Cringely: MS To Hurt Linux Via USB Enhancements

frogspit writes "In this article, Cringely suggests that MS's proposed enhancements to USB to address security issues have the added benefit (for them) of hurting Linux."

Comments

DMCA

[GoMMiX]

D...M..C.A...

And copyrights...

Watch, MS will copyright some key element that allows the OS to interface with the USB devices - prohibiting anyone from making compatible software.

On top of that, if you simply bypass their key element - it's copyright circumvention because it bypasses that security check or whatever that MS implemented.

I'm not saying that's the way it's going to be - but it's a possibility.

In the end, though, it doesn't matter what MS tries to do - they're not going to cripple FOSS. The nastier they get, the less people care for their company and products. That means more people to FOSS and other competition - and less political influence for Microsoft to continue out it's battle. (Not that I want to see MS gone, but perhaps when they're not the biggest kid on the playground they'll have to behave themselves a bit more.)

Re:DMCA

[optimus2861]

Watch, MS will copyright some key element that allows the OS to interface with the USB devices - prohibiting anyone from making compatible software.

On top of that, if you simply bypass their key element - it's copyright circumvention because it bypasses that security check or whatever that MS implemented.

Ahh, but this avenue of attack has taken a severe blow from the courts recently. In the Chamberlain v. Skylink case, Chamberlain did much what you suggest with their garage door openers: put some software code in it that handled the key exchange between its transmitter and receiver. When Skylink came out with a transmitter that could open Chamberlain door openers, Chamberlain claimed Skylink was circumventing an access-control mechanism and took them to court over it.

Chamberlain lost. The court basically said, if it's your hardware, you've got the right to access it, and that Chamberlain's proposed construction of the DMCA was too unreasonable to accept. There had to be a genuine case of copyright infringement at hand before the DMCA's anti-circumvention provision could be invoked, and the court found there wasn't one in Chamberlain's case. (That in itself is a good statement; the DMCA itself doesn't actually state that, and until that ruling I had been thinking it could very well make an end-run around public domain works or fair use.)

I would think that trying to pull the same stunt around accessing your own USB device on your own computer would meet with a similar result. (Although, there's the matter of printer cartridges, which the courts haven't seemed to have issued a similar slap-down on...)

Re:bad presumption....

[garcia]

An "enhancement" could always be included in a service pack to allow DRM CDs on 95,98,etc.

And MSFT knows this would make the original idea worthless. It won't happen. Upgrade or suffer with using old programs.

What about legacy auto/component players?

What about them? You want to listen to the new music then buy a new player. It's not exactly as if your VHS player plays DVDs. Sure, you can get VHS movies currently but I would go out on a limb to suggest that eventually they will be discontinued for DVD and its successors. You can continue to watch your old media no problem but you won't have access to the new features.

Here's to hoping the OpenBIOS project can workaroud some of this junk.

Sure, you can run all the free software in the world on your OpenBIOS computer. You will not be able to watch media, listen to media, surf the net, etc, because everything will require a "trusted" computer.

Yeah, it's paranoid, yeah it's probably unlikely, but this is where we are headed whether we like it or not.

Re:Not a chance

[spectral]

It's already possible to root Windows through an edit control, unless they patched that bug. The way the windows security model works, if there's an edit control in an app that has system privileges (I think McAfee virus scan used to show one), and you get the HWND of this edit control, you can send a WM_TIMER message to it and tell it to callback to a function pointer, and execute arbitrary code. The problem comes from the fact that any user can send a message to any other HWND, and the code executes as the owner of the control, not the person who sent the message.

Anyway. There's been slashdot articles about other media format interpreters being susceptible to buffer overflows recently as well, so you can't even claim that it's only Microsoft here. Yes, even on linux. *Gasp*

I'm not even trolling here, I much prefer Linux to Windows, but this damned zealotry has to stop. I am, however, probably feeding a troll.. *sigh*