As you may already be aware, Microsoft will be upgrading their Sharepoint Team Services servers to "Beta 2 bits", according to Microsoft today. You can read the email sent to all Beta 1 participants by clicking the 'Read More' link below.
In preparation for Beta 2 which will be coming in Q1 2003, the Office 11 pre-release program that you are participating in will be upgrading the Hosted SharePoint Team Services Beta 1 servers to Beta 2 bits in mid February 2003.



This letter is being sent to inform you, the site owner and beta participant, of our plan to upgrade these servers and the potential impact to your hosted beta site. This message will be sent twice to the site own ... more

A group called the "Holics Project" have, according to various reliable resources, successfully released a working "crack" that disables Office 11 Beta 1's WPA (Windows Production Activation) module. Sources within WinBeta have confirmed the crack to be a working example of software that "breaks" WPA, for now at least.
This really is quite a blow to Microsoft's anti-piracy effort. Not only is it an embarrassment, but unlike previous Microsoft cracks this crack patches files, as opposed to simply resetting timing mechanisms. This proves a major "advancement" (if one might call it that) against Microsoft's anti-piracy mechanisms. The crack patches the files "Mso.dll", in a similar fashion to ... more