The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) won a critical exemption to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) anti-circumvention provisions on Monday July 26th. This exemption provides new legal protections for consumers who modify their cell phones in order to make them more operable for their own personal use. Previously, these actions could have been used as grounds to sue them for their non-infringing or fair use activities.
Read onward after the break to see the rest of the article!
If you’ve ever seen a .menc file before, you probably saw it on an external memory card that you pulled out of your Windows Phone device.
Essentially, .menc (Mobile Encryption) files are just your personal data (the PIM.VOL file that contains all of your Contacts for example) that are encrypted. The extension of .menc lets the Operating System (OS) know which files are encrypted, and whether or not they can be opened by the user. To do so, the previously recorded key (user password) must match the key provided by the user when unlocking the device. But you won’t see those .menc files, because they are typically hidden by the OS so as not to be visible to the end-user during casual browsing. If you ever chose to encrypt the files you store on your external storage (external memory card, etc), then they may be visible if you took that card to another computer or device for viewing.
If you’re trying to recover those files, then you have to meet some rather special requirements in order to proceed. Unfortunately, if you have Hard Reset the device, or have a different device than the one that the files were originally created on, then the encryption/decryption keys are now lost or no longer the same, then sadly your files are totally inaccessible.
However, if you have access to the same device that the .menc files were originally created on, and you have NOT performed a Hard Reset on the device, then you can still salvage the files:
Congratulations, you’ve just saved some data. Hopefully it will turn out to be highly important data, which will make your victory taste just a little bit sweeter…
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Picked-up my new Touch Pro 2 from my local AT&T store today. Boy is this one sweet phone. Only thing that would be (possibly) better is the HD2, but lacking a keyboard is a major deal killer for me. Getting ready to update the ROM to NRG’s latest and greatest…
Today I got to hear the Windows Phone roadmap. Boy, is it going to be BIG! I’m afraid that I can’t discuss the details due to NDA requirements, but I can say that it sounds absolutely outstanding! This will be great competition for Apple…
Had a wonderful first Summit day today. Attended a couple of optional “side sessions”, then attended the main Welcome Dinner hosted by Nestor Portillo (Director of Community & Online Support), standing-in for Steve Ballmer. Poor Nestor was about as scared as I would be addressing such a large audience, but he held it together. Good job!
I landed in Seattle earlier this morning, and I am so looking forward to seeing all of my fellow MVP peers and my friends at Microsoft.
My fellow MVP Moderators were also thrown a wonderful Welcome Dinner at Maggiano’s Little Italy in Bellvue, courtesy of Microsoft’s Windows Phone Forum Management Team. THANK YOU!!!
Just attended a local PC User Group, and got to thinking again about forming my own Special Interest Group (SIG) for Mobile Device Users.
If I do, I’m wondering what name I should give the group. Since I’m old school, and I started-out on a PocketPC, part of me wants to start a “Sacramento PocketPC User Group”. But in reality, the term PocketPC is fairly antiquated, and the new OS from Microsoft is now actually entitled “Windows Phone”. So if I went with “Sacramento Windows Phone User Group”, then I would effectively be excluding other OSes like Palm and Apple.
My best idea is to go with “Sacramento Mobile Device Users Group”, as it does not limit technology to Microsoft technology, but also infers a compact solution. But after giving it some additional thought, I would not want to discount netbook or other technologies that just happen to be bigger than your pocket. But since latops and netbooks are mobile devices, they would still be covered…
Hmmm….
Yayess!
The used HP Proliant DL380 G4 is now mine! The “Buy Now” bid was officially accepted today on eBay. Now I just have to wait until my wonderful wife can pick up the item the next time she’s in the Bay Area…
I am making arrangements to obtain an HP ProLiant DL380 G4 64-bit Rack Server. This is a professional-grade server, but it’s about two generations old, so it can be had at a totally reasonable price. Here are some of the specs:
Processors:
Memory:
Storage Controller:
Internal Drive Support:
Network Controller:
Expansion Slots:
USB 2.0 Ports:
Redundancy:
Management:
Form Factor:
Pretty sweet, huh?
I”m going to be installing Microsoft’s Small Business Server OS on top of it, and see how well that works out. I’m hoping that this new (to me) server will take good care of me and my business for years to come!
