InfoWorld posted a news story that a programmer has unlocked several still-unfinished features of Windows 7 that Microsoft has hidden from users who received the alpha build at two recent developer conferences.

Over the weekend, Rafael Rivera, a developer for a Virginia-based company that sells secure messaging software to the U.S. government, posted a utility he dubbed Blue Badge that patches nine system files in Windows 7, including explorer.exe and shell32.dll. The tool disables the protection scheme that Microsoft added to the alpha to keep eyes off some features that still need work.

>> Programmer unlocks hidden Windows 7 features