You're right -- I should have looked at the message a bit closer. Would you care to expand on that point more then? That's the first I've heard anyone mention it.
You have the same potential problems anytime there is a shared library used by a number of different components. The lack of security you perceive is not due to the "integration", it's due to exploits in MSHTML.
And honestly, why the hell would you want 20 different bits of code doing the exact same thing on your system? Windows is bloated enough as it is...
You should actually read the article you linked to. The technique you mention does not work in all cases, especially when shared libraries are involved. Basically, if you throw shared libraries into the mix you need to update the cs register every time you call into a different module. Every technique which tries work around this using segments to separate code & data blocks depends on undocumented functionality and behavior that may or may not work going forward.
Seriously, with approximately sixty billion dollars in the bank, exactly what prevents M$ from producing a secure OS ?
The same thing that prevents game programmers from comming up with crack-proof copy protection.
Re:Protected Stack hardware requirements?
on
Gates on Winsecurity
·
· Score: 4, Informative
You can have a software protected stack. SP2 will have components compiled with Microsoft's "latest" compiler software, which generates code to verify the stack hasn't been corrupted (Win2k3 was compiled with this too, apparently; which was why the MSBlaster worm had 2 'variations' to the buffer overflow attack -- one to attack Win2k/XP and one to attack Win2k3). As I just alluded to, depending on the layout of code in memory and where the overflow occurs, you can hack around software protections. It's a lot harder (apparently, it took the group that found the buffer overflow originally only a few days to create the attack for Win2k/XP, but a few weeks to find something that did more than DOS a Win2k3 box), and in some cases impossible, but not all cases.
The only way truely eliminate arbitrary code execution is to mark pages with data non-executable and have a processor level exception thrown when you try to execute code from a data page.
I do not believe OpenBSD has a software protected stack. However, given that OpenBSD runs on platforms which have hardware protected stacks, it does have the ability to guard against those kind of overflows. Just not on x86 hardware. Well, except maybe a version that runs on the AMD64 hardware...
Ditching ActiveX, does anyone actually use this for anything other than malware anymore?
Yes. Aside from the windows update site, there are a whole crapload of corp intranets that use ActiveX. To get rid of it would cause a lot of grief for their corporate customers. What they CAN do (and have done for Win2k3, and I suspect they'll be doing for XP SP2) is disable ActiveX components by default for non-trusted sites. You can do this today yourself if you really want, by going to the security tab in the IE->Tools->Internet Options dialog.
2. Disabling the (Outlook) preview pane by default
Why? Fix cause of the problems; don't cripple the software. In this case, images should not be downloaded by default. And hey, guess what... the latest version of Outlook does just that.
3. Higher SSL Verbosity with IE 4
IE4? You're bitching about IE4?!? Geeze... maybe I should start bitching about Netscape 4.0 then...
4. IE URL-bar and statusbar should go into an "extra careful verbose mode" when it encounters hexadecimal encoding ( % ). IMO, these are all obvious things that should have been changed LONG ago, why are they still defaults?
Right, it was so obvious that it took how many years for the problem to be discovered? Everything is obvious in hindsight. Nothing is obvious until it has been done.
The pricing is 5% of the product cost, with a minimum of $40. It's 2.5% for an embedded product, which is not subject to the minimum liscense level.
We aren't talking about consumer/desktop products here. We're talking about server products; the kind of applications that cost more than your average computer. General Server protocols are provided by the Enterprise Server edition of Windows, which costs well over $1500. By comparison, the workgroup server edition of solaris costs over $6000. And I could by myself a nice new car for what Sun charges for the Enterprise edition (it is almost $30,000; no, I'm not putting the decimal in the wrong place).
You don't need Trusted Computing to solve that, therefore that is not a justification for Trusted Computing.
Right. It's currently solved by software which generates a hash of your application and stores it in an external file. In order to detect a "change" you must run the external software before running your application, which generally makes the assumption that the hash stored in the external file was not altered by whomever hacked your machine.
You missunderstand Trusted Computing. It's not about signing software with a key at all. The software is itself the "key", more specificly the hash of the software is bound to the encryption keys.
You're confusing TCP with DRM.
By reading the rest of your message it is clear you don't have any idea of what "trusted computing" involves. You might want to actually do some reading about the actual technology, instead of whatever rightwing conspiracy propaganda you've been reading. Keep wearing that giant tinfoil hat; I'm sure it'll keep you safe from the evil government and it's lackies.
While running any software causes the computer to do what someone else wrote, you can at will alter those instructions if you don't like those instructions. It may be a pain in the butt to do in many cases, but it is always possible.
Additionally, someone else can write software which alters those instructions, and you wouldn't know it.
You may say that's a good thing. I think that's a bad thing.
And that is exactly the ability and freedom that Trusted Computing seeks to eliminate. If you change anything on your computer then none of the new software will run at all, all of the new files will be completely unreadable, more and more websites will return error messages and be unviewable, and ultimately you may be denied internet any access at all.
False.
If you alter software signed with a digital key, it will no longer run as a trusted application. If that application interacts with other software which requires that 'trust', it will no longer be able to interact with that other software.
If you are willing to run 'untrusted' software on your computer, you can. If you want to write untrusted software and run it on your computer, you can. If you want to write trusted software and run it on your computer, you can. If you want a 3rd party to interact with your modified and/or untrusted software, you'll have to convince them that you are trustworthy through a different means.
It has nothing to do with making files unreadable. It has nothing to do with HTML or browsing the web. It's signing an exe with a frick'in digital key.
This is just another thinly veiled attempt by Google to leverage their monopoly in the search market to muscle out their competion in the free email market.
How will microsoft and yahoo compete when the only email service people see on Google is gmail?
Don't ever use a computer then unless you wrote every line of code running on it, because that is exactly what it is always doing. (what do you think a program is anyway?)
The previous settlement was narrowly defined/constructed, which made it possible for MS to work around it.
Not true with the current settlement. Which should be fairly obvious by looking at the software that comes pre-installed with computers from various manufacturers these days.
The loss of oceans on mars has nothing to do with a loss in mass.
The magnetic field Mars current has is not capable of protecting it's atmosphere by deflecting solar wind (the solar wind has been eating away at the Martian atmosphere for some time now; I'm not sure if scientists believe mars ever had a magnetic field capable of doing do, but as it's core has cooled off/solidified the magnetic field on the planet today is what it will always have).
As Mars's atmosphere is stripped away/blown into space, the atmospheric pressure drops. At a certain point, the pressure drops to a point where water cannot exist in liquid form and evaporates -- creating more atmosphere, which then gets stripped away by the solar wind...
The cycle continues until all surface water has evaporated or frozen.
There is your opinion of what unfair competition is, and what the law considers unfair competition.
Unfair competition is generally considered to include:
* false/deceptive/intentionally confusing advertising (ex: bait & switch tactics) * misbranding of products * tradmark dilution (ie: company X uses company Y's trademark on their product) * misappropriation of trade secrets * bad faith dealings * price fixing * etc
Basically, unfair competition is supposed to be where one party tries to damage another party instead of trying to improve it's own product.
While anti-trust law is defined so vaguely that it may not be possible to know if you are in violation of the law before a judge issues a verdict, in this particular case so long as MS does not prevent 3rd parties from providing the same service it would appear that they would not be in violation of the law.
Most sites have been designed for IE only, screw the rest (screw standards).
Funny, I've yet to find one site that renders oddly in Mozilla... I found a bug in Mozilla once with some of my HTML (it didn't render correctly in certain cases with dd blocks), but that's since been fixed...
It maintains its leadership by manipulation.
*hands OwlWhacker a tinfoil hat* I think it was made very clear in their anti-trust trial that they couldn't manipulate their way out of a paperbag...
Concerning Windows Media Player, it was never an issue before because streaming media wasn't such a popular/lucrative business.
It still isn't a popular lucrative business. P2P downloading of movies is definately popular, but I wuoldn't exactly call it a lucrative business...
Now that streaming media is big, why can't Microsoft use open media formats rather than its own?
They do support open media formats. Fact of that matter is, if you write a codec for it you can get WMP to play any format you want.
The answer is obviously because it wants everybody to use its media format and make money (by getting people to stream their content in WMP format).
They don't make money from people streaming content in a Microsoft format. They do make money from liscensing the technology behind it (as does every other major player in that arena) -- you can argue that it isn't better than anything else out there, but there will be people who disagree with you.
Again, this isn't bad, it's business, but by bundling WMP with Windows its going to be accepted 'as standard' - especially with Microsoft working so hard to infiltrate the media market.
If you want to be technical, their formats are "standards" -- they've been published with standards bodies, and there is talk that the "next generation" dvd formats will support one of their better encoding methods...
Why does Windows come with the additional apps that it comes with, why not add something like Realplayer or other messaging clients?
Wild guess here... maybe because they'd have to pay those companies money? Would YOU want to pay an extra $80 so you can get Windows with RealPlayer and 3 different IM clients?
Second reason: So that they don't put themself in a risky position by depending on a 3rd party.
If Microsoft didn't develop anything other than Windows as a bare-bones OS, Windows would ship with Realplayer, Firefox, etc.
If MS only gave us a bare-bones OS, anyone who bought it would spend 5 days of their life downloading/installing software to get a useable system.
Windows is not a bare-bones OS. It isn't made for geeks. It is made for the mass market. It is made to do what most people want right after installing it. Think that's a bad idea? Look around... it is standard practice.
If you have Windows distributions, as I suggested, people could buy Windows with plenty of different apps included (such as Firebird instead of IE for example).
That's wonderful. I'd hate to see the god-aweful mess that such "distributions" would bring to the market. I can see it now -- software that won't install, software that functions improperly because the xyzzy interface was a 5th party knockoff implementation created by another piece of software, software that requires you to install other software before it will work, which requires you to install other software, every application re-invents a number of "standard" components... gee, what does that sound a lot like... Sorry, no thank you. I'll take everything & the kitchen sink, turn off what I don't want, and replace what I don't like.
Nothing is stopping computer manufacturers from installing stuff on top of what MS provides -- before tha anti-trust case that was an issue, but no more.
This would also encourage people to develop their Websites so that the most popular browsers can display them correctly.
Err, isn't that what you're complaining is happening already?:p
If you're going to make fun of the work being done at Microsoft Research, you might want to do some 'research' yourself first. They're doing real research, as opposed to doing feature work for existing products.
If I find out this particular ATM is Windows-operated, I will hunt down Mr. Gates, roll him in tar and feathers and chase him out of town with a stick.... because Bill Gates is personally responsible for the poor error handling by the idiots who wrote the ATM software which runs on top of whatever version of Windows the ATM is running.
The problem is that it is easy to find ways around the punishments.
In your example, all a webpage author would have to do is use a small, solid colored background image to set the "background" color, instead of via html code.
They don't know, but they're really close to finding out what consumers want. Even the word "consumers" says a lot about their mindset. We're just there to buy stuff.
The word consumer implies nothing about "buying stuff." A consumer is a person who 'consumes' a product or service. A consumer in this context is someone who uses their search engine.
What reason do you think that some Web pages don't display correctly in the most innovative browsers available (when IE has stood still for years)?
That has got to be the biggest laugh I've ever seen... so you're saying that IE is dominant because their rendering engine has better error handling that Mozilla....lol (the biggest "problems" seem to stem around table rendering from what I can tell).
And with regards to the non-standard tags, whoopie do. I can deal with having the tag being ignored...
Every place that I've ever worked for which does website design designs for way more than just IE. Aside from the various versions of IE, most companies make sure their pages render correctly on old versions of Netscape, Mozilla, Opera, and (for one company anyway) WebTV. On a good sample of platforms that those browsers are available on (ie: a unix box, mac, and pc).
WMP is the default media player in Windows, most people that produce streaming media will choose WMP formats to stream their media because they know that most users have access to this format. This gives WMP an advantage over other media players. I assume, as you're asking this question, that you haven't been keeping up with the EU case?
I'm looking at the EU case with quite a bit of amusement, as Windows has shipped with a media player of sort since the Windows 3 days. Now that their media player doesn't suck ass, "competitors" bitch.
Furthermore, the only desktop operating system which ships with the "modern" WMP is XP. All of those old ME, 98, and 95 boxes which comprise of most of the desktop installations do not have the modern WMP -- to get it, the user has to download it.
I laugh even more, because the current version of RealPlayer is a steaming pile of shit. It became a steaming pile when RP7 was released, and has gotten worse ever since. I have yet to see one person who likes it, or would choose to use it over ANYTHING. That is, of course, if they could navigate through the maze of "buy here" icons to look for the "download free player" text in a 4 point font somewhere on the page.
The biggest note of amusement to this whole case is that it means that MS isn't allowed to do anything to improve their OS. They'll get smacked down for putting a decent firewall in XP. They'll get smacked down for updating IE. They'll get smacked down for improving their MSN IM software. They'll get smacked down if they try to add functionality that makes burning cd's as simple as draging the files onto the cdrom icon. They're probably going to get sued for making it easy to open up a zip file.
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You're right -- I should have looked at the message a bit closer. Would you care to expand on that point more then? That's the first I've heard anyone mention it.
You have the same potential problems anytime there is a shared library used by a number of different components. The lack of security you perceive is not due to the "integration", it's due to exploits in MSHTML.
...
And honestly, why the hell would you want 20 different bits of code doing the exact same thing on your system? Windows is bloated enough as it is
You should actually read the article you linked to. The technique you mention does not work in all cases, especially when shared libraries are involved. Basically, if you throw shared libraries into the mix you need to update the cs register every time you call into a different module. Every technique which tries work around this using segments to separate code & data blocks depends on undocumented functionality and behavior that may or may not work going forward.
Seriously, with approximately sixty billion dollars in the bank, exactly what prevents M$ from producing a secure OS ?
The same thing that prevents game programmers from comming up with crack-proof copy protection.
You can have a software protected stack. SP2 will have components compiled with Microsoft's "latest" compiler software, which generates code to verify the stack hasn't been corrupted (Win2k3 was compiled with this too, apparently; which was why the MSBlaster worm had 2 'variations' to the buffer overflow attack -- one to attack Win2k/XP and one to attack Win2k3). As I just alluded to, depending on the layout of code in memory and where the overflow occurs, you can hack around software protections. It's a lot harder (apparently, it took the group that found the buffer overflow originally only a few days to create the attack for Win2k/XP, but a few weeks to find something that did more than DOS a Win2k3 box), and in some cases impossible, but not all cases.
... the latest version of Outlook does just that.
... maybe I should start bitching about Netscape 4.0 then...
The only way truely eliminate arbitrary code execution is to mark pages with data non-executable and have a processor level exception thrown when you try to execute code from a data page.
I do not believe OpenBSD has a software protected stack. However, given that OpenBSD runs on platforms which have hardware protected stacks, it does have the ability to guard against those kind of overflows. Just not on x86 hardware. Well, except maybe a version that runs on the AMD64 hardware...
Ditching ActiveX, does anyone actually use this for anything other than malware anymore?
Yes. Aside from the windows update site, there are a whole crapload of corp intranets that use ActiveX. To get rid of it would cause a lot of grief for their corporate customers. What they CAN do (and have done for Win2k3, and I suspect they'll be doing for XP SP2) is disable ActiveX components by default for non-trusted sites. You can do this today yourself if you really want, by going to the security tab in the IE->Tools->Internet Options dialog.
2. Disabling the (Outlook) preview pane by default
Why? Fix cause of the problems; don't cripple the software. In this case, images should not be downloaded by default. And hey, guess what
3. Higher SSL Verbosity with IE 4
IE4? You're bitching about IE4?!? Geeze
4. IE URL-bar and statusbar should go into an "extra careful verbose mode" when it encounters hexadecimal encoding ( % ). IMO, these are all obvious things that should have been changed LONG ago, why are they still defaults?
Right, it was so obvious that it took how many years for the problem to be discovered? Everything is obvious in hindsight. Nothing is obvious until it has been done.
The pricing is 5% of the product cost, with a minimum of $40. It's 2.5% for an embedded product, which is not subject to the minimum liscense level.
We aren't talking about consumer/desktop products here. We're talking about server products; the kind of applications that cost more than your average computer. General Server protocols are provided by the Enterprise Server edition of Windows, which costs well over $1500. By comparison, the workgroup server edition of solaris costs over $6000. And I could by myself a nice new car for what Sun charges for the Enterprise edition (it is almost $30,000; no, I'm not putting the decimal in the wrong place).
Server software isn't cheap. Never has been.
You don't need Trusted Computing to solve that, therefore that is not a justification for Trusted Computing.
Right. It's currently solved by software which generates a hash of your application and stores it in an external file. In order to detect a "change" you must run the external software before running your application, which generally makes the assumption that the hash stored in the external file was not altered by whomever hacked your machine.
You missunderstand Trusted Computing. It's not about signing software with a key at all. The software is itself the "key", more specificly the hash of the software is bound to the encryption keys.
You're confusing TCP with DRM.
By reading the rest of your message it is clear you don't have any idea of what "trusted computing" involves. You might want to actually do some reading about the actual technology, instead of whatever rightwing conspiracy propaganda you've been reading. Keep wearing that giant tinfoil hat; I'm sure it'll keep you safe from the evil government and it's lackies.
While running any software causes the computer to do what someone else wrote, you can at will alter those instructions if you don't like those instructions. It may be a pain in the butt to do in many cases, but it is always possible.
Additionally, someone else can write software which alters those instructions, and you wouldn't know it.
You may say that's a good thing. I think that's a bad thing.
And that is exactly the ability and freedom that Trusted Computing seeks to eliminate. If you change anything on your computer then none of the new software will run at all, all of the new files will be completely unreadable, more and more websites will return error messages and be unviewable, and ultimately you may be denied internet any access at all.
False.
If you alter software signed with a digital key, it will no longer run as a trusted application. If that application interacts with other software which requires that 'trust', it will no longer be able to interact with that other software.
If you are willing to run 'untrusted' software on your computer, you can. If you want to write untrusted software and run it on your computer, you can. If you want to write trusted software and run it on your computer, you can. If you want a 3rd party to interact with your modified and/or untrusted software, you'll have to convince them that you are trustworthy through a different means.
It has nothing to do with making files unreadable. It has nothing to do with HTML or browsing the web. It's signing an exe with a frick'in digital key.
This is just another thinly veiled attempt by Google to leverage their monopoly in the search market to muscle out their competion in the free email market.
How will microsoft and yahoo compete when the only email service people see on Google is gmail?
I think someone fragged their webserver...
Don't ever use a computer then unless you wrote every line of code running on it, because that is exactly what it is always doing. (what do you think a program is anyway?)
The previous settlement was narrowly defined/constructed, which made it possible for MS to work around it.
Not true with the current settlement. Which should be fairly obvious by looking at the software that comes pre-installed with computers from various manufacturers these days.
With the anti-trust settlement in the US, MS is no longer able to use "contract leveraging" without being in violation of the settlement.
One problem: Each vender provides a different API (if one exists at all) for accessing that functionality.
So now you're going to need all three of them on your system in order for various software to work.
How is this better?
The OEMs will have the right to replace WMP (with Xine for example), if they think it'll make their customers happy.
They can do this today. Though usually Xine isn't shipped with the computer -- RealPlayer is.
OEMs should be allowed to offer it
OEMs can, and do in some cases.
and the OS should support them properly, not generate spurious errors (see the DR-DOS story).
It does work just fine, and doesn't spit out spurious errors.
Just to put that amount in a bit of perspective, Microsoft spends roughly $8 million annually providing their employees with free soda.
The loss of oceans on mars has nothing to do with a loss in mass.
...
The magnetic field Mars current has is not capable of protecting it's atmosphere by deflecting solar wind (the solar wind has been eating away at the Martian atmosphere for some time now; I'm not sure if scientists believe mars ever had a magnetic field capable of doing do, but as it's core has cooled off/solidified the magnetic field on the planet today is what it will always have).
As Mars's atmosphere is stripped away/blown into space, the atmospheric pressure drops. At a certain point, the pressure drops to a point where water cannot exist in liquid form and evaporates -- creating more atmosphere, which then gets stripped away by the solar wind
The cycle continues until all surface water has evaporated or frozen.
There is your opinion of what unfair competition is, and what the law considers unfair competition.
Unfair competition is generally considered to include:
* false/deceptive/intentionally confusing advertising (ex: bait & switch tactics)
* misbranding of products
* tradmark dilution (ie: company X uses company Y's trademark on their product)
* misappropriation of trade secrets
* bad faith dealings
* price fixing
* etc
Basically, unfair competition is supposed to be where one party tries to damage another party instead of trying to improve it's own product.
While anti-trust law is defined so vaguely that it may not be possible to know if you are in violation of the law before a judge issues a verdict, in this particular case so long as MS does not prevent 3rd parties from providing the same service it would appear that they would not be in violation of the law.
That's the sort of unfair competition that anti-trust law was meant to prevent, in case you didn't realise.
Actually, it's not. Unfair competition would be disabling all other music services except theirs.
Most sites have been designed for IE only, screw the rest (screw standards).
... maybe because they'd have to pay those companies money? Would YOU want to pay an extra $80 so you can get Windows with RealPlayer and 3 different IM clients?
... gee, what does that sound a lot like ... Sorry, no thank you. I'll take everything & the kitchen sink, turn off what I don't want, and replace what I don't like.
:p
Funny, I've yet to find one site that renders oddly in Mozilla... I found a bug in Mozilla once with some of my HTML (it didn't render correctly in certain cases with dd blocks), but that's since been fixed...
It maintains its leadership by manipulation.
*hands OwlWhacker a tinfoil hat* I think it was made very clear in their anti-trust trial that they couldn't manipulate their way out of a paperbag...
Concerning Windows Media Player, it was never an issue before because streaming media wasn't such a popular/lucrative business.
It still isn't a popular lucrative business. P2P downloading of movies is definately popular, but I wuoldn't exactly call it a lucrative business...
Now that streaming media is big, why can't Microsoft use open media formats rather than its own?
They do support open media formats. Fact of that matter is, if you write a codec for it you can get WMP to play any format you want.
The answer is obviously because it wants everybody to use its media format and make money (by getting people to stream their content in WMP format).
They don't make money from people streaming content in a Microsoft format. They do make money from liscensing the technology behind it (as does every other major player in that arena) -- you can argue that it isn't better than anything else out there, but there will be people who disagree with you.
Again, this isn't bad, it's business, but by bundling WMP with Windows its going to be accepted 'as standard' - especially with Microsoft working so hard to infiltrate the media market.
If you want to be technical, their formats are "standards" -- they've been published with standards bodies, and there is talk that the "next generation" dvd formats will support one of their better encoding methods...
Why does Windows come with the additional apps that it comes with, why not add something like Realplayer or other messaging clients?
Wild guess here
Second reason: So that they don't put themself in a risky position by depending on a 3rd party.
If Microsoft didn't develop anything other than Windows as a bare-bones OS, Windows would ship with Realplayer, Firefox, etc.
If MS only gave us a bare-bones OS, anyone who bought it would spend 5 days of their life downloading/installing software to get a useable system.
Windows is not a bare-bones OS. It isn't made for geeks. It is made for the mass market. It is made to do what most people want right after installing it. Think that's a bad idea? Look around... it is standard practice.
If you have Windows distributions, as I suggested, people could buy Windows with plenty of different apps included (such as Firebird instead of IE for example).
That's wonderful. I'd hate to see the god-aweful mess that such "distributions" would bring to the market. I can see it now -- software that won't install, software that functions improperly because the xyzzy interface was a 5th party knockoff implementation created by another piece of software, software that requires you to install other software before it will work, which requires you to install other software, every application re-invents a number of "standard" components
Nothing is stopping computer manufacturers from installing stuff on top of what MS provides -- before tha anti-trust case that was an issue, but no more.
This would also encourage people to develop their Websites so that the most popular browsers can display them correctly.
Err, isn't that what you're complaining is happening already?
If you're going to make fun of the work being done at Microsoft Research, you might want to do some 'research' yourself first. They're doing real research, as opposed to doing feature work for existing products.
If I find out this particular ATM is Windows-operated, I will hunt down Mr. Gates, roll him in tar and feathers and chase him out of town with a stick. ... because Bill Gates is personally responsible for the poor error handling by the idiots who wrote the ATM software which runs on top of whatever version of Windows the ATM is running.
The problem is that it is easy to find ways around the punishments.
In your example, all a webpage author would have to do is use a small, solid colored background image to set the "background" color, instead of via html code.
They don't know, but they're really close to finding out what consumers want. Even the word "consumers" says a lot about their mindset. We're just there to buy stuff.
The word consumer implies nothing about "buying stuff." A consumer is a person who 'consumes' a product or service. A consumer in this context is someone who uses their search engine.
What reason do you think that some Web pages don't display correctly in the most innovative browsers available (when IE has stood still for years)?
... so you're saying that IE is dominant because their rendering engine has better error handling that Mozilla....lol (the biggest "problems" seem to stem around table rendering from what I can tell).
That has got to be the biggest laugh I've ever seen
And with regards to the non-standard tags, whoopie do. I can deal with having the tag being ignored...
Every place that I've ever worked for which does website design designs for way more than just IE. Aside from the various versions of IE, most companies make sure their pages render correctly on old versions of Netscape, Mozilla, Opera, and (for one company anyway) WebTV. On a good sample of platforms that those browsers are available on (ie: a unix box, mac, and pc).
WMP is the default media player in Windows, most people that produce streaming media will choose WMP formats to stream their media because they know that most users have access to this format. This gives WMP an advantage over other media players. I assume, as you're asking this question, that you haven't been keeping up with the EU case?
I'm looking at the EU case with quite a bit of amusement, as Windows has shipped with a media player of sort since the Windows 3 days. Now that their media player doesn't suck ass, "competitors" bitch.
Furthermore, the only desktop operating system which ships with the "modern" WMP is XP. All of those old ME, 98, and 95 boxes which comprise of most of the desktop installations do not have the modern WMP -- to get it, the user has to download it.
I laugh even more, because the current version of RealPlayer is a steaming pile of shit. It became a steaming pile when RP7 was released, and has gotten worse ever since. I have yet to see one person who likes it, or would choose to use it over ANYTHING. That is, of course, if they could navigate through the maze of "buy here" icons to look for the "download free player" text in a 4 point font somewhere on the page.
The biggest note of amusement to this whole case is that it means that MS isn't allowed to do anything to improve their OS. They'll get smacked down for putting a decent firewall in XP. They'll get smacked down for updating IE. They'll get smacked down for improving their MSN IM software. They'll get smacked down if they try to add functionality that makes burning cd's as simple as draging the files onto the cdrom icon. They're probably going to get sued for making it easy to open up a zip file.
To me, that seems utterly rediculous.