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On Wednesday it was revealed that it was possible to fully activate the RTM build of Windows 7 thanks to a leaked OEM product key from Lenovo. Given that Windows 7 isn’t going to be officially released to consumers til October 22nd, it seemed inevitable that Microsoft would have to respond to the situation.

Microsoft has responded today by blacklisting the leaked key, so it will no longer be possible to activate copies of Windows 7 using it. Presumably Lenovo will have also been issued with a new OEM key to use. Apparently users that have already activated using the leaked will be notified that they are not running genuine software. Microsoft made the following statement regarding this through their Genuine Windows Blog:

Windows 7 already includes an improved ability to detect hacks, also known as activation exploits, and alert customers who are using a pirated copy.  There is a hack that is said to enable, when paired with the leaked key, a system to install and use a copy of Windows 7 Ultimate. Both the hack and the key are indications that a copy of Windows may not be genuine. The Windows Activation Technologies included in Windows 7 are designed to handle situations such as this one, and customers using these tools and methods should expect Windows to detect them.

- Alex Kochis, Director of Genuine Windows

As October 22nd draws nearer, the product keys from other OEMs will almost certainly leak as well, so it will be interesting to see how Microsoft will tackle those scenarios given that they can’t just blacklist an OEMs key once it’s being used by its customers.

Windows 7 isn’t legally available to consumers until October 22nd, but that hasn’t stopped crackers from a Chinese forum breaking it’s activation already. The crack was made possible thanks to a leaked OEM ISO image of Windows 7 RTM Ultimate from Lenovo, and now allows users to permanently activate Windows 7 using offline OEM activation.

The crack works by exploiting a mechanism, called SLP 2.1, that OEMs can use to pre-activate copies of Windows 7 to be pre-installed on customer’s machines. The process uses a combination of a digitally signed OEM certificate, the OEMs-SLP (System Locked Pre-installation) product key and a BIOS image that contains an embedded SLIC (Software Licensing Description Table). The BIOS image identifies the hardware as belonging to a certain OEM and must be present on the target machine or else activation will be refused as the hardware will not appear genuine.

Crackers were able to extract the OEM-SLP product key and OEM certificate from the leaked Lenovo ISO image, which can then be combined with existing BIOS images that contain the necessary SLIC information, to fully activate the RTM build of Windows 7 Ultimate and have it pass Windows Genuine Advantage. The interesting thing about the crack is that the OEM-SLP product key included in the Lenovo ISO image appears to be an OEM master key, that will allow activation on hardware from other OEMs such as HP and Dell, but will only work with installs of Windows 7 Ultimate OEM.

While the crack was going to be inevitable, it’s surprising just how quickly it’s happened. I imagine the executives at Lenovo have already started running for cover from Microsoft.

Some interesting new design mockups have been posted on the Mozilla Wiki, that show how the Windows theme for Firefox 4.0 might look. The two designs on show both embrace glass UI elements to fit in the with visual appearance of Windows Vista and 7, but the latter of the designs seems an almost carbon copy of Google’s Chrome browser theme. However it should be noted that the designs are still work in progress, so are highly likely to change before they are used in Firefox 4.0.

There are some more details about the new design over on the Mozilla Wiki, which you can view below.

View: Firefox 4.0 Design Mockups

The launch of Windows Vista was plagued by poor driver support from many of the leading hardware manufacturers, but particularly the graphics card manufacturers, which led to a lot of criticism being misdirected at Microsoft. However it looks like the driver situation is going to be far less painful with the launch of Windows 7, with AMD announcing the release of their WHQL-certified Catalyst drivers for Windows 7 today.

The Catalyst 9.7 drivers are available in both 32-bit and 64-bit variants and follow hot on the heels of NVIDIA’s WHQL-certified graphics drivers last week. Unfortunately NVIDIA don’t have any certified drivers for nForce chipsets yet, but that will undoubtedly change as the consumer availability of Windows 7 draws nearer.

Download: AMD Catalyst 9.7 Drivers

Download: NVIDIA GeForce Driver Release 190.38

It’s been many years in the making, but today Microsoft has announced that the latest build of Windows 7 has passed all of their validation checks and has been released to manufacturing.

This means that the build of Windows 7 that you’ll find available on store shelves come October 22nd will be 7600.16385.090713-1255. There will likely be new builds released after this, but they will now be on a seperate development branch that will later take shape as Windows 7 SP1.

Of course, today’s release is also the result of the amazing amount of feedback we received from the millions of people who tested Windows 7 – from Beta to RC. We actually had over 10 million people opt-in to the Customer Experience Improvement Program (CEIP). That’s a lot of people opting in to help us make Windows 7 a solid release. Through CEIP, our engineers were guided by customer feedback all the way to RTM. We also have had a great group of beta testers who have dedicated a great deal of their time to testing Windows 7 too. A special thank you goes out to all the people who helped test Windows 7.

Brandon LeBlanc, Windows Team Blog

If you want to hear a bit about the RTM process, you can view the full version of Brandon’s announced of the Windows 7 RTM here.

While the tech world is still waiting for Windows 7 to be officially signed off as RTM (release to manufacturing), Microsoft have announced the dates that the Windows 7 RTM will become available to various user groups. General availability for consumers is still October 22nd, but MSDN and TechNet subscribers will be able to obtain the RTM build of Windows 7 from August 6th. The full release schedule is as follows:

• OEMs two days after the official RTM date.
• MSDN/TechNet Subscribers on August 6th. Additional languages will arrive by October 1st.
• IHV/ISV (Independent Hardware/Software Vendors) on August 6th via Connect or MSDN.
• Volume License with Software Assurance on August 7th via the VLSC.
• Partner Program Gold/Certified Members on August 16th.
• Action Pack Subscribers on August 23rd. Additional languages will arrive by October 1st.
• Volume License w/out Software Assurance on September 1st via the VLSC.
• Consumers on October 22nd.

Given that availability for MSDN and TechNet subscribers has now been given, it seems likely that the Windows 7 RTM date will most likely be on or just after Monday July 27th.

Since The Pirate Bay sold out to the Swedish firm, Global Gaming Factory, there hasn’t really been a lot of information about what GGF’s plans for the torrent site would involve. In a recent blog post by Wayne Rosso of the now infamous Grokster service, a little more has been revealed about how GGF are changing The Pirate Bay and what that means for its users.

The new business model will involve TPB turning into a legitimate site, where content owners are paid for the content that they allow to be distributed via torrents listed on the site. Since the current advert revenues generated by its users are nowhere near enough to cover those kind of sums, users of the site will apparently be charged a monthly fee for access. Interestingly, users will be able to reduce this monthly fee if they allow their computer’s resources to be used by TPBs network. Supposedly the more resources a user contributes, the more their monthly fee can be reduced.

While details of precisely what the network of user computers will be used for are pretty slim, it seems like TPB will be offering cloud services that would compete with Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud and Akamai. However, it’s unclear whether the network is going to be using computer resources for processing information, or bandwidth resources for helping to deliver content.

Regardless of what TPB do with the computer resources in their user network, it’s debatable whether their users will actually stick around to use the service, since we just have to look back at how unsuccessful the relaunches of Napster, Kazaa and Grokster have been at retaining users. If the music and film industries ever hope to win this battle, they ultimately need to recognise that the world has changed and they need to change too.

A pair of academics at New York University (Dilip Kirshnan and Rob Fergus) have come up with a new type of camera flash that allows glare-free photographs to be taken in low light conditions. Their new camera flash has been dubbed a “dark flash”, since it is invisible to the human eye. The pair will be presenting their work to the Siggraph conference in August.

Their dark flash system uses a flashbulb that has been modified to emit light over a greater range of frequencies but filter out visible light. The ultra-violet and infra-red filters of the digital camera’s CMOS sensor are also removed so that these can be captured. Two photographs are then taken in quick succession.

The first is taken using the dark flash, which captures the UV and IR light reflect back from the scene. While this image doesn’t suffer from the glare of a normal flash, the colour balance is incorrect and resembles a typical night-vision image. A second photograph is then taken which provides a dim but flash-free image  that contains accurate colour information of the scene. The information from the two photographs is then combined using software to produce a colour-corrected and glare-free image of the scene.

There are some limits with the system however, since objects that absorb UV or IR light will not show up under the flash since they don’t reflect any light back to the camera sensor. But even if it’s not quite perfect, an invisible flash that doesn’t blind you can only be a good thing.

View: Gallery showing demonstration of the dark flash system [New Scientist]

Google have announced today that they are working on a new open-source operating system called Google Chrome OS. The new operating system is completely separate from the Android operating system they developed for use on mobile devices.

Chrome OS will be initially be targeted at the netbook market, with Google apparently already in talks with netbook manufacturers to have the OS bundled with devices in the second half of 2010. Both x86 and ARM chipsets will be supported and there are plans to have Chrome OS run on desktop computers in the future.

According to Google, Chrome OS is essentially Google Chrome with a new “windowing system” that runs on top of a Linux kernel. Since the OS is basically just a web browser, application support is limited to those which are web-based. As Google points out in their announcement of Chrome OS, this does offer “the largest user base of any platform”.

Google Chrome OS will see an open-source release at some point in 2009, so expect more details about this will be revealed in the coming months.

View: Google Chrome OS Announcement

One of the Internets largest torrent sites, The Pirate Bay, has today announced that it has agreed to sell to a Swedish company called Global Gaming Factory for around $7.7 million.

According to the current Pirate Bay owners, each of whom were recently sentenced to 1 year in prison plus a combined fine of $3.6 million for aiding in copyright infringement, part of the sale proceeds will be used to pay their fines and legal costs. The rest will be put into a foundation that will “help with projects about freedom of speech, freedom of information and the openness of the nets”.

Global Gaming Factory are planning to have acquired the Pirate Bay by August 2009 and already seem to have big plans for changing the Pirate Bay into a legitimate enterprise.

The Pirate Bay requires a new business model, which satisfies the requirements and needs of all parties, content providers, broadband operators, end users, and the judiciary. Content creators and providers need to control their content and get paid for it. File sharers’ need faster downloads and better quality. We would like to introduce models which entail that content providers and copyright owners get paid for content that is downloaded via the site.

Hans Pandeya, CEO of Global Gaming Factory

GGF is a Swedish software firm that specialises in the delivery of advertising to Internet cafes and gaming venues, so it’s highly likely that the Pirate Bay users will see more direct and focused advertising to help drive up advertising revenues. While there haven’t been any plans publicly announced yet, it is also possible that GGF may look at turning the Pirate Bay into a subscription based service.

View: Global Gaming Factory Press Release (PDF)
View: The Pirate Bay Response