+HCU Project 9 ~ Microsoft Bashing

Project start:
August 1997
M$bashing
Last update:
June 1999
How to squash all Micro$oft's protection schemes ~ Micro$oft's concealed activities inside your computer
Micro$oft's IE exploits (security weaknesses) ~ Shut M$IE users out of your site
[Malign anti-M$ related stuff] [Our essays] [A legitimate question]
[Some Tricks] [Did you know that...] [Get rid of Outlook Express now!]
[System administrators answering a troll] [Shut M$IE users out of your site]
[Remote Explorer: McAfee's selling trick or an interesting target?]

holy war

From Fravia's own private
"cracking posters" collection

"+ORC teachings sprone us to victory" ~ 1998

Gates, diediedie!

A very important project, since our main "holy" purpose is to eliminate this company and its servants (and lackeys) from our planet. The reasons should be obvious for anyone that can understand the difference between buggy and awful overbloated code and slick operating systems and applications, else try yourself to cut and paste two pages of text with Microsoft's pathetical Word for windows and you'll see what for crap many humans on this planet are being compelled to use :-)

Well, developments seem, for once, to run positively: when we started this section, more than a year ago, "Micro$oft bashing" was quite seldom encountered on the Web, now there are a plethora of sites that collect all possible anti-M$ information. A year ago M$ march towards world-domination did seem unstoppable: now they are in deep trouble: since windows comes now in more than three flawours: M$95, M$98 (a completely useless flop) and M$NT, even the most zombizied users are beginning to wonder if they shouldn't slowly look for alternatives and Linux is gaining momentum among 'lower' users and sweeping away NT among 'higher' users.
Moreover M$, even if it all but sunk Netscape through M$IE dumping and bundling, is now facing a much more terrible concurrence by Opera, a browser that, compared to M$IE, remembers a good European car against one of those huge, slow, gas-wasteful and useless American cars.
A little bird told us that the fairly recent Micro$oft's flight simulator can be transposed and run from any hard disk without much problems. So if you happen to have a friend's friend's friend that has got from a public medialibrary a borrowed copy of a 'real' Micro$oft's flightsimulator 98 CD-ROM, don't ask him to copy it on your hard disk, since you could in that case run it without having paid a penny to Bill Gates's slaves, which in some countries and under some circumstances could be considered an unproper behaviour

Malign Micro$oft's related stuff



[Roberto Di Cosmo's "Dirty Micro$oft tricks"] CYBERSNARE: Don't tell me anymore that Micro$oft should be allowed to exist
[Other dirty Micro$oft tricks] Don't tell me anymore that Micro$oft deserves a kindler treatment
[Operating System Sucks-Rules-O-Meter ] A wonderful way to use Altavista (Linux rules of course :-)
[Kenneth Barbalace's STOP M$] Make your pages MSIE unfriendly :-)
[YAMOO] Index of over 1,000 anti-Microsoft, anti-Gates, anti-Wintel, and anti-monopoly sites on the Internet. :-)

Shut M$IE users out of your site


[All my Anti-MSIE scripts] Shut those lusers using MSIE out of your site (or redirect them to download Opera) :-)

Our essays


PHASE 1 by ViceVersa+:

FrontPage 97 beta, 11 May 1997
(a first step in the right direction) - (vicever2.htm: FVP09F01)
PHASE 2 by Epic Lord:

FrontPage 98 English beta 1 for Windows 95 & NT 4.0, 14 May 1997
(a quick crack, but worthy) - (epic2.htm: FVP09F02)
PHASE 3 by SiuL Hacky:

THE TROJAN HORSE RACE'S JUST STARTED, 15 May 1997

orwell's world
(actually not a crack but a crack request) - (siulha2.htm: FVP09F03)
PHASE 4 by +Sync:

Cracking MS FrontPage 3.0.1.726 & MS Image Composer 1.5, 15 May 1997
(Let's crack Micro$oft to the bones!) - (syncms1.htm: FVP09F04)
PHASE 5 (+ORC's 4.2 Strainer) by various +HCUkers:

Solving the strainer, 15 September 1997
MsMoney 3.0 / MsMoney 5.0 / MsProject 4.1: quite a lot of very good solutions by all the capable +crackers that will work with us during the 1998 +HCU!- (solution.htm: FVP09F05)
Don't miss these beautiful essays!
PHASE 6 by TWD:

Cracking MS-FrontPage 98 Beta2, 15 Oct 1997
(Is Micro$oft kidding?) - (twdms98.htm: FVP09F06)

TAKE NOTE: The ESSAYS continue below, after "A legitimate question"
A legitimate question

As TWD asks in his Frontpage essay: are our enemies at Micro$oft just faking "protections" while in the reality GIVING AWAY FOR FREE their allegedly "protected" software in order to destroy any competition?

There are indeed some evidences in this sense:
-    M$-protection schemes are not even stupid, they are distressed :-)
-    Many trial versions last 90 days (which is more than enough to
     keep any luser happy until the next "trial" release)
-    They give some programs away for free already, completely unprotected, 
     like for instance Iexplorer and FrontPage98 beta (Yes, FP98 has now 
     appeared *complete*, fully unrestricted, on many european magazine 
     CD-ROMS covers)
Yet I would like to observe a couple of things:

 THEY GIVE AWAY ONLY PROGRAMS THEY ARE "WAGING BATTLES" WITH
You wont see any trial copy of "M$-Office" or "M$-Excel"... and I haven't seen any trial version of flight simulator 98 either... because Gates makes MONEY with that stuff (of course, as you'll have read above, it would be theoretically possible, if unpolite, to run a borrowed copy of Flight simulator from your own harddisk :-)
Anyway, if you will happen to see trial versions of these M$-product, that would be a pretty GOOD new: yessir, that would mean that they are loosing ground either in the office-suites or in the 'spreadsheet' corporate word, or in the flight simulator scene... that will mean that there appeared again some real "concurrence" (that they will have to ruin anew, that's the aeternal cycle of 'commercial' subhuman life, I suppose :-(
The whole strategy is as banal as it is easy: they have as much money as they want through the OS-monopoly, therefore they give away for free or "almost for free" or "bundled for free" a wordprocessor, say, until they bust Wordperfect, say, and then, as soon as the concurrence is dead, Micro$oft will never ever again ameliorate that crappie bugged software they pushed through and will leave the whole (incredibly stupid and gullible) world with a tool (say "word", just to make an example :-) that everybody is de facto compelled to use and yet is so crappy that it does not even allow you to cut and paste properly without seeing your screen text flash away like a rocket! (just try to cut a longer text in Word and see if you are able to control your mouse! Those assholes did not ever bother to fix this shame in their "new" pathetical Word98!).
I hate them... as I already said. Once more: Micro$oft gives away for free only SOME programs... right now they are giving away for free (and therefore still improving) two main programs:
Micro$oft explorer to bust Netscape (this does not seem to work quickly enough for Gates, so they are already bundling their browser and will bundle it more and more inside the OS, hoping that people will HAVE TO USE explorer instead of Netscape as it will be a PART of the operating system itself, which leaves Netscape in the mud to use an almost tautological circumlocution... who cares? Opera is there!
And they are giving away for free (1998) FrontPage98 BECAUSE THEY ARE NOT YET ESTABLISHED ON THIS SOFTWARE SECTOR. Clearly Internet software hat now reached an importance that the smartest idiots at Micro$oft never thought possible, and all their software (and operating system) risks to sink like CP-M did as soon as we'll break free from the Microsoft-Intel devil alliance. Therefore they will do ANYTHING in order to get and develop a grasp on all Internet-related things, mainly in order to destroy the positive advantages of the web.

Yet cracking their applications may be useful nevertheless: I believe that +ORC's crack of Microsoft publisher (that you'll find inside his old lesson 4.2) has indeed damaged them a little: MS-Publisher WAS proposed as a trial version and had a much bigger resell price at the beginning of 1997.
You see the real battle, in that sector, is among Pagemaker, X-press and other giants, Microsoft aimed the "home newslettering" broad public with its Microsoft Publisher, a market where Microsoft has NO concurrence... I don't believe they will ever publish a trial version of their Encarta thing... should they do I'll not reverse anything else until I have cracked it!

And anyway...
WHO CARES WHAT THEIR 'clever' strategies and plans are
 Remember +ORC's lesson 4.2: "the way they program they wont be able to dominate a portion of half-baked potatoes". So let's merrily keep our +cracker's promise:
We'll deprotect ALL Micro$oft programs, 
wherever they appear, 
whatever they use as a protection scheme

Besides autumn 1998 carries very good news indeed for all M$-haters


1) their windows98 will enter software history as a huge flop... even zombie users, confused by all the windoze's variants, are fleeing in droves to Linux, and I have never heard of anyone that went back from Linux to Windoze without being pulled by his hairs :-)
2) their so ruthless fight against Netscape (they were almost winning at the end) has been now thwarted and demonstrated useless and vain, by the incredible success of the (great) Opera browser... less than a million bytes and MORE functionality than both Netscape and Micro$oft browsersaurii together! No wonder that almost everyone is switching to Opera right now... among many other good reasons, I personally love the "do not load images" immediate switch on Opera's status line, most useful to avoid at a click all unwanted and delaying useless ads-banners when you sail the deep deep net and meet a 'commercialized' site.

Oh yes, yes, YES!... I wouldn't have dreamed this a year ago... but Micro$oft's grip is about to fade away... I feel it!
PHASE 7 by TWD:

The cracking of "Age of Empires", 27 Dec 1997
(with a general digression about CD-based copy protections of most Windows95 games) - (twd_aeo.htm: FVP09F07)
PHASE 8 by TWD:

BEGINNERS: Cracking Micro$oft Visual SourceSafe 5.00, 30 Mar 1998
(Cracking a quite easy timeprotection) - (twd_aeo.htm: FVP09F08)
PHASE 9 by fravia+:

What's behind the mm256.dat and mm2048.dat files?, 15 Jun 1998
(Don't trust your software - 1) - (mmstory.htm: FVP09F09)

Also useful!
spider.zip: Ward van Wanrooij's Wininet.dll secrets (Revealing hidden files which record user-activity ~ Added June 1999)
PHASE A by fravia+:

It's a long long way to get rid of M$IE, 17 Jun 1998
(Don't trust your software - 2) - (uninstms.htm: FVP09F0A)
PHASE B by Salinas:

Micro$oft Publisher 97: Crack it and Drop it!, 15 July 1998
(With a small addition by fravia+: Micro$oft's publisher '98 as well) - (salinas.htm: FVP09F0B)
PHASE C by Mr. Shellex:

ShellExecute and Your Default Browser, 20 July 1998
(the default browser problem explained) (shellex.htm: FVP09F0C)

OK, let's rationalize from now on...
06 Sep 98 IH8U ~ win98tut.htm Bypassing Win98 FULL Version's serial check "without cracking" proj 9 ~fra_0148
14 Oct 98 TWD ~ twdaplog.htm Finding an hidden incredible database inside windows98 proj 9
ourtools 		~fra_015A

Some small tricks you may use and spread


DR2000's solution for changing search page url in Internet Explorer 4.0

There is no built in future for changing search page url in Internet Explorer 4.0. But you can do it by changing one key in the windows registry. You can use regedit.exe program for that purpose. Run regedit.exe and find the following key:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Main\Search Bar.
Change it's value to the url of page you want (you can specify .html file on your hardisk). That's it! Now run Internet Explorer, open search bar, and there it is - the page URL of which you specified.
DR2000's informations about Micro$oft's registration patterns

Almost all of microsoft registration keys follow/will work with the following pattern 040-oem-7numbers that add up to 14, eg. 040-0121028 - 0+1+2+1+0+2+8 = 14. If the program needs an extra number just add 0 also a few programs will work with all 0 or all 9. (It is not widely know that windows will install if you use all 9's as the key, However this will not work if it is already installed and you are installing to the same directory). 
   Dear fravia+! In Your pages DR2000 wrote:

>Almost all of microsoft registration keys follow/will work with the
>following pattern 040-oem-7numbers that add up to 14, eg. 040-
>0121028 - 0+1+2+1+0+2+8 = 14.

I find out that the TRUE rule is: SUM of _7_ digits must be integrally
divisible by _7_ 
After all it explains all mentioned patterns like 9999999 and the well 
known 1111111.

I tried it with serials known to me - it always works!

Thank You and DR2000.

        Best regards,    Slava.
DeeEmAye's redinformation snippets about Bypassing Windows registration
(23 September 1998)

Did you know that...

(1)


Windoze '95 halves Your Download Speed?

If you access the Internet primarily by dial-up connection, Win95 may be holding you back... way back!
That's because, by default, Win95 optimizes some of its internal Internet settings for LANs, and not for modems. For example, Win95 normally sets an MTU (Maximum Transmission Unit) packet size of 1500, an Ethernet standard. But standard dial-up Internet connections use a packet size of 576 bytes. The packet-size mismatch can lead to needless slowdowns. If you use your company's Ethernet LAN, leave MTU and its related settings alone. But if you access via modem, grab a free copy of Mike Sutherland's MTU-Speed applet at redhttp://www.mjs.u-net.com/mtuspeed/mtuspeed.htm.
This nifty little utility lets you easily adjust MTU and various other Registry settings that can affect dial-up speed. Some users report their download speeds have doubled after using the optimizations suggested by MTU-Speed!

Of course this kind of solution leave you still with a slow and buggy operating system... the real correct solution is to cross over to Linux!. And I don't know of anybody that went back to Windoze after having tried Linux...

Did you know that...

(2)


If you use Windoze's mail programs people will complain that your messages arrive with gibberish or a mysterious WINMAIL.DAT file?

M$-Mail has a feature that allows M$-Mail users to exchange fully-formatted messages (fonts, italics, etc.), by attaching an RTF (Rich Text Format) file to the message. Another M$-Mail user will see the formatted version, while any other email program will show the ASCII message plus the attachment. M$ made this option enabled by default, so many M$-Mail users have no idea that they are annoying the rest of the world.

When Exchange thinks that it is sending mail to another Exchange user on the Internet, Exchange (more properly, the Internet Mail message service provider) encodes the message, along with attached files, embedded OLE objects, and their associated icons, into a special data block called the TNEF (pronounced tee-neff) block. This block encapsulates the complete original content of the Exchange message, so that the message arrives at its destination with all proper formatting intact, including boldface, underlining, fonts, and colors. Otherwise, Exchange formats the message in an Internet-standard fashion, discarding all rich text attributes and ensuring that all attached files appear as standard attachments.

The problem arises when people not using Exchange or Outlook receive a message in the TNEF format: instead of seeing a formatted message, they see a big chunk of UUENCODE data if the sender used UUENCODE format, or a MIME body part application/ms-tnef if the sender used MIME. Depending on which mail program they use, they may either see a long sequence of hexadecimal digits, or they may see an attached binary file named WINMAIL.DAT.

Here's how to turn it off: Step #1:
Step #2:
Note: Either of these methods should work for most users, but sometimes nothing seems to work - yet another brilliant design strategy by M$. I you plan to be sending lots of internet email, you should seriously consider using a mail program more suited to the task, such as Pegasus or Eudora.

Note: A bug in Exchange may cause line feeds to be replaced with equal signs when rich-text mail is disabled.

So the best solution is actually to get rid of Outlook right now! (See below)

Did you know that...

(3)


You can get some scary info about ActiveX controls and their dangers for M$IE users on my Things that happen page?

Did you know that...

(4)


M$ Outlook's calendar shifts with time zone?

You will not believe this, yet it is true...

You live in San Francisco and go to New York for business. You enter all your business meetings in M$ Outlook's calendar on your windoze laptop before you leave. You fly to New York and adjust your location (time zone) so your computer will what time it is. Then you miss a crucial appointment because the calendar claims a meeting is at 15:00 even though you said it was at noon.

All your appointments get time shifted when you change your location. They claim this is a feature. I kid you not.

I can only guess that somebody decided appointments should be stored as GMT and then displayed as local times depending on the time zone the computer thinks it's in.

As to why they thought this was a good thing, I have no clue. (G.Marriot)

Did you know that...

(5)


Excel changes numbers on its own?

If you enter a number, say 123456789999 in Excel and save the file as comma delimited (*.csv format) it will be saved as 1.234567E+11. Quite a few programs can't import this properly, including Word. But what's worse, bringing it back into Excel gives you 123456700000. I think the risks are fairly obvious. I wonder if the large banks which have standardized on Excel know about it... :-) When opening an account therefore you not only do need to ask banks the interest rates, fees etc, but also what software they use. And avoid all those that use M$-programs!

Did you know that...

(6)


Tou may update all win components to '98 WITHOUT giving much info to M$?

Korvus wrote a nice addition about M$'s stupidity
There's a nifty feature -for those of you that have Win98 already- at www.microsoft.com/windowsupdate that will allow you to update your windows components (if you call that updating :-)
Unfortunately, you must register your copy of M$, including sending them all too much personal information. The scripts are quite simple to crack (so you can register as a 2 years old gardner from Nagorny-Karabak with five kids, two cows, three swimming pools and an income of three dollars per years, of course :-) and then remove the authorisation code and save it locally, but they keep changing the addresses, so you would keep continuously updating the page, which is boring to say the least...
So you better follow a completely different approach:
The entire authorization procedure is in a registry setting:
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion]
"RegDone"="1"
Well, Korvus is correct: there does not seem to be a single smart person at Micro$oft...

Get rid of Outlook Express now!



Outlook express is an incredibly buggy Micro$oft's application, that will fill your (and others) emailboxes with all sort of useless attachments, weird little graphic codes and other useless cram. Besides it's slow, huge and utterly frill-oriented.
So, change NOW and go over to one of the most commonly used applications, you'll never regret it!

Eudora: One of the best email clients around.
EudoraPro features: *Enhanced message filtering *Multiple e-mail accounts *Plug-ins *Stylized text *"Drag and Drop" support and almost everything else you can think of.
Eudora Lite (for all windoze sorts): eul306.exe
Eudora Pro (you should pay for it): EudoraPro
Pegasus: A really good E-mail program that's free. It has a lot of nice features like a spelling checker, mailing list support, and much more.
Pegasus 16 bit: w16-301d.exe
Pegasus 32-bit: w32-301d.exe
Of course if you just do a quick search for "email clients" you'll find HUNDRED of other appz, so, the point is that YOU ARE NOT COMPELLED TO USE OUTLOOK just because some clown has installed that crap onto your computer! Get rid of it!

System administrators answering a troll



Well... soon or later I would have had to teach you how to fish info through clever placed trolls anyway, so learn it right now... (I'm just speaking for those among you that did not know this trick already, of course :-) ...Unix-related trolls (or Linux ones) on usenet can fetch a huge amount of interesting info, if cleverly placed.

This was the troll (first relevant part): 
>> I get this feeling that your anti-MS because your an old school UNIX weenie
>> that hates the fact of MS-NT eating your lunch with zero administration and
>> fast setup?

This was a first answer: 
"Zero Administration?" ...Service packs that fix one problem while
introducing another.  Distributed in straight binary format with no
source code and no compiler, so you can't fix bugs in the code
yourself.  Changing simple things like IP settings requires a reboot.
Changing damn near anything requires a reboot.  On what's supposed to
be an Enterprise-class server?  The people that actually have to
administer NT systems usually _hate_ them.  Their boss is the one who
bought MS's bullshit about "ease of use" and "reliability".

This was the second answer (quite interesting, I believe) 
I can vouch for this somewhat, having to deal with an NT box at work,
although it's actually given us little trouble.  The reason for this
is that we have only *one* mission-critical function running on NT:
our proxy server.  The only other tasks it's used for are backing up
the network and file/application serving, neither of which would
cripple us if the box puked tomorrow.  The *real* important stuff runs
on Linux or Solaris (and, as soon as Informix ports its DB tools to
Linux, the Sun box will find itself on the doorstep the next day).

What slays me about Microsoft is how badly their software can coexist
with other products, *including their own*.  A classic example is
their aforementioned Proxy Server.  When you set up NT with the Option
Pack and Service Pack 3, it installs Internet Information Server 4.0
by default.  Which is fine, except for one small detail: it *breaks*
Proxy Server.  We had to back IIS 4.0 out of the system and install
IIS 3.0, which has no trouble working with Proxy Server.  AFAIK, there
is still no fix to get Proxy Server working properly with IIS 4.0.

Now tell me: if Microsoft can't be bothered to fix glaring
compatibility issues with its own products, what makes anyone think it
gives two shits about making them compatible with anyone else's?  Why
the hell did Sun sue Microsoft over the Java issue in the first place?

Second part of the troll: 
>> UNIX hit rock bottom 2 years ago when the DOD shit canned it due to it high
>> cost. NT is cheaper and faster to use. Who in their right mind would spend
>> $1,500 for a crude UNIX OS when NT is better and almost $ 1,300 cheaper???

First answer

Well, why would you need to spend $1500 when you can get your pick of
various *BSD and Linux OS's for either the cost of the CD, or the time
it takes to download?  NT Server costs $200?  I think it's a bit more
than that.  And you also have to buy client licenses by the seat.  The
more workstations you have being served by NT, the greater the cost.

Second answer 
He may be thinking of NT Workstation, which is a very different
animal.

Point of comparison: our upgrade to NT (we qualified, having run
Netware previously) cost us just under $1500 for the server and 30
client licenses (also not $200).  But Solaris is much, much more 
expensive, especially if you run it on SPARC hardware, although 
there are no client-access restrictions.

I may add that they actually both realized they were answering to a troll, but, interesting enough, it worked nevertheless... and it was possible to fish out some anti-M$ info allright :-)
Feel free to reverse whatever Micro$oft's target you can put your hands on!

Work well: please damage Microsoft!



homepage links red anonymity +ORC bots wars students' essays academy database
tools counter measures cocktails antismut search_forms javascript wars mail_fravia
Is reverse engineering legal?
WARNING!
(I write the following here because I have a deep respect for trademarks :-)

"Microsoft, MSN, BackOffice (what the cuckoo is that?) and "Where do you want to overbloate today?" are either "registered trademarks" or "trademarks" or "trade marks" or "trad ema rks" of Microsoft Corporation in Nagorny-Karaback, Vatican City, the United States and/or other countries" 
"Unix is not important; Java is just a programming language; the Web is
important, but especially when integrated with Windows PCs."
You know who