[TAG] Amusing but true

[Benjamin A. Okopnik]

On Sun, Oct 30, 2005 at 10:16:59AM +0000, Jimmy O'Regan wrote:
> Benjamin A. Okopnik wrote:
> >So, I've shipped the HP laptop off to be repaired; however, just before
> >doing so, I wanted to try something that I saw on the Net while looking
> >up anything I could find related to this problem. Someone had mentioned
> >that having APM set in the Wind0ws registry could create all sorts of
> >mysterious crapology, and that getting rid of those settings was a Good
> >Thing. I booted Wind0ws - probably about the fifth time I did so on this
> >machine since I started playing with it, searched the registry for the
> >"APM" string (nope, no such thing), and got ready to shut it down before
> >shipping it out when I spotted *THIS*:
> >
> ><http://okopnik.freeshell.org/img/WinXP_POS.jpg>
> >
> >(Note message in lower left corner)
> >
> >I was rather amused, but also somewhat curious: was this a virus, or
> >what? Searching the Net for that exact string produced _zero_ results
> >(!), so my best guess is that some disgruntled employee at HP is doing
> >his bit for entropy - and given HP's response, I suspect that I'm the
> >first one to report this.
> 
> Nah, it's either a tweak to the resources section of 'logonui.exe':
> 
> ``
> STRINGTABLE
> LANGUAGE LANG_ENGLISH, SUBLANG_ENGLISH_US
> {
> 1, 	"arial"
> 2, 	"tahoma"
> 3, 	"tahoma"
> 6, 	"Type your password"
> 7, 	"welcome"
> 8, 	"Please type your password again.  \nBe sure to use the correct 
> uppercase and lowercase letters."
> 9, 	"You can click the \"?\" button to see your password hint.\n\nPlease 
> type your password again.  \nBe sure to use the correct uppercase and 
> lowercase letters."
> 10, 	"Did you forget your password?"
> 11, 	"Turn off XP piece of shit"
> 12, 	"Turn off %s"
> 13, 	"Password Hint:"
> 14, 	"Undock computer"
> 15, 	"Logged on"
> }
> ''

Interesting. Is that within the executable itself, or is there a related
conffile somewhere?

> or someone named the computer "XP piece of shit", which seems more 
> likely to me.
> 
> Say, Ben, what did you name it?

As I recall, I took the defaults whenever I could; I'm pretty certain
that I didn't name it anything like that.


* Ben Okopnik * Editor-in-Chief, Linux Gazette * http://linuxgazette.net *