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Windows XP To Block Use Of "Troublesome" Drivers
The document details how XP will automatically download the latest drivers for your hardware from the windows update site, and more worringly, XP will reguarly update the list of blocked drivers from the site. Quote from the document:
   "On a related note, Windows XP provides the ability for Microsoft to receive crash dump data on specific drivers (i.e. when a user receives a blue screen, we upload that information for further analysis). When Microsoft reporting systems indicate crashes have exceeded a certain threshold, Microsoft will notify the Vendor that the device is being considered for the blocked driver list. If reports pass an even greater threshold, we will then flag that specific version of the driver as needing to be blocked."
Boy, The site that uploads that crash dump data (and whatever else it snags...) better have a lot of bandwidth... ;-) As The Register points out, this brings back memories of how Microsoft killed Caldera DR-DOS by deliberately crashing Windows 3.1 if you were running on DR-DOS -- for no reason other than forcing you to use MS-DOS."
Note: according to this article, the change does not prevent Black Ice or other programs from running per se -- but it does require them to use updated versions tailored for XP.
This actually happened where I work. We are on switches anyway (I know, that's no guarentee of safety, but individual computers don't see as much traffic from other computers which increases security some), but this one guy decided to install zonealarm. He managed to cut himself off from the network until we fixed the config.
Please - try to use XP before you run your mouth. It would be nice. Hell at least I try to a linux distro before I make nasty comments about it (debian,mandrake especially).
XP is HANDS DOWN the best Windows OS ever. Microsoft has finally brought out a consumer level os which just completely rocks my world. I thought the point of the free software movement was to develop better software not just free software. But based on the constant bitching that goes on around here - I would have to say it appears to be just more of the latter.
Why is it so wrong that MS blocks certain programs/drivers that will certainly DESTROY your system? Anybody here who has played with earlier versions of Easy/Direct CD under win2k knows EXACTLY what I mean. If this feature was in 2k it wouldve saved me ALOT of trouble.
I wasnt the biggest XP fan for the last few months (though I have been a beta whore for it) until I got my hands on Release Candidate 2. Let me tell you guys - you may want to stop this Gnome and KDE bickering shit - because XP is raising the bar to a whole new level in terms of user experience. KDE and Gnome will have a hard time competing.
All Im saying is - if you havent used it - just shut the hell up. You've really got no clue. I paid my $20 for the preview program (though I have had earlier betas not part of that) and I have EARNED my right bash (no pun intended) or praise XP.
Because I took the time to see what it was all about.
Gam
"Flame at Will"
I love idealists not because I am one, but because they make life bearable for pragmatists such as myself.
"The warning dialog about DR-DOS was in beta releases of Windows, and they put it up because (surprise, surprise) they couldn't guarantee the performance of their product on DR-DOS."
Yes, that was the official spin after they got caught, but ask yourself this: "if this code was so innocent, why was it the only piece of self-modifying, encrypted code in all of windows?"
The reason that example is so well used is because a) its incredibly blatent, there is no way a rational human being could interpret it as anything other than a deceptive campaign against a competitor and b) its well documented due to subpeona'd documents.
XP will block any vendor driver based on the following criteria:
1. How many times they have blamed Microsoft for making things incompatible
2. If they have produced an Open Source driver for their device (we can't have people using evil Open Source operating systems with the devices they paid for!)
3. Modems which came with an AOL CD, or advertisement of any other provider besides MSN
And the list can go on and on... When you look at it in that light, its like blackmail. Microsoft's own (il)legal blackmail.
Brielle
The DR-DOS story is so old and shopworn that it's really pathetic that it's all the Jihad can drag out to attach Microsoft with.
The warning dialog about DR-DOS was in beta releases of Windows, and they put it up because (surprise, surprise) they couldn't guarantee the performance of their product on DR-DOS.
There's more to it than that, even a degree of 'marketing influence' from Microsoft in how the process worked. But let's be real here. If a Windows 3 era story is going to be your main example people are gonna start seeing you as an anti-Microsoft crank.
This is scary because it is entirely possible that the BSOD attributed to your driver is actually cause by someone else's f$%kup - MS or ANOther third party.
If I learned one thing in my years with a Scandanavian telecoms company (whose name rhymes with Perikson) it is that the real culprit frequently lies way up the line.
This whole thing stinks. The XP logo thing is a cheap marketing moneyspinner like so many that have gone before.
Backward%20compatibility%20is%20over-rated
This is just another method to determine what things are installed on your computer. They couldn't get away with HD scan uploads, so now they upload what's installed on your computer - but only when it crashes.
I realize this is blasphemy to say this, but I seriously doubt Microsoft would be stupid enough to risk the fallout that would occur if people's crash dumps were anything more than anonymous.
There is just no way in hell they are going to have your computer send them anything more than the crash dump and system configuration data. Not your personal data.
I know you paranoids will think of a million different ways that Microsoft can try to tie this data to you personally ("They can record my IP address," "They can match up my name and location to caller ID," etc). But the fact is, the watchdogs are going to be all over this, and it would be suicide for them to try it.
As an example, whenever you are setting up Windows Update, they make it very clear that they are only sending system configuration data (which you can view), and not anything personally identifiable. They realize people are paranoid about that, and when the screen first loads, it says something like "checking your system configuration -- this is done without sending anything to Microsoft."
They are dumb, but not stupid.
"And like that
The entire justice system can't touch MS
How did they win their recent case against MS?
but they will be afraid of watchdogs
Microsoft has repeatedly been bitten by watchdog groups, and often changes their behavior because of it. Apparantly you need an example. How about the recent Smart Tags issue? Everyone got in a tizzy, and Microsoft pulled it, even though I feel the problem wasn't as bad as it was made out to be.
MS has a monopoly and they can do whatever they damned well please. They have 30 billion in cash for chrissake they can buy the entire congress and have change left over to buy the president. Oh I forgot they already bought the president and the attorney general nevermind
Uhhhh yeah. ok.
"And like that
Yes, despite what the most vocal MS critics say, NT is quite stable, third party drivers do kill it.
Infoworld published a Microsoft study into the causes of NT 4.0 failures. "3rd Party drivers" and "Internal failure" were about equal as the two greatest sources of failure. As someone who saw a few bleu screens in the SP1 through SP4 days, this jibes with experience.
Obviously Microsoft's approach has been to reduce both those causes with the much more stable W2K OS and a enhanced driver certification program.
When I hear the word 'innovation', I reach for my pistol.
No? Okay. Just checking.
This is not new, microsoft has been telling device driver writters for years that they where going to do this.
:-)
Driver Certifications was recomended in NT 4.
Driver Certifications was optional, with a nasty dialog for unsigned drivers in W2K.
Now it looks like it is going to be required under XP.
It looks like they have included technologies to go after applications they don't like. No shock, you crash our system and customers complain we cut your revenue stream.
I just hope they keep really good records, a few of the victims will take them to court. I know if I found my companies drivers in apphelp.sdb, it would be grounds for a lawsuit.
This is going to make life unconfortable for the major software players, but what it will really do is weed out the little guys. Driver Certification is expensive and time consuming. When you have low volumes with low margins it hurts.
As case in point the company I work for a company that makes high end research grade digital imaging systems. Price range, $12K to $75K, volume low, margins low, competition fierce, domestic sales force morons. Most of our costs are engineering and material costs. We can not eat the certification costs, we must pass them on to the end user who will then buy from our competitors.
One small ray of hope for us is most of the time the customers do not add extra hardware, extra software, and network the computers they attach these systems to. (networking a computer attached to a $20K detector in a test cell that can cost a couple of $100K does not sit well with most researchers). No network, no crash logs, no black listing
Overall I have been looking foward to the XP release, It means I can finally drop win 9X support once and for all (Good Riddance). Except for a few bumps, my XP RC1 experince has been pretty good. Other than refusing to support a second ATI video card (does support the Matrox daul headed cards) and a mustek scanner it has played nice. I have not had the time to check out RC2 yet.
TastesLikeHerringFlavoredChicken
TastesLikeHerringFlavoredChicken
So realistically, what's to stop a malicious company or individual faking Windows crashes of MY software and getting my program black listed by Microsoft? Anyone with a decent array of tools can much about in memory, change a few values here or there, and crash any program they like. After doing this 'a number of times' my program may pass the undefined limits and get blacklisted for no reason at all.
Nothing I can do will get my program unblacklisted if enough users have a grudge against me, and blacklisting virtually assures my software will cease to be used by the vast majority of normal Windows users.
I hope Microsoft have given this more thought than the decision to include scripting in Outlook.....
now microsoft wants to do this, and they are evil incarnate.
amazing.
.
Close the ! For the love of God, man, close the !
Indeed. And so was the Exxon Valdez oil spill. If you do this sort of thing accidentally, it's a natural disaster. If you do it deliberately, it's make-believe employment (the East Block had a lot of that).
Not everyone is lucky enough to have well-supported hardware. Say the only drivers for your devices crash periodically. I'd rather have a flaky NIC than none at all.
The drivers for my sound card suck, but sometimes I don't care if it's going to crash.
Some people think that this is a way to have customer satisfaction - not let them run things that crash their box. I'm in another camp... I want to have the option to run buggy software.
Whether M$ is evil or not, I would never install XP for this very reason.
As for data being sent automatically... I trust Microsoft as much as I trust the IRS.
It is such a stretch of imagination to believe that Microsoft could improve the APIs that are used to "access windows internals" so that it's simply not possible to "cause instability on XP"?
PJRC: Electronic Projects, 8051 Microcontroller Tools
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For those who didn'tt know: the entire PC sector is counting on XP to pull it out of the year long tech wreck. By PC sector I am refering to: INTC, AMD, MU, GTW, DELL, CPQ, etc. XP seems like a huge gamble for MS, either it will be a great success, or an awful failure. Considering MS history, it is hard to believe that anything from MS will be a failure - no matter how bad it sucks. But, I keep hearing people say that they want no part of XP.
You are right of course. But the fools around here cant understand how it could possible work unless it involves recompiling the kernel somehow.
You've got to wonder why the people here think Microsoft even cares whether or not anybody uses their included software. Afterall its only a selling point - not a usability issue.
From what I've seen there is NOTHING preventing you from installing another product which does the same thing as one of Microsoft's bundles.
For example I have Opera and Mozilla 9.2 installed under XP RC2 right now. They work great (or as well as can be expected from Mozilla).
Either way - your words are insightful and its nice to see somebody who has a lick of sense get modded up for once.
Gam
"Flame at Will"
I love idealists not because I am one, but because they make life bearable for pragmatists such as myself.
Hey, I used to write Linux kernel code for a living. I've seen a driver crash all over the place. Multiple times. And you know what? Linux kept on ticking. It's easy to handle a driver crash. Just write the oops to the log device and return from the driver as if nothing happened. Of course, you can't do that when your memory protection has failed (or is non-existient) and the bad driver just scribbled all over your stack...
A driver under Linux is a module. If the module fails, it fails; the scheduler continues to run, and therefore so does the rest of the system. It's not a very pretty way to handle a screwup, but a system complex enough to handle it prettily is gonna be such a resource hog I wouldn't want it. But it does get handled.
As for the wags that say Linux is not a desktop operating system, tell that to my wife, who's been running Red Hat and Mandrake for the last four years. Or better yet, tell it to the Germans, who just threw out Microsoft in favor of SuSE. (And then there's all the folks running OS X, which we all know is just BSD with a nice GUI... and looks a helluvalot like Solaris and CDE...)
I believe the quote is "a chilling effect on competition".
Because Microsoft never has to use this new facility in an overtly anticompetitive manner in order for them to wield extreme control over hardware vendors. The THREAT of being blacklisted is enough alone.
Here, let me put a gun to your head. You don't know it isn't loaded, you don't know I never had ANY intention of loading it, but the gun is still there, you see it. Now, I ask you to please let me into your home. What do you do?
"Avast! Prepare for the rodgering!" THWACK! "Arrr.. me nards.."
See here.
Unless you consider US$39.95 free...
Microsoft is simply doing what it has done for years: describe anybody who has a chance of competing with them, ususally due to a better product, as "troublesome" or "incompatable" or "unstable" and then rewriting critical parts of the operating system to, er... prove their point. I liked DR DOS, and still haven't forgiven M$ for their treatment of it back in the day.
political_news.c: warning: comparison is always true due to limited range of data type
You Sir are a fuckwit & have been toking from the same crackpipe that Steve Gibson has been ODing on for far too long. Mr Gibsons so called expertise on raw sockets etc has been debunked at length elsewhere. BlackIce for what it does is a mighty fine host based 'Firewall' (You really should learn what one is ) & a corporate level combined with ICEcap makes for a very effective network based IDS at both a workstation & server level on Win2k. Not forgetting its ability to integrate with items such as the Nortel Contivity client & tightly secure VPN access into the corporate LAN I personally have witnessed a properly configured BlackICE installation in an IIS 5 server farm stop IIS buffer overflow attacks dead before they reached the server code with minimal overhead. Nothing else out there has equivalent capability given the price. ZoneAlarm is a RFPITA to use except for card carrying anoraks. It is wholly unsuitable for non techical personnel because they will within 5 minutes get wholly sick of having a access dialog plonked in front of them. Here's hoping you find your brain soon, you obviously lost it when you 'laughed' your arse off. Greg
But don't forget that Microsoft isn't preventing you from running most of these apps. Any program that wil not surely fuck up your system can be run with the click of a button (for example, you can not run the Windows 2000 or 98 setup programs). I don't know about those firewalling products, but when they're incompatible, they're incompatible, and you should not run them.
Isn't it just good that Microsoft has been contacting all of those vendors to make sure they can update their programs? And they do provide links to web sites et al in those dialogs.
Could this feature be used by microsoft to block out any drivers that they simply don't approve of? Like say a driver that redirects the audio output to a file or something along those lines?
-- Give me ambiguity or give me something else!
I do. Every day. It's great. Keep up the good work, Tony.
(Posting anonymously only to avoid the bad karma of -1, Offtopic.)
Putting all the anti-Microsoft BS aside, this really is a pretty good idea - they just need an opt-out option. I wouldn't mind MS telling me that the driver I'm about to install has crashed 4 trillion machines - but I reserve the right to go ahead and install it anyway.
The only thing I can think of is either a form factor issue (possibly wouldn't fit together with the Flyer in an A3000 desktop), or maybe in a tower system, or possibly that the Toaster never got made in a PAL version (NEC or whoever did the main chip never produced a PAL version) which might have been a requirement.
There was also a clone system called Draco without the custom chips which also worked fine with the Toaster AFAIK.
Sounds like a fishy excuse to me, some PC rep probably got to them with an offer they 'couldn't refuse'. The same thing happened in my uni years with a couple of A3000's, the admin had some fat contract with a major workstation manufacturer and the cheap Amiga 3000 UX's were a threat. The machines were incomplete, not enough memory installed, no OS on one of them (earlier 3000's loaded ROM from HD too), the other one's UNIX installation was broken. Noone cared so I as a student took it upon myself to right the situation and arranged for a couple of C= techs to upgrade everything and put them into production order.
Of course as soon as the admin found out I was totally blasted for it and all upgrades were cancelled.
I wonder if someone could write a virus that would pretend to be a Microsoft signed app...
I wouldn't have thought they'd have faked three videos presented as evidence in a Federal court, either.
It's called "Don't buy the fscking software!" I take every opportunity to encourage people to do the same. Right now, my winbox runs only those programs I haven't had the time to port (yet). I see no need to buy a piece of software which breaks my firewall.
political_news.c: warning: comparison is always true due to limited range of data type
Actually, all MS programs are derived from various portions of emacs.
"We've been working closely with Microsoft - BlackIce is widely used inside Microsoft - in order to make sure it works well," Rob Graham, founder of NetworkIce told us.
My question is how much is microsoft actually comming up with themselves and how much are they hacking away from the opensource community? I heard that Active Directory is just bind with a microsoft twist to it. Is IIS just apache tweeked to hell and back?
Microsoft is combining a firewall with WindowsXP but did they actually write it or is it just ipchains? Is there any way we would ever really know if microsoft is using open source (GPL) code for their commercial purposes?
I presuming your position against Anti-Microsoft statements means you are Pro-Microsoft at some point.
You really think Microsoft dictating which devices and drivers we can use is a good thing? I'd be just as frustrated if it was any other company, but no other company has the position to do this (disregarding Apple because I don't know alot about them). These Gestapo-like tactics are not a good sign, and that's much more than Anti-Microsoft rhetoric.
Yeah, a lot of kiddies and black hats all around the world must have been thinking about that the second they read the article, but you can BET Microsoft will have thought of it: they'll ask for your id key, or worse, your Passport id, before letting you submit crash dumps and download stuff. The former would make sense, since it also contains info about your hardware. Anyway, in both cases, you'll have to auth yourself in a way that will let MS know who you are. :)
This could also be a way for them to check that you didn't crack the product activation key, for what we know... The sad thing is, it is actually a good idea they had, but they're severed their own reputation so badly over the years, that whenever they come up with something new, people all other the world immediately assume they'll use it for Evil Purposes. The SmartTags weren't that bad, in themselves, for example (go see a screenshot of them, they don't really deface sites); we just assumed they'd be put to their worse possible use. I don't know if we were right to do so. It's just not possible to trust Microsoft.
Ah well. I'm sure the aforementionned kiddies will find a way to exploit the update server anyway. I mean, it's such a big entry point for such a variety of data, there has to be a buffer overflow somewhere in there. And God bless XP users once the kiddies fiddle with the central driver database!
-- B.
This sig does in fact not have the property it claims not to have.
How is this a good thing?
They are making the program not work, forcing them to make the upgrade. It's not a case of the program not working so they have to upgrade. Microsoft doesn't KNOW shit when it comes to these matters. They just want these companies to have the XP compliant logo.
If you read the article, you'll see that the mechanism
blocks drivers which crash the system frequently
as determined by the crash dump reports sent to MS.
Clearly, if you write your driver so it crashes the
system all the time, it will be blocked. So stop
complaining that you are "denied market share" and
write a better driver. What, do you think you are
entitled to be installed on every Windows machine just
because your software is free?
"On a related note, Windows XP provides the ability for Microsoft to receive crash dump data on specific drivers (i.e. when a user receives a blue screen, we upload that information for further analysis)."
:-)
I think not probably included in the crash info is info telling microsoft my address and that my xp install is cracked just like my office xp
I don't see a problem here.
This is what happens with every new Linux kernel and VMware, for instance.
Er, just because the American variant of English spells some things differently doesn't make it wrong. How about the millions of Latin derrived words people modified here and there over the years? Words change a lot in meaning and/or spelling when they're used in a different culture. I wouldn't be so proud of an extraneous letter anyways.
"Proximity to wonder has blunted our perception and appreciation of it" --Tim Hartnell in 'Exploring ARTIFICIAL INTELLI
What really happened is that Microsoft blocked the applications because they worked TOO well: They could prevent Microsoft's built-in spy-ware from working. That bug has been corrected.
it would be up your ass you stupid mother fucker! Just go to hell you fucking asshole AC!
uh... don't other modern OS's have firewalls? Don't other modern OS's offer music playing software, and mailing software. Get a grip people, this is Microsoft finally making Windows worth the outrageously expensive price.
I've been running RC1 and RC2 for the past 2 weeks now, and it's a whole lot more stable than 98, probably b/c of the driver deal. Because of it, my video drivers for my Rage Pro 4mb were updated in July 2001! This is when even the lone-hacker performance driver stopped development a year ago.
Though I've had a few program crashes (none complete though!) the memory management is so much better! XP rocks
hahah "on its way out the door" you do realize people like you have been saying things like this since 1993. it never changes though. and its going to be at least a decade before it does, or until ms ships an ipv6 stack by default.
Well Im not surprised if these would not work with Windows XP. The TCP/IP stack has been totally remade. You had to get special versions of both of these for when ME and 2k both came out.
(Moderators: Read ENTIRE message first)
[RANT]Since we're throwing stones here, is this anything like the Chinese spies feeling safer when Clinton was in office? Hell, they didn't even have to spy, he sent them the information they wanted!
This is a technical discussion, asshole, not a political debate. You seem like a socialist little monkey whore who can't figure out that in America we work for the things we get and we compete with each other to do better. Don't like it? Move to China, I hear the state loves control there. Wha? Don't like China's political climate? Our style of government (used to) exist(s) solely because government is retricted in it's functions. Under the laws as they were when the USA was created Microsoft couldn't be prosecuted. Government involvement in anything is BAD! It doesn't matter how beneficial the outcome.[NO RANT]
That said, I'll be the first to agree that Microsoft has competed more than unfairly on oft-occasion, but I don't think who is in the White House makes a difference to them. They're after money and the court's decision just didn't have enough teeth to slow them down. They know they can tie it up in appeals for a few years and by then it won't matter. The only way to fix this problem is to avoid purchasing Windows XP at all costs. I don't plan on using WinXP anywhere in my company, and refuse to allow it to be introduced to our network. I think I can hold out for a few years running Win2k, avoiding the purchase of WinXP. If others do the same then Microsoft will get the message that we don't want XP the way it is. The key is to communicate to Microsoft in their language, the almighty dollar. The only way to accomplish this is to market anti-Microsoft as strong as MS does pro-Microsoft. There needs to be a group that actively attacks Microsoft in the public eye as well as Microsoft attacks their competitors. An example given in another article was asking why all the coverage of 'Code Red' makes it seem that Microsoft is the golden knight who released a patch to fix this problem. What they don't mention in that Microsoft created the problem, and released the patch 45 days before the worm hit, and that if it had been reasonably secure to begin with we wouldn't have this problem. Another example would be detailed press releases explaining how these decisions by Microsoft could be anti-consumer, but more importantly how they could be anti-business or cost business more money to support. The boss doesn't care that we have to buy certain brands of computer parts, but he will care that the price is inflated 25% because of the manufacturers paying MS to be 'approved'. (Which is something I think we all see this leading to) We need to create outrage amongst the average people. Otherwise they are like sheep to the slaughter and will continue to buy buy buy just as fast as MS can say, "Umm, you need this."
GOOD: Detection of crappy drivers. Collecting and disseminating data on what works and what doesn't is a GoodThing[tm]. An automatic warning that a driver is incompatible with the OS also appears to be a popular idea. (Perhaps the Linux companies should co-opt this concept?)
GOOD: Having the option, as a network administrator, to disable crash-prone drivers and prevent their installation.
GOOD: Forcing administrators of legacy software to remove bugs caused by the switch in operating systems. Bringing code up to spec is a GoodThing[tm].
BAD: Microsoft having the power to deny YOU the ability to program your box as you choose. This strikes many /. readers as fascist.
BAD: Microsoft snarfing your entire core dump -- thus having the ability to know what you do and do not have on your computer. Sort of like the local supermarket being able to track your buying habits with their SuperSaver cards.
BAD: Microsoft's known, documented, and illegal penchant for using their code as a monopolistic weapon. DR-DOS is the most widely mentioned victim of this tactic, but there have been many others. By writing their code in a certain way, Microsoft can make $PROGRAM crash repeatedly. $PROGRAM will thus appear on the blacklist, and Microsoft can then (remotely and instantaneously!) disable $PROGRAM, "as a public service". Look for blacklistings to appear in conjunction with Windows Updates with matching functionality...
CONCLUSION: Microsoft should include a checkbox in XP allowing the user/admin, if they so choose, to disable this "helpful" feature.
Your friendly neighborhood nitpicker
I am not so sure if it is a good thing for MS to do. I would certainly not like it if I am having a problem with say a crypto card in my PC and XP starts to send debug output to MS. That is a Bad Thing(tm) for MS to do.
I guess it all depends on whether this comes as an opt-in or an opt-out system, and I don't mean just the blocking, but also the automatic driver upgrade etc.
"one millibit Word file, eh?"
What, 'mb' was used instead of "MB" or "MByte"? keesh, my friend, you must have some severe personality problems if you have to mock someone because they don't capitalize their MB. How many hundreds of thousands of people use "mb" for "MB" nowadays, anyway? It's rapidly becoming a moot point. Even if it wasn't, it's really sad that you have to point out something so trivial. I would hate to be so anal. It's almost as bad as being condescending towards someone because they forgot a period at the end of a sentence
Well, if Microsoft didn't change the format for every version, you would have so many crashes too.
Microsoft to prevent users from installing certain device drivers.
Oh Great! One more product edge taken down by marketing idiots!
Do they get a clue why their product is so popular?
Do you trust ms to block there own spyware? This is not the correct way to protect the operating system from an errent program!!! The tecknecs for protecting the operatinf\g system from errent programs have been known for 30 to 40 years. Why doen't ms use them???
IE6 beta does NOT include any firewall of any kind. You probaby have proxy incorrectly set.
Someone forgot to include the trailing tag when selecting the portion of this story to be on the front page...so now my entire news page is in italic!
Once again they target compeditors and attack using the well known "If you cannot beat them, include them" strategy. Microsoft have again and again prooven their inability to comprehend computer security, they should stop pretending to be capable of pushing computer security products to us consumers, anything they do will just be crap.
The primary API change in XP for firewalls appears to be that Microsoft signed applications and drivers can bypass the firewall.
A link would be nice you karma stealing AC bastard. :-)
Gam
"Flame at Will"
I love idealists not because I am one, but because they make life bearable for pragmatists such as myself.
Certification is already here. That is what the "designed for Windows xx" logo is. They certify both software and hardware.
The real threat is that now you might HAVE TO certify, or get your software denied.
On a lighter note, kernel32.dll is asways the one to crash, I wonder if they will be turning that off.
badness 10000
Someone mod the parent post up.
I agree 100%, I used to use Zone Alarm, but TinyFirewall is way more configurable, and has the same restriction (free for personal use).
set up a win XP box on a network behind a cable modem and have it go through a linux gateway with a packet sniffer and figure out EXACTLY what its doing then. i personally still use win98 for my windows machine cuz its all i need. i'll never use win XP because it scares me =[
Microsoft has been contacting all vendors that got blacklisted, and I guess that's what the 'working with Microsoft' meant. And surely Microsoft wants those firewalling products to run, because otherwise people might just try Linux and find it works!
In this case, only CURRENT versions of these programs are blocked, because they access Windows internals which causes instability on XP.
And they are establishing a mechanism to block third-party software in a very elegant and unsuspicious way. This isn't bad per se, but the company has shown in the past that nobody can trust them.
Microsoft preventing this software from installing is like having different plugs for 220 V and 9 V devices so you won't plug your shaver directly into a high voltage outlet.
Most of the time Microsoft puts "Beware: 220V - use at your own risk!"-stickers on their opponents interfaces. Now this will be easier than ever.
It's a perfect example of double standards: when Windows crashes this is always the fault of Microsoft, not of bad drivers or programs which access Windows internals, while in fact they often are (especially video drivers). When Microsoft tries to do something about it, it's suddenly only done for promotion of their own firewall software.
We are talking about driver problems like if(check_drdos()) complain(),exit();
XP will have a generic solution for this program-fragment. Not scary?
Make up your mind. If you are against Microsoft for monopoly reasons or anything else, that's your right. But mangling any piece of information to something negative only hurts the credibility of the anti-Microsoft camp.
They maintain their monopoly with technical measures like this. That's the point.
People are worried about all the worms and viruses slowing down the internet? If every time Windows PC's blue-screen, the data is uploaded to MS, it will slow to a crawl.
Yeah, and in the 1920s, some Jews were paranoid about Hitler.
-- In the beginning was the WORD, and the WORD was UNSIGNED, and the main(){} was without form and void...
For the most part, everything has seemed the same.... However, I now seem to be unable to block the internal windows stuff from calling home (such as windows update).
Could this be the real motivation?
Does Linux bitch when I install my decidedly non standard Sound Card driver for my Aureal?? Nope! So Windows should not either.
Gorkman
First you complain Windows is unstable, then you complain when Microsoft makes it possible to block known incompatible programs from being installed.
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
That is a scary, scary thought. Please, someone, mod up!
Before you begin to make irrational statements, perhaps you should read all of what I said. Let me draw your attention to this statement, "It's probably not compatabile with XP architecture". To dumb it down for you, that means I'm already admitting it won't work, even without the protection.
I think you're pretty.
...since I use a BSD or Linux box as a firewall. At the very least someone should use a router/firewall box. I personally can't imagine having the net going straight into my working computer.
Prolly more accurate to day that CLX components developed for Kylix will run under Delphi 6 as well. For fairly clear reasons, Qt on KDE is regared as core, and Qt on Windows is regarded as a curiousity at best - the general thinking in the MS world is that Windows already has a standard set of UI widgets built in, so why bolt on a different set?
It's no wonder they are waiting to see how Kylix is acepted.
Seems that a lot of people are in that position. Kylix is cool, but ther eis no great stampede toward it yet. Hope it happens
My Karma: ran over your Dogma
StrawberryFrog
>Note: according to this article, the change does not prevent Black Ice or other programs from running per se -- but it does require them to use updated versions tailored for XP.
At first when I read the headline I was outraged. Then at the end of the story I read that XP only prevents "older" versions of thes programs from working because they violate what may be an "improved" security model.
The last thing that we should be doing is criticizing MS for making their OS more security.
Especially given the whining and gloating that goes on around here whenever IIS or some other MS product suffers a security problem.
Whoever writes up the stories around here needs to get a life.
ELITISM: It's always lonely at the top. Uninvited company is rarely welcome.
Don't know about ZoneAlarm, but BlackIce isn't free. It costs $40.
Still no reason to buy Bill's Bogus Journey, though. Although the idea of using ZoneAlarm to prevent Microsoftware from phoning home every time I crashed it (by using java?) does have some appeal :)
political_news.c: warning: comparison is always true due to limited range of data type
Actually we should blame MS - it was a deliberate decision on MS's part to put speed over stability - ie to put the video etc. drivers into the kernel level in NT4 onwards, for increased speed as the expense of them being able to bring down the whole OS if they crashed.
My Karma: ran over your Dogma
StrawberryFrog
Zone alarm was recently updated (wednesday or thursday) and it works with with xp rc2. I dunno about blackice. I another thing I dunno is how to turn off this "feature" in windows....
The 14.2 drivers rock under RC2, dont they? Those bad boys solved all of my problems
Yes. That's why i installed them
foo.
Yeah, We had the same thing. They took us for $13,000 because we did not have the reciepts. We had EULAs but their lawyers said that wasn't proof enough. We could have fought it in court, but the time and cost would have been more. We swapped out all of the Microsoft Server stuff and replaced it with FreeBSD. It was a steep learning curve for me, but once I got it, it was way more stable. The box was up for 9 months on FreeBSD. Under NT 4.0, it could last a maximum of a month before it died.
... actually, I think that the firewall 'in XP' is in IE6 - when I installed a beta of IE6 on a Windows box out of curiosity, network traffic was almost exclusively blocked, with no way to switch it off that I could see. But ne'ermind.
James F.
After about the umpteenth million time that I've successfully used ZoneAlarm to block out some adware, or some s'kiddie trying to r00t my winbox, I'm what you'd call satisfied. Sure, That program causes some instability, but that's nothing compared to what would happen if my computer were a zombie. Presumably Microsoft expects me to trust their firewall to block out adware? Or to actually be secure? No thanks. XP is one "upgrade" this user won't be wasting time/money on.
political_news.c: warning: comparison is always true due to limited range of data type
Sure, it might block programs to cause Windows to crash, but it could also be used to block software MS just doesn't want you to run. They've done things like this before. Because MS feels safer with Dubya's administration, I won't be surprised if they do even nastier things to competition than they did in the past. I expect them to try to kill off all non-MS operating systems by replacing TCP/IP with their own.
When I buy a PC, I should be able to install whatever software I want, period. If I'm dumb enough to install software that is known to make my OS crash repeatedly, so be it. It is MY box. I'm responsible for what happens to it. If we give away that responsibility to MS, then we're also giving them the ability to further steal away our freedom of choice.
And it won't be any more secure than what we have in place. If anything, stupid email viruses and exploits will be even more damaging than before, because now EVERYONE will have the exact same system setups. And each time one of these attacks takes place, Microsoft can charge everyone for the update.
Oh, and let's call this new Internet/Software Control system "RapeNet," since that is what it is going to do to each and every computer user.
"You spoony bard!" -Tellah
The doc basically says you have to have MS approved drivers...and they give you notification first. Seems like self policing that would be good for users in the end. Good for MS for taking a stand against crappy code. No offense but MS products are pretty stable now
you can use HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Driver Signing = 0 or 1 to get around this.
Damn. There are a ton of people here bitching, and less than 1% of them have even seen XP. Listen: If you have a driver that is not XP Logo Certified, it tells you that it could create problems. But then it gives you an option to continue anyway. Lets address the 'big boys' here: If you know enough about your computer, and want to install the driver anyway, go ahead you have that option. Don't bitch that microsoft wasted your time warning you.No as far as the rest of the consumers go: Yes it could scare them from installing software, but it could also save them the hassles of a crash.
Now we all agree that Microsoft could be completely underhanded and use this against us, but that is the choice you make when you run their OS. And as far as being anticompetetive, yes it could be, but if it wasn't for Microsoft in the first place, most of the software companies in the world would not exsist. Microsoft didn't have the first OS, they had the first OS that was easy to use.
I have not been the biggest fan of Microsoft, but for once they have an operating system that is good. Yes they install a ton of extra crap (firewall, cd-burner software, movie maker, image viewers, msn messanger, etc.) but you don't have to use them. They are all there to make it easier for the end user, and I hate to tell you, but most of you do not fall in the 'End User' category. You know too much about computers, the internet and 'the way things should be' therefore, you are way to hard to please.
And someone mentioned that things will be easier for MS now that Dubya is in office. First of all, what the hell! Why drag the president into this? Second of all, Democrats, not Republicans, have been notoriusly good for big business. Why do you think the stock market dipped when Bush was announced president?!
Just try XP first, THEN draw your opinions.
that's my piece,
Los (not a coward, just not a memeber)
Comment removed based on user account deletion
This could be both good and bad. Good: I can appreciate MS trying to reduce crashes due to driver incompatibility and software conflicts with the OS. This is a laudible goal. Bad: This gives them complete control over what will and will not run on a computer running XP. Can we say "extreme potential for abuse"? As an example - MS: Your're driver is causing a crash in XP. 3rd Party Vendor: What exactly is it conflicting with? MS: I'm sorry but that is proprietary information. This will only work effectively if MS fully documents and makes readily available the code base for their OS. Otherwise a 3rd party vendor could never know what their product is actually conflicting with in XP. Based on MS history, they will most likely go the abusive route, only giving details to their partners and those with enough money to pay thier Intellecutal Blackmail. Maybe it's time we started looking at things like this logically instead of immediately jumping to "MS BAD!" Truth is a dangerous thing, but it a powerful weapon in the hands of the knowledgable. Most end users won't care as long as it works unless we make them understand why they should care. MS doesn't care if it drives 1000 geeks away if 100,000 uneducated end users are still willing to buy their product. Ignoring MS or complaining amongst ourselves won't change things, educating end users will. Complaining about MS on /. is like preaching to the choir
So what, they suck. Go get Conseal.
Yes...and Win2K shares its roots with WinNT but is not WinNT. Windows NT 3.x laid the groundwork, registry, ntfs, accounts, services, events, hal...etc. NT 4.x added the familiar interface and rudimentary multimedia functions, increased drivers...etc. 2K added plug and play, USB firewire, file encryption...etc. And now XP adds the Luna interface, registration locking, driver blocking...etc.
It all depends on what you define as code base. To me, Win2K and XP are no more different from NT4 as Windows 98SE and ME are different than 98. Basic updates and add ons that could have easily been added as an incremental release.
I'm still pissed as hell I had to upgrade stable bloat-free NT4 servers just because I needed to access a USB accessory...there's is absolutely no reason why MS couldn't have done USB support in NT except for the fact they would sell less 2K!
- JoeShmoe
-- I wonder which will go down in history as the bigger failure: the War on Drugs or the War on Filesharing
Not to go offtopic on Mac OS X, but X is the opposite of the crude OS 9. Anyway, Apple is offering a fair solution of allowing the user to run the old operating system within its own process (Classic). That way they don't have to for the most part worry about weeding out a few function calls for every upgrade or disallowing programs to run (with the exception of some disk utilities). Apple isn't declaring themselves bosses of the computer users of the world and making profound "You can't use this software/driver, etc."...
MS could at least be sensible in this so-called transition period.
This sig provides no comical value.
That's exactly how it works....90% of the SlashDud community seems to consist of self-righteous, paranoid, development wannabes who have some deluded notion that people should develop software out of the goodness of their own hearts rather than out of the desire to make a buck.
Someday they will wake up and join the real world and understand that:
(a) Linux is basically a niche product that is good for tech hobbiests but has no hope in the general PC user community.
(b) Nobody cares if Sklyarov rots in jail.
(c) Regardless of what they do, Microsoft will still be going strong 20 years from now.
Gawd this site makes me sick sometimes. The level of ignorance and self-indulgence promoted here is just scary.
Quit yer bitchin' and use Linux! Oh wait.
No sig for you!!
I just LOVE vladinator's site! Especially the "fash" section, where I learned to cut the bottom off of an old shirt to use as a hair enhancement! Oh, and the "dance party" photos!
Of course, don't forget to read vladinator's emails! Here you will discover how truly difficult it is to decide what to do on the weekends... have a pizza party? A fash party? Go to the mall with all of your friends? Have a sleepover and call boys on the phone?
In short, if you haven't checked out vladinator's site, you don't know what you're missing!
Yeah, and guess what? It won't even install on Windows 2000, much less Windows XP. Windows 9x drivers just don't work on NT-based systems, and I have personally tried that particular driver (assuming you're talking about DirectPad Pro) myself.
Also, who said that if Red Carpet did this, it were okay? Your only reply to the onslaught of bad news from M$ seems to be to use faulty and unfounded arguments.
Sorry but you are a MORON!!!
you are surprised that when you come to slashdot you find slashbots and MS paranoia. man you are lonely
I haven't used a Microsoft product in 3 years and i do not miss it. I'm a Linux user (although I DO have a pc attached to the network I boot up w/ windows in case I get windows only stuff)
I don't understand the addiction to windows...
If you're not a Liberal in your 20's, then you have no heart.If you're still a Liberal in your 30's you have no brain.
Zone Alarm has ALREADY been updated to be XP compatible. BlackICE will be updated before the end of next week to be compatible.
This is a Good Thing(tm) for MS to do. If they KNOW that a certain driver is bad then why shouldn't they prevent you from making an obvious mistake. Why would you WANT to be able to add in a known bad driver? You actually fault MS for this? I applaud them - I say: FINALLY!!
Sounds like M$ is trying to improve the perceived reliability of their OS by taking bad drivers out of the picture.
Is it true that most reliability problems in NT, for instance, are due to device drivers (and not the core OS)?
A one millibit Word file, eh? That'd be a first. I take it you mean 1MB (or preferably 1MByte). BTW, do Microsoft get payed by anyone for the amount of bandwidth they waste?
from the article
- BlackIce is widely used inside Microsoft -
I tried black ice and got a shit load of bogus intruder reports Has anyone else noticed this?
I wonder if this statemnet is true do you really believe M$ uses black ice?
http://Lenny.com
If we trusted them this might not be so bad. They ARE trying to make the end user expereince better. they are trying to say that drivers that are certified to work will be allowed.
The problem is though...we really do not trust them. I like MS and I don't trust them.
On the bright side though, this seems more like a hardware issue. Except for mice/keyboards/joysticks there isn't a wholelot of hardware MS sells. Thats not to say though that they wouldn't blackball a competitor of a favored hardware manufacturer that pays them a little extra cash to get their hardware/driver certified.
It seems to me that if what it takes to pass the test is out in the open, and it really is in MS's best interest to do that, there shouldn't be a p[roblem. I have always said that the reason why MS seemed so unstable was because the device drivers and the devices really didn't play well with Windows despite the Windows certified logo.
I'm still working on a clever footer.
People can see through it
The readers are not stupid (except for some who, for example, think that X is an integral part of Linux)
Posting such a story is insulting to their intelligence.
Do you feel stupid now?
Why use technology to block my ability to choose. MS (and anybody else for that matter) doesn't know my motivation behind installing a driver. Why block it and thus make the operating system shackle me into something. Why not let me see infomation (anonymous, of course) on all the terrible things that will happen to my system/family/life if I installed a suspect driver and let me decide. The idiot user will be scared and run while others may say "Hey, I can deal with that for now" and still be allowed to download/install it. To me it's not a matter of trust, it's a matter of choice.
This is the third and final post I will be making to this geek nest. I thought that this was a place where intelligent people voiced sensible opinions, turns out it's full of children who bicker and squabble about Microsoft and Linux/OSS. I'm also sick and tired of seeing references to 'script kiddies' and 'l33t haxors', or whatever it is. Just because you pick up a bit of hacker-text doesn't make you an expert. In fact I am probably wasting my time. Adults, heheh, what a bunch of picky, moaning brats. Microsoft stuff dominates because it IS GOOD, geddit? You even say so yourselves then comparing the likes of Mozilla with IE. Linux, sadly, is pants. One day it might be great, but at the moment its overly complex geekware and the majority of people just aren't interested. The last time I saw pages of cyptic text scrolling up my screen was when I ran a 386 on netware. And, thank god, I don't have to bother with that now because I can use a nice, well designed and consistant GUI through Windows. I've also said before that Microsoft is massive success story, something you Americans should be proud of instead of knocking at all of the time. When someone actually betters what MS are doing then I am sure people will migrate, they just do..look at Google. I used to try in frustration at altavista, but Google showed how it should be done and I moved - no problem. I've tried on and off to like Linux, I like the principle, the cute penguin even, but it's just too much hassle and I can't spare the time to figure it out. There is so much else to comment on but at the end of the day isn't this all great? Technology moves on and whoever's driving - who cares? If you are all so much cleverer that MS then write something better, beat them at there own game, that's what we are doing. But if all you can do is moan, moan, moan, jeez, just bog off. You know what Gates is? He is one of us, a hacker, a geek, whatever..he loves technology and he had grand visions THATS ALL. In this cut throat industry you have to be quick and *smart*. I love the way everyone forgets about the time Norda and co went after him. Old Dr. Novell had friends in government - he started this anti-trust thang like a spoilt (old) brat. What am I saying? If MS wasn't so aggressive someone would simply ease them out of the picture, it's just business at the end of the day. I'm probably wasting my breath anyway as I'll simply get marked as an MS collaborator, when in truth, I just use whatever tools and technologies make my life easier and MAKE ME MONEY. Adios.
It is one thing to accuse Microsoft of deliberately attacking a competitive product. But have *any* of you even *tried* the built-in XP firewall? I have, by running it against the same site used by millions to test their firewalls: Steve Gibson's excellent and unbiased ShieldsUp! (http://grc.com/shieldsup). You may not want to hear this, but XP's firewall passes all the same tests that the still-excellent, still free (for non-commercial use) and still-recommended-by-me ZoneAlarm does. Why do I still recommend ZoneAlarm then? Simple: not everyone *has* Windows XP *yet*. And, to be quite honest, ZoneAlarm is still the best personal firewall for non-XP users. And as far as Microsoft wanting to exercise QC over what goes into the OS, that is not only their *right*, it is their *responsibility*! How many times have we as users complained because a rogue driver or DLL royally borked our computer? And now we're complaining because Microsoft is actually taking that responsibility seriously? Not I, sir. Not I.
Two kinds of drivers that may never be affected: :)
Networks cards and modems
"The computer crashed, better send a report... wait, how?"
Unless they write it to a log and send it later, which is probably what they do, so never mind.
how can anyone possibly compare it to mozilla talkback? ,right ?
windows will be a finished project when people start to buy them
i mean they are not going to sell a still-in-beta software that needs talkback right ?
yeah, right.
Washington bullets will simply be known as the "Bulle
I hope they do. If they turn it into a warning system, not a mandatory blacklist. I'd LOVE to know that "25% of the people using this program have experienced crashes likely as a direct result of using it". And be given the option to change my mind about installing it. As long as everything is ultimately my decision, I think this is a great idea.
Because, dammit, Microsoft may write bad code, but they aren't the only ones.
My ISP strictly forbids me from running any kind of server. If this XP 'feature' uses ftp or some other kind of server to download my core dumps, my ISP can cancel my service.
I guess MS is nicely weeding out bad ISPs as well as bad drivers...gee thanks
From the document:
One of the valuable prevention features that have been added to Windows XP is the ability to block users from installing a particular version of a driver. Since the release of Windows 2000, Windows has had the ability to block installation of a driver through a Setupapi.dll check of known problem drivers. Windows XP adds the capability to update the list of problem drivers from Windows Update. Windows Update, independent of the access mechanism described above, automatically downloads this information.
Read that...the list of drivers is controlled by a DLL that is updated by Microsoft. The information is automatically updated.
If a user with administrative privileges has the device installed (or plugs an external peripheral into the PC), they will receive a balloon popup in the taskbar indicating that the driver has known problems and will not be loaded. When a user clicks on the balloon or notification icon, Help and Support Services will provide information on where to get an updated driver if information is available. Driver blocking is independent of whether the device is signed or not (i.e. Microsoft will block signed drivers that are known to have problems).
So yes you are correct...it will be possible for 3rd parties to add in their own drivers...the catch being that Microsoft still retains control over them...even if they are signed (which most unofficial drivers aren't). All MS has to do is add the driver (probably DLL information?) to their list of "problem drivers" and they will be blocked.
I don't know bout you...but that sounds like a perfect setup for MS to break practically any application they want at will on millions of PCs in a heartbeat. Brrrr.
- JoeShmoe
-- I wonder which will go down in history as the bigger failure: the War on Drugs or the War on Filesharing
Because Microsoft said so.
Similarly, I'm going to enjoy the cool, filtered taste of a Marlboro Red, due to findings by Philip Morris, Inc. that smoking isn't harmful.
-Legion
Are you incapable of thinking long-term? Just because something is voluntary now doens't mean it will always be. New Microsoft features are almost always voluntary - they're usually voluntary only until people have gotten used to the idea. Then either they become involuntary, or the process of opting out is made overly-complicated and obscure, so that most people just give in anyway. Think man.
Who cares if they lost? They lost before and all they got was a slap on the wrist. This court is going to do the same thing. They are utterly immune from any and all pressures from the govt. MS is above the law. If you need proof take a look at the trial. For most people tampering with evidence is a crime for MS executives there is zero punishment for evidence tampering. Same with witness tampering, intimidating witnesses, and of course lying under oath.
BTW if you think smart tags are gone you are really stupid.
War is necrophilia.
Well thank god we have Microsoft to solve all our problems so us morons don't have to deal with them. I'm done putting peoples' rights over the rights of a for-profit business. I want passport and hailstorm, I want my news handpicked by MS-spinsters before I wake up, I want my computer tailored to MS's idea of what I should be using it for, I want my car fixed before I even knew it was broken, and when I become utterly vacant of dignity and turn to suicide as a last resort, I want hailstorm tobe able to notify the authorities when I purchase a noose. Now, please bend over.
Does anyone else get as irritated as I do that there seems to be a large amount of moderators out there that want to play spoil-sport with just the top threads (5's)?
I've had six threads in the past couple months that all hit +5 within the first few hours and then suddenly get slammed back down to 1 or 0. Meanwhile, the posts that stay in +4 country they seem to be left well enough alone. I find that very odd.
This parent for example...Moderation Totals:Troll=1, Insightful=1, Interesting=3, Overrated=1, Total=6. ++++ hits 5 then --
I mean really...troll? This is the best use of a moderation point? This post ranks alongside the beowulf comments?
(sigh)
I wish Slashdot had a feature that let authors apply a -1 retroactively because I serious do not like having my posts in the +5 category.
- JoeShmoe posting anonymously cause this post is off-topic and there's isn't a "no score +2" option...which there also should be.
and that would be what in example?
Software vendors don't "access Windows internals" because programmers want to--it takes a lot of time to do so. They do it because Microsoft's APIs are insufficient and poorly thought out. Microsoft has profited handsomely from this because third parties have managed to figure out how to make that pitiful platform do things Microsoft never had the sense to design APIs for. Without third party vendors doing this, Windows would be nowhere. Now that Microsoft has finally copied enough from other vendors, their system doesn't quite need such enthusiastic third party software vendors anymore.
It's also a question of architecture: except for a very limited set of hardware drivers, there is no reason why the installation of anything should either be prohibited or cause instability. (Linux doesn't get this right either, but it is considerably better than Windows.)
The biggest problem with this is, though, that, whether it is sensible or not, Microsoft is driven by the profit motive, and for them to be able to exclude vendors from the market and force them to submit to certification procedures is a great way of controlling their market and increasing their profits. That is, even if there is some weak justification of this action in terms of profits, it is still highly suspect, and should be.
This isn't about being intrinsically "anti-Microsoft". The company has been found to be a monopolist, and it is rightfully subject to this kind of scrutiny and suspicion. Microsoft needs to tread extra careful in ways other companies don't have to, and instead the company is still giving consumers, software vendors, and regulators the finger.
(Incidentally, your characterization of blocking "only current versions of the drivers" is incorrect. I suggest you take the time and actually read the document at Microsoft's site describing their policies.)
I'm sure they are, as they would love to get put from uder Bill's thumb, but it's going to be uphill work to convince windows users and developers to use something that doesn't look and work 100% windows.
The release of Kylix Open Source edition was to aid the Open Source community. In doing so, it is anticipated by the Delphi and Kylix users that more CLX compliant components will become available.
Yup, If I'm still doing Delphi, I for one will write some. May I recommend http://www.delphi-jedi.org as a first port of call before commercial closed-source Object-Pascal component vendors.
My Karma: ran over your Dogma
StrawberryFrog
Yes, Outlook stinks. IE, on the other hand, is the best browser currently available. If you disagree, and you most certainly will, point to something that is better all-around.
Hello?
Didn't think so.
That Bill Gates as borg icon you see on top signifies the topic "Microsoft".
While I agree that the whole article should probably be labeled "Flamebait" designed to increase hits, you can always block articles about MS out by going to your user info and clicking "Customize Homepage". Check on "Microsoft" and you won't see any articles about the company again.
The problem, of course, is that you will also miss out on the important stuff like the final resolution of the DOJ case and also that Slashdot editors frequently post thinly veiled flamebait about Microsoft under other topics.
Mmmm.. Donuts
For my firewall needs, I went with Darrel Reed's IPFilter on an old Sparc5. As a single purpose box, it more than fills the need to protect my Windows desktop machines at home. Here in the office, I went with Netscreen, a relatively cheap, but powerful firewall, VPN, and remote access solution.
"Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart, he dreams himself your master."
BWAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!
XP is a giant step BACKWARDS in user experience.
The desktop is gone! All that's left is the start button (i.e., Program Manager) and Explorer (i.e., File Manager).
Microsoft has managed to resurrect the Windows 3.1 interface!
You are not only a lyer, with your made up stories about the control of the network layer (nice try), but your MS-hatred has driven you to a point where you cannot think logically anymore and start insulting people who actually think of what's happening.
It's also clear you have absolutely no idea what "software engineering" and "design" actually is. The best you yourself could engineer are the little sh scripts, with no structure at all, you use to get your daily pr0n.
According to your logic, if I fart, eventually you'll find a way to blame MS. Grow up, grow a clue and get lost.
Does this mean MS will now be responsible for support since they are taking on the responsibliity of selecting the driver?
Doesnt slashdot just remind you of an overrated day care facility at times?
Gam
"Flame at Will"
I love idealists not because I am one, but because they make life bearable for pragmatists such as myself.
Guess what? I have a couple drivers, specifically one to run a connector I made that plugs a PSX gamepad into the parallel port. And the driver was made in Germany by one guy several years ago. It's probably not compatabile with XP architecture (made for Win 9x/ME), but conceptually, they have no right saying I can't plug devices they don't know about. Much less, any devices that there is no chance the author won't even want to have Microsoft test it.
It's a tag BTW. (I forgot to HTML code it in the first post)
According to the The NIST Reference on Constants, Units, and Uncertainty the correct terminology is derived from the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC), Prefixes for binary multiples. So as you can see, the correct term would actually be one mebibyte (1 MiB = 220 B = 1 048 576 B). It is suggested that in English, the first syllable of the name of the binary-multiple prefix should be pronounced in the same way as the first syllable of the name of the corresponding SI prefix, and that the second syllable should be pronounced as "bee."
"Going to war without France is like going deer hunting without your accordion." - Jed Babbin
Slashdot should have a Biased story flag.
I sure remember some scripts using ipchains got broken on 2.4 kernel upgraders, so that made Linux evil?
Firewalls, especially on closed system architectures plays too much with system internals. So when a system get updated, they can cause crashes. Notice Zonealarm and Blackice are "startup" programs. So, a end user installing those will get crashed and it will cause lots of hours to understand what is going on.
No need to say much, TheRegister article explains all.
according to this page TCP/MS might be the new protocol
what's next? programs that are not specifically registered with MS won't be able to use sockets? Or Maybe even open a window?
Not at 8:20am in the morning. Nice trolling though, looks like you weren't too sharp either. Pot, kettle, black.
Two concerns here:
1) MS has a fairly large and profitable peripheral division. Imagine "The driver for your Logitech Optical Mouse has not been certified for use with Windows. Please purchase a compatible device, such as the Intellimouse (TM) Explorer."
2) MS can now officially "certify" hardware as PC compatible. Remember how many early computers were sold as loss leaders and would make up with inflated peripheral prices. This could effectively do the same thing for PCs, where we may end up paying a Microsoft tax on all of our "certified" peripherals.
The Register has a great point. Even if you can install whatever drivers you want to anyway, most PC users will be a little scared that their device hasn't been certified to work with Windows. And MS has power to dictate which products are PC compatible.
...one of the most blatant, anti-competitive strategies MS has ever employed. The bundling of IE is actually beneficial, from a technical and usability standpoint (or would be, if IE and its related programs, such as Outlook, weren't so shoddy) - but for them to include their own product and then block competing products via operating system code is ... not very smart, in light of the antitrust suit lodged against them on grounds of anti-competition practices.
For MS to decide for you what should be installed and used is also a disrespect to the consumer/user. This is the last straw - I'm completely breaking with MS. No more of my clients will be offered Microsoft products. Neither, after the term of technical support for existing customers expires, will I offer extended service contracts encompassing Microsoft products.
think for yourself, you won't like the results if others do it for you.
I want to know exactly how people know that "most of the instability I've had with windows was due to bad 3-rd party drivers."
--or--
"Most of the instability I've had with windows was due to windows."
Got friends?
I MUST disagree with you. You should see my ZoneAlarm logs of people port-scanning me, trying to make a connection on every port.
I am not a systems administrator, and although I try, I do not neccessarily have the knowledge needed to completely lock down my various systems.
ZoneAlarm fills two important needs:
1. Prompt me when incoming connections have been denied on some port. (Lets me know I have an open port, also, it's nice to know when you're being hit so you can do something about it if it gets really bad)
2. Lets me know when spyware has been installed on one of my systems, because the first time it gets installed, I get a prompt when it tries to 'phone home'. I can then deny the connection and go uninstall it.
I want to KNOW what internet traffic is coming IN and OUT of my system. ZoneAlarm fulfills that need, for $0, and deserves praise.
Actually, if you understand the NT architecture, it is. They could someday throw in another abstraction layer (say a new hardware architecture that doesn't die) and want developers not to be hacking beneath the documented layer.
1) I have a Word document that substantially increases in size each time I save it (even after trivial changes).
2) Once, I added a few megabytes of graphics to a 10 page Word document, and the resulting document was close to 40 megabytes in size!
These are two reasons why incomprehensible and undocumented file formats are so bad. There is no acceptable reason why these things happen--they just do. If my coworkers weren't so enslaven to MS Word, I would love to go back to LaTeX. With text source files, such as LaTeX documents, what you see is truly what you get (no fluff).
Healthcare article at Kuro5hin
You a pretty stupid person.
.. well .. normal people with windows (or newser linux distros) really have their computers pretty damn closed down when they buy'em."
"The first
You really don't have a clue, do you?
Please refrain from spamming idiocy on here, there is enough of your kind here; We don't need any more!
Because my company is a member of MSDN, i've been testing the XP betas and now RCs and based on my experiencese, I'll be using XP. I only have one Windows machine anyway and because XP is a) much faster, b) much more stable, c) vastly improved feature-wise, I won't have much problem plunkin down the $150 or whatever for it. I've used 2k since it came out, and although a vast improvement over 98 or NT4, it now pales in comparison to XP in the exact things that made it better than its predecessors-- stability, speed, and features. Sure, I'm not super-thrilled about the whole product activation thing, but it doesn't bother me all that much either. There are solutions for large IT organizations so that every PC does not have to be individually activated and for anyone else, I can't really see the problem. I had to go through the product activation process during setup of RC1 for the first time, and it was rather quick and painless.
I think the bottom line is that the people on here that are bitching about this really don't know much about XP-- everything they "know" is based on news articles or press releases. I've used XP pretty extensively since Beta 1 and I find it to hands-down be the fastest, most stable, and most feature-complete OS to ever come out of Redmond. And thats quite something, I think, considering it hasn't even completed the Beta process yet.
Perl - $Just @when->$you ${thought} s/yn/tax/ &couldn\'t %get $worse;
Blocking of drivers is just another way that Microsoft controls what I install. ZA always worked great for me. It never crashed my system, and it was very customizable. I have not yet seen Microsofts intergraded firewall program so I will not judge it yet. However, I think that Microsoft has gone beyond the "innocent until proven guilty" benefit. Comparing the MS firewall to ZA will probably start being like comparing IIS to Apache.
I'll go back to Linux when Windows goes open source.
I can't comment on BlackIce, but ZoneAlarm DID work just fine. The new version works just fine, but aparently hooks much higher in the network stack: It can no longer prevent Windows update from calling back to Uncle Bill.
I'll say.
I bought a 98 box for my son to play his games on, it came with ME instead of 98, and refused to play any Disney CD.
Funny. It played all the Magic School Bus (tm) CDs, but those were all created by....Microsoft.
I repacked and sent the machine back the next morning.
i watched a good buddy o mine upgrade his just installed mail kit rc1 (which took nearly a month after it was released by download) to rc2. it took a good 40 minutes to do so and it endlessly bithed about his sound drivers not being certified, which was promptly ignored because they were in fact, certified. it coredumped immediately after installation completed. i was actually surprized to find out that they added the ability to coredump in the first place. the screen was nice and blue though, reminicent of my own past experiences with windows. (i wuv my linux) a restart (of course!) and it loads fine, but over the course of the next 3 or 4 hours it proceeded to coredump another six times, sometimes by simply pressing a key repeatedly. when it wasnt coredumping, things were crashing left and right. most of them happened to things that had nothing to do with the sound card anyway. since yesterday he had already sent in 3 bug reports, 2 of which came back with we-don't-knows, the third unanswered. they have plenty more bug reports to read now.
Are you pondering what I'm pondering?
When Mom and Pop find their CD burner no longer works because their manufacturer hasn't gotten around to becoming "XP Ready" (even though the code base is no different than NT/2K) then I seriously doubt they'll be keeping it.
Yeah, but the list of blocked drivers is updateable via the internet. So at first Mom's and Pop's CD-ROM will work, only after XP has gotten some foothold some problems might startI can imagine someone flooding Microsoft's 'Crash Dump Servers' with loads of fake dump info making Microsoft take action on disallowing that application to run!
First one to make Windows XP NOT ALLOW OFFICE XP TO RUN --->!!WINS!!
LFS. Have you built your system today?
Something tells me that this is the first step towards creating a 'closed shop', whereby NO software, not even application-level, can be installed or run unless it has M$'s approval.
Goodbye small independent software developers - if you can't afford the hassle and expense of MS$'s Certification Program, or if you don't toe the party line with MS$'s marketing agendas, then you'll find that your software is barred from Lose-dows XP.
Another possibility is that unknown software might be severely restricted in what XP allows it to do - for instance, non-certified programs may be strictly forbidden from all but the most basic access to the Internet.
And it's only a matter of a couple of years before you won't be able to buy a legal copy of Win2k, Win98 etc - it'll be WinXP or nothing.
Don't be surprised to see mandatory updates of XP which include blocked websites, blocked protocols etc.
I hope that the masses migrate to Linux, and that WinXP fails to recoup its development costs.
-- In the beginning was the WORD, and the WORD was UNSIGNED, and the main(){} was without form and void...
In any cast, it's not a complete core dump. It's just a little thing that tells what program did it, the address, and a few other things I don't remember.
The first firewall in the industry to allow system-level access with just one buffer-overflow attack.
It's not morning on the west coast.
Have you flamed SpanishInquisition t
Man, sometimes I just can't figure out which side of the ship /. is leaning to, espically on this article.
/. to tell everyone that this was an early jump at the anti-trust gun, when I read the rest of the /. article and found this nice disclaimer:
/. reader wanting to cry to the world about the evil Mr. Gates through the public forum aka /. Darn...15 minutes of investigating torn apart by this disclaimer that would have never needed to be had /. edited out the line detailing about BlackIce and ZoneDefender in the first place! They could have instead mentioned the second half of the article in the headline (about it's uncanny resemblance to the fight with Win3.1 and DR-DOS) in the headline instead, making the concern seem more realistic, but no.
We begin with the contributor's hasty remarks that I got a the usual M$ "Oh no, they're being anti-competitive again!"
But, being as how there's the initial M$ bias that one needs to get over, I decided to read the article to find out what really was going on, so I ran into this:
The authors of BlackIce and ZoneAlarm assured us that versions will be updated to take account of the major networking changes in WinXP.
Hmm, so there's really no cause for alarm, because this is just a security issue with firewalls. If you want the firewall to be secure, you're going to have to update it for the new OS so that it is secure. So, what's the worry? In fact,
Microsoft alerted software authors and device drivers writers to the changes earlier this year that, and this Word document describes what's necessary.
Oh, so the word file wasn't one of those "M$ showing the world it's power in how to block whoever it wants from it's OS," but instead a "Hey guys, here's how to fix your software so that your clients don't shove hatemail down your throat when your software doesn't work right with the new OS." So, I decided to go back to
Note: according to this article, the change does not prevent Black Ice or other programs from running per se -- but it does require them to use updated versions tailored for XP.
Oh, really? I never would have seen that one coming had I been some "M$ is the Antichrist"
My laugh for the day from this article... Software needs to carry the XP compliant logo to run.
Sure...and my computer needs to have the "Intel Inside" sticker to operate as well.
Warning: You must be in view of the Slashdot logo at all times to properly read and understand this message. Unless you have a clear view of the Slashdot logo above, please turn off your computer for it is not functioning properly.
Yes, Windows XP, an operating system, is just the same as rape on a moral and ethical level.
Fucking idiot.
Would you hurry up and update your Web site? I totally agree with the sentiments expressed there, but it's been stagnant for damn ages and needs more writing. If you make interesting enough comments I might even come out of hiding and write stuff for you.
It's not in the article, and it's not in the word document (which states: Windows XP provides the ability for Microsoft to receive crash dump data on specific drivers (i.e. when a user receives a blue screen, we upload that information for further analysis). )
Apparently the only way to know this is to install XP.
I'm sorry I'm not 3l33t3 d00d downloading warez versions of XP. I'm certainly not following the beta process of an OS I have absolutely no intention of installing even when it's final. So, stick your ego ....
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo.
I'm sorry I'm not 3l33t3 d00d downloading warez versions of XP. I'm certainly not following the beta process of an OS I have absolutely no intention of installing even when it's final. So, stick your ego ....
WinXP has been in beta for awhile now, someone in the local shop has been testing a prerelease version for the past month. In Microsoft's big package of fun software you can get for $500/year, the latest one the local shop got included WinXP (arrived this week).
So, don't start flaming people who have actually researched and used an OS that a vast majority of us will probably come in contact with over the next few years. Some of us can't support a Linux only setup, there are end users, and customers, with software sometimes going back years, and specialized equipment with windows only support. Hint: Linux may be nice, but it doesn't work everywhere, for everyone.
(Oh, replace "Linux" with your operating system of choice. The argument doesn't change.)
Just another evolved monkey with a keyboard!
step two. no longer looks as far fetched anymore
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
Yea, whatever. Who decides what's an "instable driver"? Fact is, M$ is just using this as an excuse to drive competition into the ground. M$ probably even intentionally introduces features into their OS to make products that compete w/ M$ products instable.
This is NOT a good idea. At least not if its mandatory. If this was an optional feature that users could turn on and off, then it would be OK. If MS ships their OS w/ this feature defaulted to on, they have to provide a way for advanced users to disable it the first time it tries to prevent them from installing something they want. For example, a message like, "MS' stability protocol X does not allow the installation of this drivers, or other drivers not up to the'MS stability standard'[ROTFLOL]. Would you like the turn this feature off?"
Otherwise, its just another anticompetitive measure, designed: (1) To eliminate competition, (2) to hinder user control, allowing MS to try to stop users from copying their own music or programs(Kazaa, LimeWire, BearShare, etc, are now deemed by M$ to be "instable programs").
social sciences can never use experience to verify their statemen
Any news about Microsoft is mangled into something bad about the company, regardless whether this really is the case or not.
Hypothetical: A man is on trial for rape. We have a finding of fact that the accused has raped several times. The accused shows no remorse, and refuses to admit that rape is wrong.
We now discover that the accused wants to volunteer at an orphanage for girls.
What kind of hypocritical person would be suspicuous of such a kindly act?! We should give him the benefit of the doubt. I'm sure he just wants to help, out of the goodness of his heart, and would NEVER take advantage of his position to do anything wrong or illegal...
I realize that you are a clueless anonymous coward, and most likely a troll, but I shall respond anyway for the benifit of those who don't have slash admin experiance. The icon denotes a TOPIC. The poster wants a SECTION. As do I. Sections can be FILTERED OUT in your preferences. Thx, pls die.
...and this is also precisely the reason why SlashDot is a Good Thing®.
Sure, the post might have been biased in the posting, but in the end, the group of us can reply with our own biases.
I don't see that at the New York Times, CNN, or FoxNews sites. Or too many others, for that matter.
.SynTruth.
i'm using win98 SE and i find it really stable already according to microsoft standards. the uptime is 24 hours in case you're wondering. zonealarm works well with that too. win98 will also be my final microsoft OS since they newer OSes are too slow, unstable... and doesnt even support new hardware for crying out loud.
linux doesnt always support new hardware too and lack a lot of device drivers, but at least it's stable and free
(i never by windows, so that's also free anyway. what i dont understand is why university labs always upgrade to windows 2000... perhaps they have too much money for the m$ tax.)
my blog
Ahh. It would be So Cool if microsoft actually blocked blackice and zonealarm. Preferrably blocked each new version, with each new update of windows.
.. well .. normal people with windows (or newser linux distros) really have their computers pretty damn closed down when they buy'em. If they open things up - they really don't need a firewall to "double-check" everything for them.
/sub7 victims, but only _after_ they've been stupid enough to run the fscking trojan in the first place. NOrmal rules of conduct on computers really says that they SHOULD NOT RUN PROGRAMS THEY DO NOT KNOW.
.. well .. I don't know why they do it -- either they are stupid or they are bought out by the "personal-fw-industry".
The "personal firewall" industry is a full-of-crap industry created by the media. There is absolutely NO NEED for a person to install a 'personal firewall'. There is a small set of rules he should follow to be safe from email-viruses, trojans and "crack attempts".
The firewalls prevents crack attempts, and preventes outgoing connections on non-allowed ports from non-allowed software. The first
The "firewall" may prevent them from becomming netbus/back orifice
The entire 'personal-firewall' industry is a mediahyped hystery that really shouldn't exist. Its an industry that is all about creating 'fear' in the normal citizens, and the SO CALLED "security consultants" that recomends that you should install personal firewalls
Personally I just shake my head when I hear about stupid lusers that has actually INSTALLED such things.
"Rune Kristian Viken" - http://www.nwo.no - arca
Since when did it become the responsibility of the OS to insure that third party software / drivers work adaquately? Clearly this is a ploy by Microsoft to wrestle even more control from third party vendors.
I've been using Windows on the desktop (more out of necessity than anything) for several years. But I am *not* going to upgrade to XP. No sir. I'm going to jump ship to the only other viable desktop alternative: Mac OS X.
All they will do is drive people to dual boot their machines to Linux for those purposes. Anyone using "SMR, DivX ;-), 3ivx, M$MPEG-4" are probably good enough with computers to handle the dual boot. So just keep MS for the MS approved games, and start using Linux for everything else. Eventually the games will follow.
"Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart, he dreams himself your master."
"We've been working closely with Microsoft - BlackIce is widely used inside Microsoft - in order to make sure it works well," Rob Graham, founder of NetworkIce told us.
/.), I find this quote fscking hilarious. If you're relying on a company that can't keep its own products secure to help you do quality assurance on your company's security-specific product, well...
After reading Steve Gibson's scathing pseudo-review of BlackIce Defender that was part of his Denial of Service article (which was previously covered here on
If there was ever an endorsement for why one shouldn't use BlackIce Defender, this is it!
~Philly
This is so typical of some Slashdot submitters. Any news about Microsoft is mangled into something bad about the company, regardless whether this really is the case or not.
/dev/ files changed between some version of Linux. Microsoft preventing this software from installing is like having different plugs for 220 V and 9 V devices so you won't plug your shaver directly into a high voltage outlet.
In this case, only CURRENT versions of these programs are blocked, because they access Windows internals which causes instability on XP. They just need to be adjusted to work with XP correctly. Just like some
People who badmounth a company (whether it be Microsoft or another) using information like this as an argument should either shut up or be sued and punished for spreading mis-information.
It's a perfect example of double standards: when Windows crashes this is always the fault of Microsoft, not of bad drivers or programs which access Windows internals, while in fact they often are (especially video drivers). When Microsoft tries to do something about it, it's suddenly only done for promotion of their own firewall software.
Make up your mind. If you are against Microsoft for monopoly reasons or anything else, that's your right. But mangling any piece of information to something negative only hurts the credibility of the anti-Microsoft camp.
You don't think I'm aware that it won't work on NT? You don't think I've at least tried it?
Agreed. It has gotten to the point that I no longer trust their technology solutions, because of all of this enhancement in ther marketing and monopoly functionalities.
Let me repeat this. I do not trust their technology. I do not trust their marketing. There is the old joke revisted: How can you tell when an MS exec tells a lie? Answer: [fill in the blank]
Many MS geeks live inside a microsoft world depicted by microsoft marketing. Imagine the vaporware presentations they give the staff about the new technology coming out 5 to 10 years down the road! No wonder they go OOO and AHHH. But it is vaporware all the same. MS probably lies to thier staff as much as they lie to us. They got to keep the vision alive, sell the microserfs on the long term dream enough to get get 5 or 10 years of juicey code out of them before they burn out.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
The choice for ME to install software i CHOOSE is MY choice, my hardware does NOT belong to MS. Youre telling me MS has the right to block any company that makes bad "drivers" from installing software on your machine? what if i download the software and choose to install it? This is nothing but another push for MS to control everything, by putting this "blocking" into affect every software vendor out there will have to deal with MS, therefore MS sees the program learns from the program, if its valuable i dont doubt next version "code inserted here". open your GOD DAMNED eyes.
Who wants all this legacy hardware today?
For example, a message should come up when you install that says:
WARNING: This software is known to cause Blue Screen of Death Syndrome, as well as chicken pox in small children. Do you wish to proceed?
Also, I would hope that sending BSOD dumps to Microsoft is optional....
I have ZoneAlarm on my computer and I love it! Now Microsoft says I can't use it if I upgrade to Windows XP?! Well here's one dude that won't be upgrading.
"If installing IE6 broke anything... you didn't do it right. I've been using it with Windows 2000 for quite some time now." Which assumes that Windows XP has the same codebase as Windows 2000. It is entirely possible that he's run into some interesting interaction between IE6 and XP that does not appear in Windows 2000, after all.
Actually when I had ZA, I was running XP RC1. Now I am back to good old Win 2000. Displaying messages to the user is fine. I would be a lot happier with it if it were possible to turn it off. So far, I have not seem that ability mentioned.
I'll go back to Linux when Windows goes open source.
Does XP have a mechanism that prevents the installation of Back Orifice, too??
Waaaaaaah!
Go cry somewhere, babies.
Amiga went down for one sole reason: Commodore mismanagent and greed. Arguably if they had some sense Amiga would have had PCI and PowerPC and a Mac like transition a long time ago (which has partly been done by third parties now). A4000 and especially A1200 were actually a big hit and noone much had problems with compatibility, except with badly coded games clinging to an assumed 512 KB memory limit and jumping directly into undocumented ROM calls or registers. The OS shipped with them was '3.0', which was not that much different from 2.x, the real changes occurred much earlier between 1.3 and 2.0, or between the A2000 and A3000. Even then great pains were taken to make sure system compliant software would remain working. The rules were laid down clearly for developers in the RKRM volumes, they were quite strict and obvious. Amigas being unstable is such an urban legend, just because everyone remembers all those badly hacked pirate games from A500 times crashing their machine all the time doesn't mean the rest of us well informed users can't work for weeks on end without any problems. UAE based experience doesn't count either, obviously.
Furthermore, the A4000's expansion bus (Zorro 3) is backward compatible with earlier incarnations (Zorro 2). In fact the majority of expansion cards continues to be Z2. There should not be any problem using older cards unless they were broken to begin with. Same goes for software, I still use many ancient utilities, programs and even games (and Z2 cards). You seem to be quite uninformed about Amiga.
Apart from the above, the major point everyone seems to be missing about XP's new 'feature' is that it is just another step towards total control, today they add blacklisting of drivers, but who says they won't add any other utility or program in the future as they see fit, or even content control (Word popping up the paperclip's equivalent when you try to type 'M$ sucks', "I'm sorry Dave, I can't do that", or becoming a tool for the RIAA, DMCA, whatever).
Also, since they can update the blacklist at any time, there is nothing that can prevent blocking of ZoneAlarm or whatever in the future if they decide so anyway, whether they are updated to run with XP or not (and every time they get updated to get around the blacklist, blacklist the new incarnation too).
The whole feature is about control, disguised as a feature and just continues the long tradition of step by step extend and embrace strategy that will lead to 1984. One day you wake up and you cannot run anything but M$ software, use M$ services, live the M$ lifestyle, while regularly paying for it and be audited for even remotely critical thoughts. Oh yeah, I'm paranoid or something. I just hope future generations will not simply accept what they are born into..
It probably was just able to block XP from accessing MS's activation servers to do it's check up.
bug in slash?
Never underestimate the relief of true separation of Religion and State.
Wake up you idiots !
Just say no.
The last thing that MS wants is for the user to see a bunch of pop-up warnings each time XP and MS servers talk to each other to validate/snitch registration information.
They stab it with their steely knives,
But they just can't kill the beast.
...because I can't wait to see something like KERNEL32.DLL or NTDLL.DLL getting blocked. Then again it probably has a "if M$ then ignore", if not they'd never get the beta out the door. Disclaimer: Using win2k here, and from my personal experience, next to a crappy ISDN card driver, most BSODs happen because of M$ internal drivers.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
I wish this existed in Win2K. Maybe then the Casio digital camera drivers would be blacklisted. As it is, they completely corrupt the system, irreparably destroying DirectX, so that the only recovery is to wipe and reinstall the OS. Thanks, Casio. *:-|
I mean. what is WinXP? it's taking a very good and successful product with good features, and put some "meat" around it to grab more marketshares. For most of us, everything new XP has to offer we know how to install the equivalent on win2k... switching from Win2k to winXP is simply an interface upgrade (which can be done also with windowsblind(?) or similar).
Question is, is there a good reason for a win2k user to upgrade (downgrade I should say) to XP? XP seems so much more restrictive WIHTOUT giving any new features that can't be match with 3rd parties software. It's not an OS for most of us who like to mess around with hardware or software and betas. It's meant for the home user that is running 98/ME and wants to upgrade, THAT guy is gonna see a shitload of improvements.
Yes there's a professionnal version as well... I know... do you really think it's gonna be a major seller? heck they didn't expect win2k to sell that much, why did it sell that much? Games support/directX, Stability, speed, dual processor support, etc... XP offers nothing new in any of these area, so the win2k userbase Won't upgrade unless they have money to burn.
Finally, that product activation thing is gonna be another major pain in the butt for them, most IT people won't tolerate that, and boycott it. (personnally I don't feel like wasting 10hrs a month waiting over the phone because something bad happened to my users and I have to reactivate each one of them one by one or for whatever other reasons).
--- Metamoderating abusive downgraders since my 300th post.
timothy, my friends are right. you ARE an idiotic dipshit.
you said: "Note: according to this article, the change does not prevent Black Ice or other programs from running per se -- but it does require them to use updated versions tailored for XP. "
NO WAY!#%$ YOU MUST BE FUCKING KIDDING ME! software that needs to be updated for a new operating environment? how DARE microsoft do that!
i guess that would never happen on a linux box, right?
you're just pissy 'cause microsoft is extending extra service in their OS. something no linux person has EVER yet figured out how to do without being a hypocrite to their own philosophy.
Clerk: Yeah but we had to stop. We found that they were making people unstable. They started uses the words "fuck" and "shit" in their daily vocabulary. That's definitely not normal.
Boy: Who are you to decide what's normal and what's not normal?
Clerk: Shut up little boy, you're stupid and we know what's better for you. This is for your own good.
Got Freedom?
Thinking?
I live in the UK therefore spell colour correctly and drive on the left hand side. I hope thats trouble enough for you billy boy!
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
From the text:
Anxious readers should check the following file in a hex editor in WindowsXP Release Candidate 2: go to \WINNT\AppPatch (or the directory AppPatch under whatever %systemroot% is pointing to) and open the binary file apphelp.sdb. The proscribed applications should be clearly readable.
I just wander what is in there....
Anyone with a copy of winXP would check this?
mod the parent up
How can Microsoft stop people from sending in spoofed data? What will stop, for example, NVidia from sending in data that makes Matrox drivers look buggy as hell and getting them blocked?
Unfortunatly, I doubt anyone is going to make any noise about this.
Note: according to this article, the change does not prevent Black Ice or other programs from running per se -- but it does require them to use updated versions tailored for XP.
Hello??? Anybody home? Did it occur to anyone that maybe the reason why Microsoft is considering blocking old versions of ZoneAlarm and BlackIce is because they don't work on the new operating system? I'm sure by the time XP ships, there will be updated versions of ZoneAlarm and BlackIce available, and users will simply be required to upgrade them (for free I'm sure) before installing them on XP. If Microsoft didn't do this, some morons would try to install the same old version they used on Win98, and it would break things, and many of the users would blame XP.
Microsoft did something similar in WinME: the OS ships with a database of known-incompatible software, and if you try to run a known-incompatible program, it gives you a warning, with the option to cancel or run it anyway. An example of this is Enternet 100, a PPPoE client that Mindspring used to distribute for their ADSL service. Guess what? It actually doesn't work on WinME. Runs fine on Win95b, Win98, NT 4 and 2000, and I understand there's a way to hack it to make it work on ME, but according to the company that makes it, it's not compatible - you have to upgrade to a version of Enternet 300, or use a different PPPoE client. I did tech support for Earthlink after the Mindspring merger, and that feature that Microsoft put in actually saved us from some pretty annoyed customers, because it told them it wasn't going to work before they found out for themselves the hard way.
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
even though the code base is no different than NT/2K
I think not. The XP code base shares its roots with Win2k but is not Win2k.
--- -- - -
Give me LIBERTY, or give me a check.
Is to do away with those pesky non-standard codecs like SMR, DivX ;-), 3ivx, M$MPEG-4 and so forth. Right now you get just a warning when you try to install those ACX/DLL files but come XP then that "Unable to find codec" message is all you are going to see.
Also you can say goodbye to those wonderful drivers that let you load a "sound card" to output the contents of the wave device to the hard drive of those "video cards" that let you screen capture ASF/RM player windows in an unencrypted format.
As soon as the encrypted video standards are rolled out you can bet that any kind of video output driver will be limited to VHS quality or the driver just simply won't be allowed.
Microsoft is smoking some serious crack if they think they can become the sole authoritative source for drivers on the Internet. Their WindowsUpdate driver server (if you go though the process of registering your hardware config with Microsoft) is worthless and do you think that companies are going to want to have to go through the hassle of signing very beta or unsupported driver they release?
Lesson from history folks...when the Amiga 4000 came out and told their customers that everything they had bought up to this point was no longer compatible Amiga went down the toilet. When Mom and Pop find their CD burner no longer works because their manufacturer hasn't gotten around to becoming "XP Ready" (even though the code base is no different than NT/2K) then I seriously doubt they'll be keeping it. Even though they can't return it. Shafted.
- JoeShmoe
-- I wonder which will go down in history as the bigger failure: the War on Drugs or the War on Filesharing
However...
One thing no post has touched on (at least not to my satisfaction) is why popular hardware and software manufacturers need to bend over backwards to keep up with changes to the operating system instead of the other whay around.
Because this is not a bad thing at all. i wish it was like this since windows95. and yes i'm a linux guy.
Washington bullets will simply be known as the "Bulle
Here, cretin, have a clue. Microsoft are deliberately forcing ZoneAlarm and BlackIce out to prevent them from blocking the OS from snooping on your computer. Shock horror! How terrible if Microsoft's OS can't report back to Redmond HQ. It's a deliberate program of corporate sabotage.
As for the 'redesign' to comply with XP. This is sheer rubbish. ZoneAlarm and BlackIce will be fed API's which Microsoft 'authorised' applications can bypass. Microsoft has a problem with these applications because they're effective in returning network control to the user.
This kind of user configurability is something which Microsoft abhors. Bill's fondest wish is to turn the OS into a data mine that he can subsequently sell to advertisers. You may not like your privacy, but many people do. I see no reason why they should give it up because of cretins like yourself whose inability to think is only exceeded by their hero-worship of an anti-competitive monopolist with a lot of money.
So...Windows XP figures out when vendors write shitty drivers and call them on it by informing you and the vendor and that's bad? Is it just as bad when a kernel module causes a core dump and it writes a mail message to the admin defining the error? This is ridiculous. So the fuck what if Microsoft fucked over Caldera by making Windows 3.11 crash on it, it's their fucking product. Windows 2000 supports driver certification just like Win XP does, it is a professional class workstation OS and damn well should have some way to verify the integrity of the hardware drivers you're installing. Maybe when a vendor's drivers keep causing a system to core dump they will get on the ball and release what we call "updates" to their drivers. I'm sorry releasing a single driver update over a product's lifetime is a pretty shitty way to treat your customers. Compare for example Creative and nVidia. Creative drivers for their sound cards and modems are over a year old and dispite being shit have not been improved upon at all. On the other end of the spectrum nVidia unified their driver base and continuously updates and refines their drivers. It drives you to buy shitty bargain basement hardware for your systems because at least then you get what you paid for.
I'd like to see alot more talkback features in fucking software so vendors can actually improve their fucking products. The Omni group pretty graciously lets you use their browser for free with no restrictions yet maintains a bug tracking system. Bug report e-mails aren't exactly support for software. Slashdot always finds a reason to bitch just because Microsoft's logo is found somewhere near an article.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
As said by other posters this is probably not such a bad thing, as it ensures that driver developers do better quality control before they release the driver. The problem, like anything it is open to abuse. For example do we know for sure that MS will be putting the same limitations on home grown drivers, or that they won't use this in anti-comptetitve manner? We don't, but this doesn't mean they will (only time will tell).
I believe that if there was an option to disactivate this feature, or have a admin control-panel which lists the software that has been perceived as causing the problems, with an over-ride, then I am sure users would appreciate this feature a bit more. The FUD comes from the fact that the user, as I understand, has no control over this feature and has to trust MS is not abusing their position - given past history it would take a lot of faith to put 100% trust in them.
Being to turn off this featue would also mean that you don't need an MS certified development environment to develop your software.
The other question I ask myself, is what do you do if you don't have an internet connection?
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
So that means, Mr. Genius, that there is no chance the Moz folks would grab data they shouldn't? Becasue Mozilla has nothing to do with Netscape/AOL/Time-Warner, and even if it did, those guys are completly trustworthy. Right?
So compile it yourself if you're paranoid, Mr. Savant.
and any other drivers or pseudo-drivers that allow you to bypass Microsoft's "digital rights management".
when apple wouldn't let you change the theme of Mac OS X?
ah...the days of installing whatever drivers we felt like installing...make us sound like the "I actually USED punchcards!" guys, don't it?
guns kill people like spoons make Rosie O'Donnell fat.
This way, the name of 'crash-prone' OS windows has for decades will slowly vanish. That's the whole idea.
Now, to get to your point of choice: in win2k, you get a warning when you install a non-signed driver. If you continue, and the box crashes due to that driver, just when you were about to save that important document, are you still happy? Who will you blame? Yourself, because you were so utterly stupid to install that poopdriver? Or microsoft because 'their OS' crashes all the time?
I know the answer. So does Microsoft. That's why this option is included.
Never underestimate the relief of true separation of Religion and State.
the 1.24 MB word document, when run through wordpad and resaved....32K Yeah, i know i lost 3 graphics, but come on.
What happens if "explorer" crashes? God knows that it happens at least once-per-day to every Windows user. Would that be an unacceptable threshold? Would explorer be put on the banned driver list (putting aside the fact that it isn't a driver, heh)
[insert witty comment here]
Firewall included in XP? I can see the support calls now.
OK, so this scenario could happen with any of the commercial firewalls now, but in most places one would have to go through an approval process to get the software, where if it is now included on the CD it is more readily accessible and much easier for people to screw it up.And frankly with everything that Microsoft has gone through in the last few months (sites hacked into multiple times, Red Code, etc.), they are the last people I will trust to make firewall product. They had better have already qualified both Zone Alarm and Black Ice. This "driver blocked by vote" idea is just too too dumb.
"Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart, he dreams himself your master."
Why not just have a message pop up, like, "This program has not been certified by Microsoft and may impact the reliability of your system. Do you still wish to install it?"
I've never used Windows XP, but I have used two other products that use Microsoft's feature of "Error Reporting". I am the admin of a medium-sized Windows network of about 25 users (but I use Mac OS X and LinuxPPC at home). This happens to me at work all the time: Someone will come up to me and say, "Uh, something came up on my computer and said something about a problem and to say yes to help fix it. I clicked Yes. Was that OK?" How many people will say, "Duh, uh, OK Microsoft sure I'll help you fix my problem." Most computer users out there aren't knowledgeable to take candy from strangers (or, in this case, to give the candy). Maybe many /.ers will know to choose whether or not to send a crash dump, but what about that person's spouse who checks his or her email at night, and IE crashes and then he or she sends the crash dump. The point is that Microsoft will end up getting the informationthey want, regardless to whether or not they appear to be voluntary.
Regarding your issue with the Sidewinder, the reason for that is twofold: 1) they want you to buy another $100+ joystick that has the features you want 2) keyboard mapping allows programmers to bypass Microsoft APIs like DirectInput because anyone can program the keyboard without an API - MS wants to stop those programmers nasty habits of making things too portable to other OSes.
By the way I agree with a previous poster who said that MS would ignore official "watch-dogs"; I'm sure somewhere deep down they will have a nice tally of how many people have 600 KB porno MPEGs in their RAM right after the memory segments with the emails to their wives.
This sig provides no comical value.
You didn't read the article - that driver wouldn't be blocked by default. Unless it was already known/documented to be bad it won't be blocked. Get it? So, go ahead, install something you should already know better and see what happens. MS won't block that. What they are blocking are things guarenteed to screw you up.
Attention! Attention Moron. When a program in XP crashes you are given the option of whether or not to upload crashdumps. I hit yes or no. If I hit yes it uploads it. If I hit no it does not.
Whats it like to be a rocket scientist?
Gam
"Flame at Will"
I love idealists not because I am one, but because they make life bearable for pragmatists such as myself.
I've decided to buy XP licenses for our new machines and will keep deploying 2k.
-ted
I cannot believe the government is standing for this. Microsoft has exclusively shut out any company from making software for its operating system. From camera and movie capture to buil tin firewalls, this is a SERIOUS threat to any software company.
Just so you know, an NT admin would simply define a group policy to disable that option for XP installs on their network.
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
The only thing the old version would have destroyed is Microsoft's unethical control of YOUR computer.
you are such a typical slashbot. please keep this MS paranoia to yourself
This is just another method to determine what things are installed on your computer. They couldn't get away with HD scan uploads, so now they upload what's installed on your computer - but only when it crashes. On windows, that's more than early enough, my win2k box crashed twice today.
Do you have StarOffice installed? Well that's why you crashed.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo.
Åååhhh, stakkars deg! Boohoo. Men sånn rent seriøst, tror du ikke editorene legger merke til slikt etter en viss stund? Slutt nå å poste off-topic-kommentarer som dette, så skal du se at alt ordner seg.
That is fine and dandy for those particular applications. The real implications of this are that to work effortlessly with windows any driver developer now has to have the drivers certified by Microsoft.
Microsoft gets to decide if they want to certify a driver or not. That allows Microsoft to control what technologies and companies will work with windows.
Just like so many other things with XP, this may seem harmless now, but the potential for abuse this introduces is overwhelming.
"This just in: Microsoft drops support for all security products in a move to solidfy support for its own firewall. However, Microsoft's firewall has a mere 61,000 bugs, but only 20,000 are considered to be serious. Bill Gates says, 'Screw you Steve Jobs, we got the money, baby!'"
And everyone thought that Apple's "Big Brother" ad was so off the wall...
Vote monkeys into Congress. They are cheaper and more trustworthy.
Just like how censorware typically blocks peacefire, Microsoft is blocking any software that can help users protect themselves from Microsoft.
I'm a big boy now. If I choose to run software that *might* cause XP problems, then that's the risk i take. It's my fucking problem, *NOT* MS's. If I want to run v 1.1 of software x instead of v 1.2, because I didn't like what they did in 1.2, why can't i just keep v 1.1 and deal with the problems it has myself?
On another note ... beta drivers tend to crash the system, is MS going to prevent people from downloading them? I can see it now....
"Sir, we can't seem test our beta XP drivers on our XP machines, XP is refusing to install them."
Got Freedom?
Thinking?
When Mozilla receives n crash reports from a specific page, they don't block you from looking at the URL that crashed the browser. When Microsoft gets n crash reports from a certain program, they won't allow it to run. Of course, with Microsoft's dubious history, I'm *sure* that a perfectly good 3rd party application that works just fine won't be blocked ... rriiiiggghhttt....
This article on ZDNet from a few days ago details a disagreement between Kodak and Microsoft over Kodak camera drivers for Windows XP. Seems that Microsoft, who has bolted a lot of digital image features onto XP, refuses to sign Kodak's drivers.
I remember the outcry from some people back when driver signing was first introduced. They said that Microsoft could use driver signing as a weapon, a way of sabotaging their competitors' products to give their own a boost. Now it's starting to look like those predictions are coming true.
Says the article: "Although the driver could be downloaded, a dialog box will appear on the PC stating that the driver has not been tested for use with Windows XP and may not be reliable." And we all know what that means, right? The average non-computer-savvy consumer will be frightened off from installing that evil, evil Kodak software by Microsoft's Warning Dialog of Death (apparently a direct descendant of that old DR-DOS induced "error" in Win 3.1) and will just use Microsoft's built-in stuff. Of course, that's assuming that there will be some non-lazy consumers who won't just use Microsoft's offering without question. Is is those people, after all, who were a major part of how they crushed Netscape.
~Philly
Oh, FFS, I /do/ know how to set up a network. And anyway, in this case, the computer had a direct connection both to a computer trying to send RC5 blocks to it, and to the Internet.
Or does WinNT5 have the firewall in it, instead?
James F.
No, only XP has the built-in firewall. Yes, it's fairly easy to turn off (I did it in about 30 seconds).
If installing IE6 broke anything... you didn't do it right. I've been using it with Windows 2000 for quite some time now.
Game... blouses.
Are you opposed to traditional firewalls as well? While a personal firewall can't compete with a dedicated firewall it will still provide far better protection than a bare connection.
While you can likely keep a machine free from trojans by beeing cautious of who you source your software from, there is still loads of spyware out there, some contained in quite useful apps.
While you can say (/shout) "SHOULD NOT RUN PROGRAMS THEY DO NOT KNOW". In practice noone can know all the software they run, as this entails reading and understanding all source, as well as building from the ground up all software you use. Some trust must be applied, and when you trust you may be mistaken.
A firewall app provedes an extra layer of security against your own erronous judgements (after all noone is perfect) as well an enable you to use and identify some spyware without sacrificing privacy (By blocking the spyware's channel to home)
The windows XP OS "phones home" and delivers information to MS headquarters (supposeldy just about your liscence data and nothing else of course). If you had a firewall program like Black Ice or ZoneAlarm you would be alerted that your computer was trying to send something over your internet connection. You could then STOP IT from transmitting data with a functional personal firewall.
When MS says they are working with vendors on an "XP" version what they really mean is
**sillymodeon**
"We are forcing vendors to allow our Big Brother program to work without your ability to disable it because we really need to know what software you are installing and whether or not you have an ext2 partition or other non-suitable for XP partitions on your harddrives. You of course have accepted us snooping into what you eat and your e-mail when you bought windows XP, merely glancing at the packaging in the store binds you to this agreement whether or not you even own XP. Our lawyers are that well paid *wink*".
**/sillymode**
I don't think I will be purchasing any computer with XP on it.
"Science is about ego as much as it is about discovery and truth " - I said it, so sue me.
Maybe someone can correct me here, but I don't think there are any desktop operating systems that can recover after an unhandler kernel-mode exception.
When I tested Windows XP RC1 I forced it to use Windows 2000 drivers for a Philip's Accoustic Edge 5.1 sound card. Well whenever I went to play music or Quake 3 the OS would blue screen saying the computer is shutting down to prevent breaking the hardware and also make specific reference to Tbird.sys (the sound card's driver).
I contacted Phillips about the problem and they said to check back with them come the end of October until then they're not supporting Win XP. What the hell is that?
So I bought a Sound Blaster Live! and had no problems.
This is a perfect case as to two companies who are in a competing in the same market and need to make new drivers for their operating system. If Phillip's had just been a Win XP beta tester they would have been able to write drivers and give them to Microsoft to put in RC1. Instead, they are going to screw customers until Microsoft officially releases. Creative made sure their drivers were top notch for RC1. All a company needs to do is become beta testers and send in their drivers.
Win XP blocking bad drivers will increase stabillity and bennifet everyone. This forces hardware makers to make good drivers or they won't let it run under Windows XP. Newbies won't have to wonder why their computer is screwed up. And the most important part is you wind up with a mush stabler operating system.
No wonder the Sweat Hogs never got that Rhodes scholarship...
I assume you are working as a developer, product manager or something tehnical at Microsoft or one of the "blocked" products since you are aware of why these programs were blocked. If not, have you - just for a second - considered that there actually might very well be a perfectly technical reason for this? Now, let's say that the "blocked" software actually gives a security hole when installed on XP (no, I do NOT know this is the case, but i doubt you know for sure it isn't). - Guess which forum will be the first to yell out about MS security if the hole is exploitet? I am not saying Microsoft hasn't pulled some really bad stunts in the past and this "feature" can very well be used for a new one - but this does not mean it WILL be used, only the future will show.
Microsoft is smoking some serious crack if they think they can become the sole authoritative source for drivers on the Internet.
It is foolish to underestimate your enemy's strength. If there is one company with enough resources to pull this off, it is Microsoft.
In conclusion, be afraid. Be very afraid.
Call me paranoid, but I have a hunch that the new "compliant" versions of this software will have certain microsoft ports opened for various reasons. Not only does this present a security threat, but I am also somewhat worried about the user's privacy.
As for AOL, I think I can guess about that one.
Ahhhhh, all the evil news about XP that is being floated is obviously a ploy to boost sales of Windows 98 and ME. Well, it worked. I'll be advising my friends, who rely on prebuilt systems, to purchase tricked-out PCs before XP ships.
You see that picture up above.... the one of Bill with a Borg Head...? Guess what section it denotes?? You guessed it! The MS section! Hooray for brain power!
I think this is a good thing.
They are making device developers fall into line.
I sure Microsoft is as tired of the the blue screen jokes as the rest of us are.
Alot of the people whining about how this may reduce compatibility with existing apps (which is not the case) are the same maclots who defend Mac OSX "The worlds most crude OS" to the death.
The irony of it all is so sweet. So very sweet indeed.
Gam
"Flame at Will"
I love idealists not because I am one, but because they make life bearable for pragmatists such as myself.
I would not say that adding a major feature that breaks competitors' software in the SECOND RELEASE CANDIDATE is kosher in ANY sense of the word. I mean, think of the implications JUST from the software development life cycle aspect. This addition will certainly have system-wide implications, and it's going into RC2? TWO??? Wouldn't that effectively nullify most of the beta testing that applied to RC1 and ALL previous builds? Isn't this just plain common sense?
And if you were a prosecutor, you'd look at the defendant's past history of proven, similar actions and call it damning. Just the things that we know for sure, coming largely from internal memos and emails that came out of the discovery process during the various legal actions, indicate that there is a predatory culture in Microsoft. Not that there isn't a similar culture in a lot of companies, but this one goes beyond the bounds of the law, common sense, and is certainly NOT in the interests of the comsumer. (And when I say comsumer, that's you 'n' me, chief!)
Furthermore, you saw fit to add your own conjecture. Frankly, if ZoneAlarm uses hacks to accomplish what it needs to do, I for one am entirely happy; and so are the millions of other people using it, who find that it causes no crashes whatsoever. I am hard-pressed, in fact, to think of a system utility that does its job so well, sitting in the background as unobtrusive as it can be. Especially something that has to intercept and examine every packet coming into a machine.
If you're going to accuse Slashdot submitters of faulty journalism, you can't interject your own bias as well and hope it all balances out...
If the criteria are not published, though, one may reasonably presume that the criteria are not objective. Even barring malicious intent, subjective criteria would be bent to Microsoft's convenience. This is for the same reason that science uses double-blind experiments when possible. People always are biased in favor of judgements that favor their own interests. In the absence of an objective specification, I believe this no-run list would be a clear violation of monopoly power even if it were not so intended.
mt
Those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it.
Microsoft Apologists would have you forget the whole Blue Mountain Arts episode. Where after setting up a competing service to deliver e-greeting cards at MSN, they started creating incompatabilities in MSIE to make use of Blue Mountain's site impossible. Then they instituted mail filters in Outlook Express to allow users to control spam. One of the first sites to be dumped in to the spam filter was the competing Blue Mountain Arts.
Microsoft's Response of course (queue up the Phil Collins) was "There must be some misunderstanding. There must be some kind of mistake."
Those who willfully ignore the abuse of power by the folks in Redmond and the lies to which they stretch to rationalize their behavior are at best sociopaths. Curtly respond to them and dismiss them. They are unable to discern reality, because they refuse to accept what history might teach them. Besides they are probably being paid by a third party PR organization hired by Microsoft.
Hi I've been using "Tiny Personal Firewall" from "http://www.tinysoftware.com/" and I'd like to say that I'm pretty much happy with it - it lets you set rules and doesn't nag you whenever somebody pings you. I don't know about black-ice or other perasonal firewalls, however, I find Tiny personal firewall by far more intelligent (& free for non-commercial use). I highly recommend it, even though that company has some shareware products (winroute etc.) because it seems much simpler and compatible with my taste in software. I would like to simply use IP-tables under and OSS OS but simply don't have the knowledge to install one.
Why on earth should an 11 page text document be over 1M??
I'm saying that having Windows XP blacklist certain drivers won't change the fact that you won't be able to install it anyway. Your example is vacuous.
They can remotely cripple any software or hardware that uses a specialized driver. While they use the excuse that it is not XP compliant. What is to stop them from placing drivers from any software or hardware they choose on the list? Imagine if they wanted to block a certain piece of hardware, a specialized sound driver or a Divx codec. What would stop the? This impacts open source because often the software used is in beta when people first download and try it. This would not work if they wished it. Where are the controls to disable this feature? Even then how much do you want to bet that in order to watch or listen to any secure content that you will need to update your list of banned devices? Anyone here use Disk Daemon or VNC? I will bet that packages like these will be banned because they can emulate hardware or provide ways to pull screen content. I would also bet that Microsoft is not about to remove any of its products from the list. Imagine them restricting the latest version of Apache or MySQL while releasing the newest version off IIS. Even if this feature were meant to be used with good intention, it allows them in an underhanded way to control the software and hardware market. Futhermore, it just dawned on me that they could even block software that uses standard Windows drivers by updating a standad driver in way that cripples third party software ability to communicate with it and then blocking the old driver as outdated. All they have to do is make sure that the driver update and the patch for their own software to work with the new driver's FEATURES is released in the same package. I could easily see them doing this with the streaming Media Codecs.
That said, there is NO question Microsoft has used tactics to drive competition into the ground. The DR_DOS is a clear example and there are others. Again, we're left with the conspiracy theory - Microsoft could easily use this and WIndows update to degrade the stability of competing products and then block them out entirely or make them spend precious R&D on fixing bugs Microsoft has cause. Now in most other contexts (except maybe the gov't) something like this would be laughed at. But time and again Microsoft has proved they will go to extreme lengths to eliminate competition and a setup like this gives them a very powerful weapon.
Its too bad really. Microsoft has rightly earned their reputation and now they are in the position that even when they might have good intentions they get slammed for it. Its their own fault, but at times you wish we could trust Redmond in cases like these so that we could help improve the stability of WINdows and make our lives easier (for those that are forced to support them)
Top Most Bizarre/Disturbing Error Messages
Plan B: buy Caldera.
Plan C: buy Ximian.
sgis ddo ekil t'nod i
Get a better browser, like Internet Explorer.
Slashdot should have a Microsoft section. It seems like there is at least one MS article a day, and they are all the same article: "MS bad OSS good."
With a separate section, those who enjoy whining about how "M$" is taking over the world can go off in a corner and circle-jerk all they want. The rest of us can (hopefully) read something truly interesting.
Also, the MS articles shouldn't appear on the main page unless there is something *truly* newsworthy, for example, the final resolution to the anti-trust case.
Of course, this will never happen because /. gets more page hits from MS articles on the front page than from any other single source; but I can dream.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Uh-oh. So will blackice and zonealarm ask the JD to persue the "illegal tying" of a firewall and an operating system together?
Hmm, my RedHat machine also has a firewall....
I've seen lots of comments about how Microsoft is evil and is trying to eliminate all their competitors in the personal firewal market and how they are going to spy on what the users have installed and how they will block web sites a programs too, along with the drivers, but nobody seems to have realized the true implications of this modification to Windows, instead of all the paranoid stupidity.
First of all, this provides another revenue stream for Microsoft. In order to get their the drivers marked as Windows XP Compatible (and the digital signature that goes along with this), hardware vendors will undoubtedly have to pay Microsoft some fee, whether it be for the signature itself or perhaps something slightly more useful (and less greedy), like paying Microsoft to do some testing on the drivers and then providing the certification.
This isn't particularly bad (although, Microsoft is once again abusing its monopoly power to gain money, who else are the hardware companies going to make hardware for?).
What does worry me is the fact that this provides an easy way for Microsoft to infulence hardware manufacturers. If they don'y follow Microsoft's "suggestions", the testing and certification could be "accidently" delayed, while all the hardware company's competitors deliver their products to market before them.
What will those suggestions be?
Probably something like "Hey, you know those weird communist hippy freaks who work on that evil anti-American OS called Linux? We want you to stop providing them with technical specifications and hardware drivers. Thanks, and have a nice day!"
for GNU/Linux and BSD that is. Everyone seems to get upset with this idea, I love it! Fsck em, let them screaw things up more and more. The more they do it, the more people will search for an alternative.
GNU/Linux allows me to do what ever the hell I want. If I wanna run _everything_ as root and make the system 100% insecure, its up to me. It will allow me to make whatever changes required to do so. Of course I wouldn't, but the freedom is there.
On an M$ platform, M$ makes those desisons for me. Why would anyone need another firewall ? Ours is good enough. This comming from a company that has zero clues on security.
Theres a slew of intresting info on this avaiable here. (Take a look at the links on the bottom) They talk about a lot of crap that M$ is tring to pull with XP. Its a good read. Especially for those intrested in acutally using an M$ platform.
until (succeed) try { again(); }
You would appear far less moronic if your use of childish vulgarity was restricted to commenting on what the previous poster *actually* said, rather than your "I'm too full of self-righteous MS-loathing to read straight" interpretation.
So, you can shut the fuck up now. Idiot.
Java is the blue pill
Choose the red pill
I keep a firewall **ONLY** to ensure that my box never hits MS servers--and for no other reason...if MS expects me to use their firewall, they can expect me to use Windows 98 until the dawn of time.
This is scary.
You didn't really understand what he was talking about, did you?
Why the fuck would you have tried it? It's clearly a VXD.
"I want to KNOW what internet traffic is coming IN and OUT of my system. ZoneAlarm fulfills that need, for $0, and deserves praise."
Microsoft has a history of creating deliberate incompatibilities for competition, and it's no coincidence that ZoneAlarm and others find their software broken for no good reason in XP. It's happened before and it will happen again, and KEEP happening until developers learn that when they are playing M$'s game, the only winning move is NOT TO PLAY.
In the case of a firewall, or any other kind of security software, I have a LOT more faith in a third party than I do in MS's "security bug a week" laughable record.
I have no doubt that MS's so-called "firewall" in XP with Active Swiss Cheese (tm) technology will prove just as sucessful as their foray into bundling anti-virus software with DOS 6.x (horrible failure).
Bundling a swiss-cheese firewall with the OS is a BAD idea, as it will, like the MS Anti-Virus debacle, it will give a LOT of people a false sense of security, and cause the demise of third party security apps for `Doze (who will cease development because their air supply is cut off). Which will do NOTHING for MS's reputation as the least secure, MOST dangerous OS to let loose on the `net there is.
Aim down, FIRE, where did my foot go today?
=== The price of freedom is eternal vigilance
Noone told me anything about having WinXP on my car! At least, they`re keeping dangerous and troublesome drivers off the roads.SAving a few lives... Oh wait a minute...
-------------------------
That they were included in Windows 3.1 & 3.11 right? Killed for Win9x, and then are supposed to be re-add'd for XP. NT has always had it, but NT security wise is a good deal better then the old 9X kernal.
The main problem is that, like all personal firewall manufacturers, Microsoft ahs to take into consideration support costs. For this reason, personal firewalls do not offer high levels of security. This is why I build my own...
The Personal Firewall in XP has a number of design decisions made in order to cut down on support costs (read security). Among these are the fact that they decided to not allow it to protect packets traversing through Internet Connection Sharing meaning that there is no single point of administration for a home network. This limits its security and violates nearly all good security practices by making Personal Firewall somehting that simply provides enhanced host-based security. It is not a piece of software I would encourage in any sirt of networked environment...
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
I am a NT sysadmin and have an XP and 2000 box of my own (and a i386 and Alpha Linux but that is besides the point) that I use regularly so I am in no way biased against Microsoft. However! I have been beta testing XP and in RC1 I tried to install the Novell Client (as we have a large Novell network) and it told me it wouldn't work and to pound sand (more or less). There was no way to bypass the block (it did let blackice slide in RC1 as it allowed me to overide the block). Anyhow, with this particular product I knew how to manually bypass the installer and after I did so it worked fine. Unfortunately it seems some of Microsoft's App and driver blocking could be political and not stability related.
Perhaps MS should have provided a feature in Windows (all versions up to Win2000) to keep Windows itself from running! This would, after all, have avoided the inevitable crashes caused by Windows.
It might be said: Software companies that live in "crash" houses shouldn't throw rocks.
It is true that blocking poorly-written 3rd party drives might lead to tangible benefits for consumers. But at the same time it might serve to benefit MS also. The two are not incompatible.
But MS can protect consumers from poorly written 3rd party drives in other ways than proposed. For instance, they might have a feature in Windows that sends a message to the user that they are using a driver than is known to cause problems and that the user should be warned.
This would give the consumer the ability to decide what to do: to use the driver or not. After all, a driver might cause crashes in 25% of systems, but this means that 75% of systems don't crash. Microsoft would deny the 75% of happy customers from using a driver that has given them no trouble.
Perhaps 10 reasonable ways might exist to solve some problem with Windows. But MS consistently chooses the 1 solution that benefits MS the most (even though the solution might not be optimal in other ways).
Microsoft keeps on letting the rope out on this OS. But for some reason they haven't hanged themselves yet. I can't wait till they do.
The justice department and the courts have not been able to find a solution to the Microsoft problem. Even M$'s competititors have failed miserably.
At this point only group of people can save us....this is a job for Ted Kaczynski and the Trench Coat Mafia!
Muslim community leaders warn of backlash from tomorrow morning's terrorist attack.
Have Windows XP RC2 & Zone Alarm is working fine (they just had a update).
recognizes a document by extension and type, then it should at least be able to open it. No. WordPad decided to go a life of crime rather than read that pile of M$ trash. Illegal Operation my ASS!!!
Shift happens. Fire it up.
No OS vender should block certain pieces of software. Any 'blocking' should be turned off by default.
Personally, I feel that this is a great move on Microsoft's part. It will help curb compatibility issues, and help prevent faults from happening in the first place. The next step would to be, if it hasn't been done already, including protected memory support... a la Mac OS X, and others, into Windows XP.
Windows is their product, so they should be entitled to treat it how ever they please. Even though Microsoft exhibits monopolistic characteristics from time to time, they are not a monopoly. Blocking developers from implementing potentially crippling Windows drivers is a Good Thing, not a monopolistic(bad) thing. Furthermore, if developers feel that Microsoft is extorting money for driver rights, the developers will blow the whistle... perhaps moving their primary focus to another platform. Perhaps those same disgruntled developers will conjure up some wild hack, circumventing this driver installation block altogether.
If Microsoft wants to start some quality control over their platform, they should be able to. Perhaps this went a little off-topic, but don't hesitate to enlighten me if I have drawn a misconception or two.
But its not the lockout - its the TIMING.
in RC2? How about activating in Beta 1???
Of course they have to block BlackICE and ZoneAlarm. These two would actually inform the user that MS is uploading heaps of data which would probably raise quite a few questions..
"Use the Firewall that comes with XP. Trust us."
Nice try.
Alex
Perhaps they might write a worm that damages your driver, making it cause crashes, and then replicates and spreads itself to other susceptable machines. It wouldn't take too long - after a few days, thousands of machines would be crashing on YOUR driver, which might be enough to get it blacklisted.
Of course, Microsoft's tracking program might be smart enough to note the sudden change in crash reports and conclude that it's a worm, but do you trust them to do so?
Might there be issues with the legality of one company disabling another company's products without their permission, regardless of "qulity" issues?
I'm not a lawyer, so I'm asking this, but it seems that they might be asking for trouble here.
I've tried TPF and gone back to Zonealarm after TPF squeezed my DSL bandwidth to sub-14.4 modem speeds. Everything from my browser to my mail client to my beloved gnutella clients became unusable. Lose Tiny, re-install Zonealarm, problem solved.
Eloi are stupid, throw morlocks at them!
The same thing applies to what happens when an application drops dead. You can either send or not send the app's crash info up to Microsoft.
As far as the driver blocking itself goes, the system only blocks your driver installation when a certain critical threshold of user problems is reported. And here's the kicker: It will even block MICROSOFT'S OWN DRIVERS! Just try installing the 3.x version of the Sidewinder game controller software. The system won't let you do it. (The hardware is still supported in the core XP system; you simply lose the ability to map the buttons to keyboard commands. Irritating, but not disastrous.) To me that means that Microsoft's Windows Division is trying as well as they can to stick to their commitment of shipping as stable a system as they can.
--Ford Prefect
Yes, I have an MCSE certification. ...Hi, my name is_________and I use Microsoft products...)
Yes, I know it isn't worth very much around here.
No, I don't live in a world depicted by Microsoft marketing.
You see, I don't work for Microsoft, I work for my clients, and the technical advice I give them will be what is in their best interests, not Microsoft's! And that advice doesn't include XP in future deployments. Expect to see more Linux, BSD, BeOS etc...
(gee, I feel like I'm at an A.A meeting!
You're using her as bait, Master!
There isn't much journalistic integrity on this site is there? "Well, apparently among the casualties are ZoneAlarm and BlackIce... Two popular free personal firewall products for windows. Guess What? XP includes its own firewall ... So you don't really need then anyway, right?"
and at the very end of the article:
"Note: according to this article, the change does not prevent Black Ice or other programs from running per se -- but it does require them to use updated versions tailored for XP. "
Why wasn't the entire summary of that one line posted, instead of so blatantly skewing the truth?
"RC2 refuses to install a host of third party applications including Black Ice, Zone Alarm and AOL. Users will need to upgrade their applications to Windows XP-compliant versions."
when will people understand that MS cries out to be bashed (it has a proven track-record of lies and heavy-handed biz tactics that have been adjudicated as illegal)... it is in fact MS's own fault that it garners such vehement hatred. if you do NOT bash MS there truly MUST be something wrong with you...
You know, I really think the average consumer oesn't care a bit about open souce, closed source, or shared source. Sure, maybe most people think that Microsoft shouldn't be such a bully, but that's not going to keep them from wanting to buy computers they can use without reading a book.
Wake up, folks. People don't really care about free software, open source and all the rest. No more than they'd be expected to care about Free Toasters and Open Refrigerators. They don't want choice if the choice means reading howto's and Unix manuals. They don't want to have the freedom to build their own computing environmen because computers are complicated, intimidating and scary.
If Microsoft disappeared tomorrow, Linux and all the other free Unixes still wouldn't be easy enough, simple enough, and attractive enough to fill the void.
So, rather then whining about how the Big Bully is keeping Your Favorite Unix LookAlike from taking over the world, how about getting busy and putting together on OS that is so outrageously good that people will wipe Windows from their PC's and buy it.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
OTOH, you could look at these firewalls as making it so that everything a Windoze user runs, is inside a sort of a sandbox. They're trying to solve the users-run-trojan problem from the weird direction.
Why is Microsoft the only one with the privilege of getting automatic bug reports for their products? Why can't each vendor set up an address where crash dumps can be sent?
I've got to ask, how many people downloaded to the doc file and read it? How many downloaded it to /dev/null just to eat a little M$ bandwidth? :-) 'nough said.
I'd read it, but
Wordpad has caused an error in
MSWRD832.CNV.
Wordpad will now close.
AND... If i continue to exiperence problems, i should try restarting my computer.
That's comforting.
~z
sig?
1 - Collect Data 2 - ?? 3 - Big Profit!
I don't know about you, but when I use windows, I have the GIMP Win32 port installed. I rarely use Photoshop anymore, as I find the GIMP more convenient and natural for me to use. I can see it now. Microsoft will block the GIMP in WinXP just because Adobe pays them off. I know I'm being paranoid, but this can eliminate individuals being able to write their own apps. Well, maybe this will backfire:
... Ahh fsck!"
::home user calls MS tech support::
User: "Hello, I downloaded a program off the net and it won't start."
Tech Support: "What program is that?"
User: "Ultra Solitaire."
Tech Support: "Umm, that application doesn't work."
User: "Why?"
Tech Support: "We included a perfectly good version of solitaire in Windows for your enjoyment. Why don't you just use that?"
User: "WHY WON'T IT WORK GOD DAMNIT?!?!?!"
Tech Support: "You _don't_ need that application."
User: "Well, that penguin thing looks trendy. Maybe I'll try that."
Tech Support: "Penguin thing?
Boss: "That's coming out of your pay check!"
I can only hope...
Conrad Herrmann of Zone Labs posted in grc.security.software: For right or wrong, Microsoft has made enough changes to Windows XP that render the device drivers of some previous versions of applications incompatible with the new OS. It's a pain. In my 20 years or so of development experience, Microsoft has never failed to render some apps incompatible with the new OS version. It's a pain. Applications vendors (like us) can complain about the difficulty this causes to the customers, but Microsoft knows we will release compatible versions of the software if we want to look forward to the next generation of compatibility. MS developed Windows XP to be what it is, regardless of whether it is incompatible with version 2.6.88 of ZA. So we updated ZA to be compatible with the new OS. It's a pain, did I mention that? But, installing ZA 2.6.231 after installing XP will give you a working system. And our goal is to give you a functional security system that works under the final XP when it is released.
the days when M$ employees used to astroturf messageboards? Wait, they're still doing it....
"ZA always worked great for me."
Maybe thats because you're not running XP? Zone Alarm bluescreens on XP, so it was blocked. What's better, displaying a message to users letting them know they need to get a new version, or having their system bluescreen at random times?
Your momma. And I mean that. While you might be well cable of troubleshooting the problem yourself, please tell me if your mother (father/uncle/neighbor/etc) is capable of that? What would you say is better for them, blocking known buggy software, or having their machine crash at random times?
This is not a rhetorical question - keep in mind that XP is consumer operating system. What do you honestly think is better for the average luser consumer?
You can't handle a driver failure. By definition a driver is part of the kernel, and if the kernel screws up, you're toast.
This is an unsupported proposition. While it may be typical for a driver to be implemented in kernel mode, it's not "by definition" a requirement. Take a look at Project UDI for a device driver API that could be implemented in user-mode. This would allow the system to be equally protected against untrusted drivers as it can be from untrusted applications. Now, I'm not saying that the Reference Implementation or any other UDI implementation actually supports user-mode drivers today. However, the API standard is written in such a way as to allow for that possibility.
Of course, user-mode drivers would execute more slowly than kernel-mode drivers, but if an OS supported both types, paying the performance price for stability on untrusted drivers would be a worthwhile tradeoff...
Deven
"Simple things should be simple, and complex things should be possible." - Alan Kay