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

Re:Oh, god, no!

[coolgeek]

Bottom line is that they are saying that vendors will need to upgrade their wares to be compliant with the new platform.

Almost, but not quite. Yes, an app vendor needs to recompile/port/totally rewrite their 9x/NT application to get it running reliably under XP. That's not the issue. The issue is that M$ is now requiring that you certify your software under the XP logo program. This is cost-prohibitive for many companies, almost certainly excludes any GPL programs from running under windows, and it seems that an individual will be unable to author, compile and run a program on their own system!

The only way to get your program into that list is to get the logo. This implies that the database will have to be refreshed on individual user's computers from time-to-time, so a new app when published, will fail to install on any computer that has not been refreshed recently. The user will not blame Microsoft for this, and will likely return the product to the store and buy the competing solution. Also, if you read the entire Register article, it mentions that ill behaved software will have their XP credentials yanked, if too much BSOD events are logged. If you've ever developed any Windows software, you know that Microsoft breaks plenty of API calls during rev-level releases, potentially causing a vendor's application to get blacklisted. Or from the conspiracy theory perspective, this becomes a new tool Microsoft can employ during the "extinguish" phase.

Re:zone alarm and xp rc 2

[cmat]

I another thing I dunno is how to turn off this "feature" in windows....

Well, the thing is you can't turn this feature on or off... it's automatically running all the time in the back ground. And actually, it looks like it's geard to reducing the number of "unstable" drivers on your system. This may or may not be a good thing(tm), however, they did not mention in their reference document exactly how they are going to validate these "crash dumps" that will be sent back to them. They will need to validate these dumps somehow, or else you'll get a new kinda of DoS attack... one where a bunch of computers are crashed purposefully to generate dumps that seem to indicate that a particular driver is faulty. Then MicroSoft blocks this driver from ALL the installed XP user base and Wammo! Driver DoS :)

BTW, I copyright that idea.... erm, yeah, whatever. ;) Cheers!

Re:Improve "reliability"

[Dr. Evil]

Yes, despite what the most vocal MS critics say, NT is quite stable, third party drivers do kill it.

Linux doesn't have this problem because there aren't too many vendors writing kernel modules.

IMHO, it is a harsh solution for a bad problem. But I can't fault them -- I can't think of any other way of doing it... except maybe a "I forfeit support from MS, and accept the risks of running this driver" button.

Remember too that MS has been responding to industry requests for privacy and control over updates. I imagine this will be among those tools with an option to point towards a privately run server. If not, corporate customers would have a fit. Just imagine being an IT manager finding out that Windows XP purged the video drivers from half your users in North America.

On the other hand, the worse MS gets, the more sense Linux makes.