Yearly Archives: 2008

[USA] Berlin loves Obama

There have been enduring discussions about european anti-americanism. The truth is: the so called anti-americanism always was disappointed love. And that disappointment now turned back into unlimited love. The american messiah has arrived.

What happened? The whole world was deeply sympathetic with the US when the World Trade Centers were attacked and thousands of innocent people have been killed because of ideologic hate-filled maniacs. And then? America’s leaders completely lost control over what their aims were. An Iraq War with loads of bogus proofs. Iraqi oil for the US but no real peace weather in Iraq nor in Afghanistan. At least Europe was deeply frustrated from what the Bush administration was doing then.

But the american people now showed the world that they “can” and they want to convince themselves and the world that a better world is possible. Though he will not be able to solve all the problems at once, his election is the first right step into the 21st century.

May he and his family live long and prosper and may he set free all the good powers that have been suppressed so long. Berlin loves Obama. Keep on smiling, man. Your smile heals the world.

[Callmobile] Softwarefehler erleichtert Kunden um €1.500

Kunden des T-Mobile Resellers Callmobile dürften heute einen gehörigen Schreck bekommen haben. Die automatische Aufladungs-SMS beinhaltete heute folgenden Text:

Da Ihr Konto einen negativen Betrag aufweist, haben wir Ihre SIM-Karten gesperrt. Diese wird entsperrt, sobald Sie Ihr Konto aufgeladen haben. Von callmobile.de

und die nächste SMS lautete etwa (Zahlen können abweichen):

Ihr Konto wurde mit einem Betrag von €15,00 aufgeladen. Ihr Kontostand beträgt jetzt €-1503,85. Von callmobile.de

Richtig gelesen. Eintausendfünfhundert Euro im Soll. Nach dem Einloggen in das Callmobile System zeigten sich folgende Fehler bei der Berechnung der verbrauchten Daten-Einheiten:

Unser Tipp:

Sofort bei Callmobile.de anrufen unter 01805-777464 und automatische Aufladung der Karte deaktivieren lassen, sonst wird aufgeladen, bis das Callmobile Sollkonto wieder ausgeglichen ist.

Die Aufladungen erfolgen etwa alle fünf Minuten. Bei einem o.a. Soll von €1.500,00 und einer voreingestellten Aufladung von €15,00 bedeutet dies, dass das verknüpfte Bankkonto binnen der nächsten 10 Stunden um €1.500,00 erleichtert würde.

Weitere Infos:

Wegen der sofort eingerichteten Sperrung kann zwar der Anschluss angerufen werden, es sind jedoch keine abgehenden Gespräche möglich.

Danke an Steffen für die Infos.

[MultiPlatform] TrueCrypt 6.1 Released

The open source encryption program TrueCrypt 6.1 has been released. It now features:

  • Encrypt a non-system partion without losing existing data (Windows)
  • Support for security tokens and smart cards
  • TrueCrypt bootloader can be configured to not show texts
  • Encrypted Windows system partitions can now be mounted by Linux or MacOS X

» Download TrueCrypt 6.1 here

[Apple] IBM Manager Papermaster Hired by Apple

Mark Papermaster, formerly known as IBM’s Vice President of Microprocessor Technology Development, got hired by Apple. Papermaster was employed with IBM for the last 26 years, where he was actively involved in the development of the Power PC architecture and IBM’s Blade Server.

IBM now filed a lawsuit against Papermaster. They say he breaks his IBM work contract. IBM says the contract includes a term that disallows Papermaster to work with a competitive company like Apple within a period of  12 months after quitting.

Papermaster is indended to be the successor of Tony Fadell at Apple. Fadell was the Senior Vice President of the iPod Development Unit, thus reporting directly to Steve Jobs.

[Windows] SRWare Iron updated

SRWare just updated their Iron browser, which is based on Google’s Chromium source code. It now contains improved support for website embedded videos and PDF documents and it blocks advertisements – so don’t use it when visiting our pages ;-)

» You may download SRWare Iron here

[Microsoft] Next Office Runs In Your Webbrowser

It’s been rumored quite some time, but now it is public. Microsoft’s next Office components (Word, Excel, PowerPoint und OneNote) will be controllable, accessable and editable using your favourite browser.  It will be compatible to Microsoft Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox and Apple Safari. Microsoft puts much efford in getting their applications compatible to the internet user of nowadays who wishs to have access to his data no matter where he is right now. The Office applications will be also available on Microsoft’s Live Services and for companies subscription or volume license based.

In the video Chris Bryant – Microsoft Office Product Manager – demonstrates the abilities and compatibilities with Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox

The video is courtesy of our fellow german Golem.de:

[MacOS] Crossover Software For Free Tomorrow

Strange things can happen. With the Lameduck Campaign Jeremy White (CEO of Codeweavers) initially wanted to:

“(..) to inspire President Bush to make the most of his final days in office. Who knew that our Challenge would have this kind of impact on the country?” White said. “On the other hand, who knew that the economy would implode, causing oil demand to drop into the abyss and gas prices to plummet as well. Clearly, investigating Bear Stearns, AIG and those guys is misplaced – CodeWeavers is responsible for this mess. So it’s free software for all!”

Luckily for the american customers the price of a gallon decreased to 2.79$ on october, 14th and so Codeweavers will give away free copies of their Crossover software tomorrow (2008 october, 28th).

» Crossover’s press release here
» Crossover’s Lameduck Campaign
» Incomplete-Labs’ HowTo: Crossover and UltraEdit

[MacOS] Save your Data after EFI-X Crash

I. Abstract

Imagine the following situation. You are very keen on this EFI-X device that’s now on sale. So you order a testing device. Some days later the device arrives from Taiwan. Your EFI-X compliant system already kept waiting with a blank SATA 250GB on a Gigabyte EP35-DS3.

After having plugged the EFI-X module to your system, you install MacOS on your PC. It’s really worth the bunch of money since EFI-X lets MacOS boot like a charm. Easy and nice to handle for everyone who is not more willing to hack device drivers into their Hackintoshs. But as a tinkerer who wants to see how it works in real life and so you decide to apply the newest update for your EFI-X module. Since you’re a Mac user you decide to use the MacOS tool provided by the EFI-X team.

All works well during update, until you do the reboot. All of a sudden the intro boot screen of EFI-X looks quite garbled (like the screen below). You wonder what might have happened and do a reboot. As it doesn’t help you plug your EFI-X to another computer hoping you may be able to flash it again using Windows XP. But after all the installation argy-bargy with EFI-X’ virtual device driver under Windows XP – the update tool tells you, you are running the current version.



To make a long story short. EFI-X has customer service and they will exchange their defective units. You may also have a look at the EFi-X Bug Hunt forums for further assistence (please don’t link our article from EFI-X Bug Hunt forums, they will remove it and may ban you – don’t say we didn’t warn ya ;-) Anyway if you need to have access to your data until the RMA unit arrives, we prepped the following article. We’re going to show you how to make your system bootable after the EFI-X device broke for whatever reason.

A short remark before we start: this article is partly based on a HowTo by a guy going by the nick Menoob. We shamelessly stole the method of installing retail Leopards on PCs and adapted it a tiny bit for this EFI-X specific case. Anyway: all the shouts fly out to him.

II. What you need

  • 30 minutes of your precious life time – you may use this time to think about why you didn’t buy a real Mac
  • a Boot-132 disk – it contains your MacOS compatible bootloader (find a list of Boot-132.iso’s for different mainboards and chipsets here – in case you don’t know you should always give the generic.iso a try) – Kudos to Sonotone/Hackint0sh forums!
  • burn the Boot-132 onto a blank CD-R or CD-RW

III. Prepping your hardware

  1. remove the defective EFI-X device and if you feel you don’t need it, send it to the CCC for further examination
  2. let only the MacOS drive and the CD/DVD drive plugged, unplug all other drives from your motherboard
  3. start your computer and hit DEL key to go into your BIOS
  4. inside of your BIOS: set the MacOS harddrive as first boot device and enable AHCI mode for SATA drives – your drives will appear orange/yellow in MacOS, don’t worry about that
  5. save the BIOS changes and reboot

IV. Booting your system

  1. turn on your computer
  2. insert the just burnt Boot-132 CD-R into CD/DVD drive
  3. during BIOS startup hit the F12 key to manually choose your boot device (applies to Gigabyte boards only!!!)
  4. Choose to boot your CD/DVD drive
  5. Your screen will show that ISOLINUX 3.6x is prepping to boot the Multiboot loader
  6. since this ISOLINUX bootloader is not too user-friendly ;-) you will find yourself with a screen similar to this.
  7. Hit the F8 Key. You’re gonna see this:
  8. Hit the ESC Key. and You’re gonna be welcomed with this screen.
  9. Now enter 80 and hit return, if the name of your MacOS harddrive shows up, 80 was the right number, if it does not show up, give 81 a try and so on.
  10. Once you’ve found your MacOS harddrive, the bootloader will require again some parameters. Simply enter -v -x as parameters and hit return (you may find more infos about these Darwin boot parameters here)
  11. if you experience the “still waiting for root device” issue, just reset your system and play with the AHCI mode for SATA inside of your BIOS
  12. Anyway: booting will take a long while – in our case about 5 minutes until the login screen appears
  13. login into your system

V. Saving your data

  1. Examine which data you require from your formerly known as almost native system
  2. plug your external harddrive (if you plan to migrate data to Windows, better have the external drive FAT32 formatted)
  3. Copy the files

VI. Final Words

Ooop duh. You got some more options here that we cannot cover at this time:

  1. You may revive this system with the hackint0sh ingredients (dsmos.kext and kexts for audio and video cards) – this will be a longer journey
  2. You may also get a real Mac. In this case Apple will suddenly love you…
  3. We recommend to give also Microsoft’s Vista a try. We feel like Vista Aero Glass effects are currently superior to Leopard’s effects. In this case Microsoft will love you (and us for suggesting this)…
  4. You could also go up the hill to the end and find Debian and ask yourself why it took so long to understand that unix is beautiful – in this case nobody will really love you but during installation you’ll find plenty of new friends in the Ubuntu community explaining you Debian…
  5. :-)

Anyway we hope that article helped you a tiny bit. If so you may also consider our sponsors, they also help you (and us of course)…

[iPhone] 3G Runs Modified Baseband and Custom Tools

The iPhone Dev Team posted some news during the last days. First of all they show us they are able to run a modified 3G baseband, although it fails integrity checks (see picture). And obviously they coded a baseband tool that allows execution of custom commands on the baseband.

Their silent and evolving works seems to be succesfull. Both these steps are major steps into a custom unlock. Anyway we don’t have information how long it will take until the final unlock, but we expect it to be aired before Chrismas.

Picture and video is courtesy of iPhone Dev Team.