Category Archives: News

[News] Pirate Bay Case: Court rules Jail Sentence

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In yesterday’s court rules the four people behind the Pirate Bay BitTorrent tracker were convicted to jail sentence and to compensate about 2.8mio euros. Although this might have been a day for the media industry to party, the Pirate Bay guys already said they will definitely appeal.

One of the Pirate Bay guys – Peter Sunde – compared the trial with the Karate Kid. You lose the first fight but there will be a happy ending.

To reach the final verdict by the supreme court could take many years. In the meantime the Pirate Bay platform is still operating. The Pirate Bay guys even started a new service called iPredator, that is basically a VPN service for peer2peer users without logging anything.

For legal reasons, we cannot link those services from Germanistan. You will find them anyhow.

Watch the Pirate Bay’s press conference:

[Windows] Office 2010 to be Available as 32bit and 64bit versions

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It seems like Microsoft Office is the main topic during the last few days. Office 2008 for Mac is available for trial download, while Office 2007 Ultimate for Windows is available at a special discount to german students and now ArsTechnica.com even got information about the upcoming Office 2010 (Office 14).

According to them Office 2010 will be available as 32bit and as 64bit versions. The beta testing program is rumored to begin in May 2009. Some screenshots have been leaked already.

Screenshots are courtesy of ArsTechnica.com, find more at their place…

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[MacOS] Microsoft Office 2008 Available for Trial Download

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Microsoft Office 2008 has been made available for trial download. The trial will cease to run after 30 days. The trial download seems to be a part of Microsoft’s strategy to address the competition with the open source freeware OpenOffice.org. Microsoft also offers Office 2007 Ultimate at a special discount offer for students in Germany as of today.

» Download Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac…

[Windows] Vista and Office 2007 Special Offer for Students in Germany

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As of today Microsoft allows to purchase Windows Vista Ultimate and Office 2007 Ultimate at a special discount price. The offer is restricted to students from german universities. Prices vary between 52€ (Office 2007) and 56€ (Vista Ultimate). Both products are available for immediate download only. A backup DVD is available for additional surcharge of 13€ per disk.

When registering with a valid eMail address of a german university (i.e. john.doe@fu-berlin.de) it seems it is not necessary to provide a certificate of enrollment.

» http://www.daswahreoffice.de …

[Pre] Palm Pre’s Release Date

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According to phonenews.com the US american carrier Sprint will be the official distributor of Palm’s new flagship “Pre”. phonenews.com is referring to internal Sprint memos that there are two possible launch dates.

If Palm can deliver enough units the launch might be on May 17th, 2009 or if not the release will be delayed until June 29th, 2009. The end of june has also been mentioned by Palm when referring to the iPhone. At the end of June, the first iPhone subscribtions will be finished and people might want to search for an alternative.

In our opinion the Pre is a very strong contender to the iPhone. Its Linux based WebOS looks also very interesting to developers and hackers. Moreover the Pre supports multi-tasking. Let’s see what the new iPhone models will feature.

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[iPhone] iPhone 3G Bootloader 5.8 Compromised

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George Hotz – well known to the iPhone scene as GeoHot – has put some efforts into analyzing the  behaviour of the bootloader 5.8 that is running in many iPhone 3G’s. He found the signature checking of the bootloader is buggy. By exploiting this bug we are now able to up- and downgrade the bootloader. Sadly many of nowadays iPhone 3G’s contain bootloader 5.91. which added an RSA check that GeoHot could not circumvent yet. Read his whole article here.

By the way: this seems to be the same exploit the iPhone Dev Team used and released to be able to be used for manipulating (read our news here). Anyway GeoHot did standing work again. Kudos to you, dude.

[iPhone] Rumors about 3rd Gen iPhone Features

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Apple’s policy to upgrade devices once a year seems also to apply to the iPhone. A new iPhone – 3rd generation – is expected to be released at the end of june/beginning of july.

Rumors are circulating about the following features:

  • Developers who are already working with the latest beta version of iPhone OS 3.0 now report new drivers for WLAN chipsets allowing 802.11n connections to access points (according to MacRumors.com)
  • Also the camera could get an upgrade to 3.2megapixels as those CMOS image sensors have been ordered in large quantity (according to the asian Digitimes.com)
  • A video capture function seems to become integrated (according to EngadgetMobile.com)
  • A video editing function might become available (according to austrian Benm.at)
  • USB tethering might become available (also according to EngadgetMobile.com)

Will the 3rd gen iPhone be the same success story like the 1st and the 2nd generation? Let’s see.

We are very curious on the battle against the Palm Pre, that has been designed by the former Apple Manager and iPod architect Jon Rubinstein.

By the way: iPhoneBuzz.com has already released a comprehensive comparison between iPhone OS 3.0 beta and the Palm Pre. And StuffTV.com yet allows themselves to summarize the Linux based Palm Pre will be superiour to the iPhone. See here:

[iPhone] Quickoffice To Edit Microsoft Office Documents

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TheRegister.co.uk reports Quickoffice will be released within the next week on the iPhone’s AppStore. The Quickoffice suite will integrate Quickword and Quicksheet. It will allow

  • to create and view Microsoft Excel sheets on the iPhone (via Quicksheet, that is already available via AppStore)
  • to create and view Microsoft Word .doc (Office 97-2003) documents on the iPhone (via forthcoming Quickword)
  • to transfer files via WiFi
  • to access files on MobilMe’s iDisk
  • to email files
  • to view jpg, png, tiff, gif and svg pictures
  • to view (or play)
    • Office 97-2003 files (DOC, XLS, PPT)
    • Office 2007 files (DOCX, XLSX, PPTX)
    • Adobe PDF
    • Webpages (HTML, HTM, MHT)
    • Audio files (MP3)

The introduction price for Quickoffice will be about 20US$. By the way: Microsoft themselves seem to work on a native Microsoft Office version for the iPhone. But there are no further information available currently.

This picture is courtesy of Quickoffice, Inc.

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[iPhone] Microsoft To Mimic iPhone User Experience

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According to DetNews.com Microsoft plans to mimic the iPhone user experience on less costly Windows Mobile phones, said Andy Lees, chief of mobile-phone division at Microsoft.  Especially the graphics acceleration makes the software design and thus the user experience more fluid and movie-like. Currently Microsoft is working with hardware manufacturers to make user experiences like the iPhone’s GUI available to the masses.