Nada Collar

I have been getting a strange message from iTunes for a few weeks now and haven’t had the time to look into it. The message was “iTunes has stopped working”, and the signature was listed as APPCRASH in the module “QuickTime.qts_unloaded”.

Looking around on the net it seems that its hurting a lot of people. Some were claiming that a QuickTime re-install would work, others were stating that it didn’t (and that was my experience too).

After playing around for some time I finally have a solution based on something that a “Carey Frisch” wrote in a forum. Note that some of these steps might not be needed, but I can’t back out and retry.

1. Re-install latest iTunes
2. Install MS update 938194 for vista reliability
3. Install MS update 938979 for vista reliability
4. Run QuickTime install, but choose repair.
5. if that didn’t work try a full QuickTime install rather than a repair.

That order worked for me. You might want to ignore step 1 and just try 2,3 & 4 (due to the large iTunes download size), although that might not work if you have a slightly older version of iTunes.

Update: I suspect this problem might be related to Vista Codec Package… or K-lite. Please post a comment if you are using either of these or not. Thanks

Update2: It seems that this solution doesn’t work for everyone. But unfortunately that means I can’t check for a better solution, since mine is working now. However I am curious to know if people that still have this problem can open Windows Movie Maker? I came across this MS Knowledge base article about “Window Movie Maker has stopped working“. It sounds like a similar problem and a similar solution probably exists for iTunes, however it looks like the iTunes related codecs are not accessible through Movie Maker.

But if you are having this problem with Windows Movie Maker or Windows DVD Maker, or Windows Photo Galler, then take a look at the knowledge base article.

Question1: If the first solution doesn’t work, does Windows Movie Maker start? or does it give this same “has stopped working” message?
Question 2: Does any one know how to see what codecs are installed on Windows Vista? It was available in Control Panel > Multimedia in XP, but I just can’t find it anywhere in Vista. (Apart from some codec information in the Windows Media Player > Help > About windows media player - but that only appears to be related to Windows Media Player).

My Guess: Try uninstalling any codec packages you have and then repairing QuickTime. It sounds like this “has stopped working” message relates to incompatible codecs.

I was just searching about CAPTCHA (pictures of letters used for human verification) for an idea I had been thinking about and noticed news from last month (I was busy and didn’t do much reading lately) about how some spammers have cracked CAPTCHA…. I think thats un-imaginative thinking. Of course maybe they have a program to beat the Captcha, but why go to that effort?

Anyone with half a brain can figure out how to beat Captcha.

Think about this… Anyone with half a brain can use a captcha. So now all I need is someone with half a brain!!!! Simple.

Still not getting it?

Ok. Create a simple website that uses Captcha, say: “play our game and win money” (or even better, prOn). Make the game a captcha… Give away some money. Now write your software for creating yahoo email accounts. When Yahoo asks for a Captcha pass it through to your other site. Instead of serving up a captcha that some software created, serve up the image that Yahoo gave you. Tada. Someone with half a brain is solving your captcha.

I guess you could almost say its a different form of social engineering.

As a footnote: Captcha Killer claim (and probably can do, I see no reason why it can’t be done) to automatically solve captcha, (for “blind” people using ocr techniques)

Some of the news articles about the “cracking”:

Techdigest

It even got slashdotted
Tech Blorge

Update: After writing all that above I came across the term “Captcha farming”…. If you just know what to search for its amazing what results you can find. Anyway this concept has been around for a while, and its commonly used in the prOn industry (just as I thought).

I’ve been crazily busy, so no time to write, then when I became “un-busy” I just wanted to do nothing. So anyway. Here I am again.