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Windows Genuine Advantage bypassed again!
March 11, 2006

Posted by Roel in : Technical , 1 comment so far

UPDATE: This bypass method described below doesn’t work anymore. Visit mydigitallife’s article for an updated (3-dec-2006) and easy method of bypassing WGA/Notifications/Visiting Windows Updates, etc.

In 2005 Microsoft introduced Windows Genuine Advantage (WGA) which was (also) meant to reduce illegal copies. Since then, people who had an ‘illegal’ Corporate copy of Windows XP or Server 2003 were not able to use the Windowsupdate site anymore.
Shortly after that people found a way to bypass the checks required by the Windowsupdate site by disabling the WGA ActiveX plugin from their Internet Explorer.
It could be done by pasting this line in your browser:
javascript:void(window.g_sDisableWGACheck='all');
Microsoft fixed it and bypassing was no longer possible after March 2005.

The following content is for informational and educational purposes only.

I came accross the website of djlizard and he found a NEW way to bypass the checks at the Windowsupdate site.

  1. Close all your browsers (this is really important)
  2. Click Start -> Run -> Type: regsvr32 /u LegitCheckControl.dll
  3. Go to the WindowsUpdate site, select typical or custom. It will show the Activate button to activate your copy of windows. Click Start -> Run -> Type: regsvr32 LegitCheckControl.dll and go back one page in your browser. Now you can click typical or custom again and it won’t show the Activate button but continues to search for updates.

Script it! A logfiles compress/backup script
March 5, 2006

Posted by Roel in : Technical , 1 comment so far

Lesson of this article is: Script It!
I will also show an in depth example of a sheduled script which will zip/rotate/delete/move/copy you logfiles. This is a typical task everyone with a webserver would automate/script because you want to save your logfiles for statistics and to track ‘bad’ visitors while zipping them reduces it’s size approximately 25 times. So a 100MB logile will only be 4MB.

You can much better script the tasks you do often than doing it by hand all the time.
Advantages are:

Before scripting tasks i advise you to do the tasks manually a few times, then you exactly know which steps you have to do and which are always the same, you have more feeling with the task now.

(more…)

Always do your calculations based on days !
January 30, 2006

Posted by Roel in : Technical , add a comment

This is a simple example of what can happen when you calculate with years only:

Imagine you had a backup script which would delete all old backups, older than 1 year.
When you were using a VBScript (or ASP) function like:
DateDiff('yyyy', backup_create_date, Now)The 1st of January all your backups would be deleted (even the ones created at 31-12-previous_year). This is because Microsoft has quite a different way of doing math with years:
"When comparing December 31 to January 1 of the immediately succeeding year, DateDiff for Year ("yyyy") returns 1 even though only a day has elapsed."
Source: Microsoft MSDN VBScript Functions Reference – DateDiff Function
 
Solution: The best thing to do is always to calculate using days. The example above would be:
DateDiff('d', backup_create_date, Now).
Note: Keep in mind that years have a variable number of days (ie: 365, 366).

Magic Quotes and stripslashes, the truth
November 22, 2005

Posted by Roel in : Technical , add a comment

The follwing article I found is about what every PHP programmer should know, but unfortunately, the opposite is what i see among the most PHP programmers. They just freak around with the escaping of quotes and slashes. It sometimes results in a database with too many slashes and may be get noticed after a few years… For once and for all, the real facts about magic_quotes_gpc, addslashes() and stripslashes(). May it be clear for ever: http://www.webmasterstop.com/63.html.