is that quite a few plugins just aren't as cool when you use the boring old HTML editor. Not to forget that a lot of WordPress's - or any visual editor's - core functionality is really only realised through the use of the visual editor. Even more important is the fact that, for one example, when creating a link using the visual editor, it adds on key information that helps with SEO or standards compliance like a title for the link that would otherwise be omitted when using the HTML editor.

Up until now, I've opted to go the HTML editor route, switching to the visual editor when need be but this still proves to be annoying. Thankfully, there is an answer: PureText by Steve Miller.

In a nutshell, PureText automates the Word -> Notepad -> WordPress method and proves to be significantly less annoying. Once you've downloaded PureText and run it (no installation required), it'll add a system tray icon that can be clicked on to convert the current clipboard to pure text or right clicked on to get to the usual options menu. To happily become rich text formatting free, you simply hit the assigned hotkey (WIN + V by default) and it will convert the clipboard to pure text and paste it (if that's what you want it to do or you could just have the hotkey only convert the clipboard to pure text).

System Requirements: Windows 9x, Windows ME, Windows 2000, Windows NT, Windows XP, Windows 2003, Windows Vista, Windows 7. Both 32bit and 64bit.

License: PureText is completely free.

Download: [PureText]

Are you faced with the same annoyances? Let us know so I know I'm not suffering alone. Or maybe you know of a program that does this better? Leave a comment so we can hear about it!