Windows XP To Block Use Of "Troublesome" Drivers

Johnno74 writes "According to this story on The Register, Windows XP rc2 now includes the ability for Microsoft to prevent users from installing certain device drivers. Sounds like a good idea? 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? The full details on how this works are in this 1mb word document on Microsoft's site.

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:

&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp"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.

Comments

MS Marketing : internal pr

[Alien54]

No, the problem is trust. Microsoft has done just about everything possible to ensure that they don't have mine. Remember the truism: fuck me once, fuck you. Fuck me twice, fuck me! Bill can go find another hunny to take from. He can't have any more of mine.

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.