I'd rather: 1) Tell them to buy a Mac or install Linux. 2) Failing 1) (because they don't understand it), install the necessary security software and tell them how to use it and update it, and if possible, switch them to Firefox and Thunderbird from IE and Outlook Express. Educate them about security so they aren't as vulnerable - and the rest of the Net isn't going to be made more vulnerable because of them.
I got lucky on my trojan client of the other day - somebody had already clued her in to Firefox.
Or get creative, get off your ass and find one that does run on the preferred OS.
This is a highly overrated problem given the number of programs available for the Mac and Linux these days - especially for home users. And for business users, there are other solutions as well. Except for some highly specialized vertical industries where there are only a couple companies dominating the industry and all of them run on Windows, most industries have software running on other OS's available from some player. It may not be as expensive or "perfect" as the dominant player, but it will usually be adequate compared to the cost of running Windows and paying for the security and other Microsoft issues.
Which is why I prefer to clean a client's machine of malware rather than just nuke it and reinstall the OS.
Of course, at some point there are diminishing returns - if the client can't afford to pay you for the time necessary to finish the cleaning, you can either leave the job half done or reinstall. I don't like either alternative, so I just finish the job and eat the hourly loss. It does make the client appreciate me more, however.
Home users rarely have "workstations" and "servers" - they have one machine running everything.
For businesses, of course, using servers and Linux is obviously better. For the home user, Linux is still better because it will be a LONG time before any significant number of viruses exist that are likely to warrant installing AV software - compared to the scores of thousands of viruses, spyware and worms that plague Windows.
But he is right - if malware destroys a home users's home directory, it's as bad for that user as if it wiped the whole hard disk.
I thought Geek Squad was a francise that required a fairly hefty investment to get in, but once you were on, you made good money based on the rates they charge.
Obviously the deal with Best Buy is to hire the usual peons, call them Geek Squad Agents, but not let them have any of the "own your own business" benefits of being a Geek Squad franchisee.
"An initial diagnostics call, for example, could run $99. Cleanup jobs usually run one to two hours, and some franchisees say they charge between $149 and $165 for one hour and $265 to $275 for two hours."
You'd have to be Paris Hilton to pay these rates as a home user. Even small business users might squawk.
It's highway robbery. It's extortion to charge those rates.
Now you know why most people just wipe the machine and reinstall when there's a problem. Who wants to wait on the phone for two hours on a call to the manufacturer or pay these ridiculous rates to some geek?
My trojan cleaning client of the other day ended up paying $175 for nearly 16 hours of my time - mostly because I wasn't very efficient and my tools were not totally adequate. And I hate charging a client for a half-done job because I was too inefficient to finish it before they run out of money.
Now, if it was a small business user, I would have charged $35/hour, and probably just backed off their data, reinstalled the OS and apps, and been done in three hours or so, because they would have had the CDs and could afford to do it that way.
You haven't seen the right pictures. I have several hundred of her on my hard drive and believe me, she looks good in most of them - both the posed and air-brushed mag shots and the candids. Her sister Nicky isn't bad either, but less of a "glam hound" than Paris.
She has a beautiful face (even if it looks pretty vapid most of the time), good hair, long legs. She could put on five or ten more pounds in the right places is her main problem - that and being brainless (or acting that way on purpose, I'm still not sure which.)
Well, first of all, she wasn't sure she could find the Dell CDs.
But mostly you don't know if the problem is bad enough to warrant a reinstall until you've already spent two or more hours on the job.
Also, I'm charging a relatively cheap rate. If I was charging $75/hour, it would have been cheaper to reinstall.
Then you have to count the time added on to back up any important data the client has on the machine. That could take another hour depending on circumstances.
And then you still have to install all the anti-malware tools to make sure it doesn't happen again.
And reinstall all the apps the client might have downloaded or bought and configure them.
I ended up charging her only about $175 for all the work, so while it was an expensive lesson in computer security, it was still way less than I or someone else could have charged. I wasn't as efficient as I could have been. I also don't like to leave a job half done if the client can't afford a full cleaning, so I don't bill for every hour. Then there were some issues that sidetracked me because I forgot some things, so I didn't bill for that time either since it was my own fault.
When I get my bootable tools buffed up to enable me to clobber any malware quickly, I'll be able to charge for every hour and it will take less hours. This job should have only taken a couple hours at most with the right tools applied more efficiently.
I do recognize that. I was thinking more along the lines of how the humans hadn't changed significantly in three or four hundred years - which simply isn't going to happen. The degree of technological change and advancement of the ability to intervene in the human body and brain just in in this century alone will be enough to change human nature radically.
Also, Q is more the standard use of "divinity" in science fiction and the Borg are the usual Star Trek "humans are better than machines" story line that was used countless times before. They're both still recognizable concepts.
I'd like to see the Star Trek crew actually run into a nanotech civilization based on Hans Moravec's "bush entities" or something that looks and acts more like the UFO stories - entities that appear and vanish, that can make anything from any matter around them, that think a million times faster than any human - and have utterly no interest in humans at all rather than trying to conquer them or exterminate them or any other standard biological entity motivation.
It's been said the toughest thing in sci-fi is to write a story that puts the reader believably into a superhuman perspective. That's the problem with Transhuman entities - I would expect there would be almost nothing recognizable as human about them - unless they deliberately allowed it.
I know that a virus that is not able to be executed is harmless - it's the ones that can use a flaw in the email client or other program to run that worries me. I mean, jpegs that can contain viruses - who would have suspected that before the GDI flaw was found? Theoretically possible, of course, but ONLY if the program displaying them had a flaw that allowed it.
I can risk my AV having a flaw that allows them to get past, but why should I take the risk that all the other programs I use DON'T have flaws? Your suggestion that security products just add vectors makes no sense, as one could say the same about any software. The issue is whether the security software protects against more vectors than it contains.
It's a matter of common sense, not paranoia. You take the security precautions you can, because while most of them may be superfluous under NORMAL conditions, you can't know which ones are until the attack occurs or which ones turn out to be critical. This is common security practice in any area of security.
And despite the fact that, in some cases, the very security you employ can be used against you by a clever attacker is not justification for not using it. It is merely justification for being aware that it can be used against you.
Being complacent about security is the best way to have NO security at all when an attack comes.
AV products may be overhyped, I have no quarrel with that, but "education" that ignores some of the possibilities is nearly as bad as no education at all.
"Einstein rules, and FTL space travel has about zero chance of ever existing."
Sorry, I think that's bullshit. Low probability perhaps, but zero? Nope. Any physicist who talk about time travel like these guys in the/. story yesterday or whenever it was do not give me any confidence that modern day physics necessarily has all the answers. And I DO think time travel is utterly impossible in any form. But I cut slack for FTL.
I also don't know what you mean by AVG not stopping any viruses since it stops mine quite nicely. I know there aren't any known Thunderbird exploits that would make it easy for the viruses in my emails to infect my system, but it's nice to know that AVG is in fact stopping the ones that do show up.
Patches help, but they're not perfect, either. And patches have new vectors, too, in some cases.
But if you can do it, fine. I still say that 95% of computer users who try your advice will end up like my clients.
So IE is not integrated into the OS, only the shell, eh?
And why then can it not be removed without significant problems?
"Windows NT has always had a secure, multiuser design. (unlike UNIX where security was taped on as an afterthought)"
This statement is too bizarre to even consider responding to, if for no other reason than that UNIX predates NT by twenty years. And yes, for a good part of that twenty, security was not a great issue - mostly because viruses weren't even discovered until the early 1980's (and were developed on UNIX machines since sys admins in those days were naive - much like Windows sys admins are still today.) It changes nothing - UNIX has had more security features than Windows for many years.
I've seen that one, too - no bootable media! NO CD! No floppy! You can imagine how my face fell on that one!
Best to tell them to throw the fucking thing in the trash since it's never going to be a usable machine. I can't imagine WHY ANY company would sell such a POS.
I agree that Microsoft probably doesn't see this as a huge money-maker like Office or the OS itself.
But to suggest they're "spending a lot of money building their own" is disingenuous. They BOUGHT these products and are re-engineering them to fit into their product line. Then they intend to CHARGE for them - presumably at a price-point where they at least break-even.
The bottom line: they're charging for products to fix their own mistakes.
OTHER security companies are charging for providing a service that Microsoft was unwilling to provide until the money and the PR problems got big enough to force them to get into the market.
It's that simple. No amount of excusing changes the bottom line here.
What is it costing you to develop Web solutions in a language and platform never intended for Web solutions? That's GOT to be costing you more than some script kiddie managing to break a newer platform and defacing your Web site.
I can believe the Windows 2003 Server platforms are inadequate, but a properly hardened Linux platform - running on an IBM mini-mainframe or large SUN systems if necessary - should be quite scalable enough for your needs and would allow you to develop more productively. I know Linux is running on very large clusters handling very large Web sites, so I find it hard to believe it can't handle your requirements.
24/7 reliability is a function of system design, not platform. But platforms go obsolete.
Are you going to be running VMS and COBOL in the year 2020? That's just short-sighted. It's old stuff, it needs to be updated. Deal with it.
That's why a tech support person needs stuff like Knoppix and Bart's PE - so you can boot an OS from a CD which is not compromised and run a scan on the file system no matter what file system it is - and preferably with an OS like Linux that has NTFS support so you can bypass NTFS file permissions and kill anything.
Only problem now is getting Knoppix and Bart's to run really industrial-strength tools that can detect and kill stuff effectively.
All in all, though, the security tools aren't doing too bad IF they're installed FIRST on a clean install machine. I always install a firewall and AV on a new Windows install BEFORE allowing it to connect to the Net.
You have a point - at least for tech support people like me.
I need to be MUCH more familiar with every process and file and Registry key on Windows in order to spot trojans and spyware that the security software CAN'T find. And I need to be more familiar with hex editors and tricky ways of getting around the Windows OS to get RID of things.
For end users, however, this is completely hopeless and it's a waste of time to suggest it.
And it's a damn great argument for using Linux - even if you have to know more about Linux to use it than you do Windows, it's easier to get that knowledge since it's mostly all out there whereas Windows is closed to most people.
If you don't get hundreds of virus-laden emails a day, switch to the free-for-home-use Grisoft AVG or Avast. They're light on resources, do automatic updates, and while they're not as good as McAfee or Norton at detecting 100% of viruses, they're adequate for home use. I've used one or the other for over two years with no problems. Of course, I don't run IE or Outlook or Outlook Express either which helps.
Ahem - they BOUGHT their software from a third party.
And yes, they WILL be charging for their full security package. Maybe not the antispyware one alone, though.
Read this from back in January of this year (if the plans have changed, I didn't hear of it):
Microsoft Readies 'A1' Security Subscription Service By Mary Jo Foley January 4, 2005
Publicly, Microsoft continues to be cagey about packaging and pricing plans for its anti-spyware and anti-virus solutions. But privately, Microsoft has begun informing partners of its plans for a security subscription service code-named "A1," according to developers who requested anonymity.ADVERTISEMENT
Microsoft bought anti-virus vendor GeCAD in the summer of 2003, and anti-spyware maker Giant Company Software last month. As to how it plans to deliver these technologies, Microsoft has declined to give specifics. How, when and if it will repackage GeCAD's technology remains uncertain. Ditto for Giant's--although according to the Windows enthusiast site Neowin, Microsoft is expected to field its first anti-spyware beta based on Giant's technology this week. Neowin said the anti-spyware beta is code-named "Atlanta."
Microsoft officials have said the company is planning to make some form of its anti-spyware product available as a free tool. But that isn't the ultimate plan, partner sources said.
See more stories on Microsoft Watch
Microsoft is currently expecting to field its A1 anti-spyware/anti-virus bundle in the form of a renewable subscription service, the same way a number of other security vendors do, sources said. The service will allow users to keep current on the code needed to combat ever-changing viruses, worms, spybots and the like.
Some elements of A1 are likely to be built directly into future versions of Windows, according to partners. Specifically, some of the security management functionality, such as the security health-validation technology that Microsoft officials discussed last year, would likely be bundled into Windows itself, partners said.
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Exactly.
I'd rather:
1) Tell them to buy a Mac or install Linux.
2) Failing 1) (because they don't understand it), install the necessary security software and tell them how to use it and update it, and if possible, switch them to Firefox and Thunderbird from IE and Outlook Express. Educate them about security so they aren't as vulnerable - and the rest of the Net isn't going to be made more vulnerable because of them.
I got lucky on my trojan client of the other day - somebody had already clued her in to Firefox.
Buy a cheap used PC to run that one program.
Or get creative, get off your ass and find one that does run on the preferred OS.
This is a highly overrated problem given the number of programs available for the Mac and Linux these days - especially for home users. And for business users, there are other solutions as well. Except for some highly specialized vertical industries where there are only a couple companies dominating the industry and all of them run on Windows, most industries have software running on other OS's available from some player. It may not be as expensive or "perfect" as the dominant player, but it will usually be adequate compared to the cost of running Windows and paying for the security and other Microsoft issues.
Exactly.
Which is why I prefer to clean a client's machine of malware rather than just nuke it and reinstall the OS.
Of course, at some point there are diminishing returns - if the client can't afford to pay you for the time necessary to finish the cleaning, you can either leave the job half done or reinstall. I don't like either alternative, so I just finish the job and eat the hourly loss. It does make the client appreciate me more, however.
His point is still valid.
Home users rarely have "workstations" and "servers" - they have one machine running everything.
For businesses, of course, using servers and Linux is obviously better. For the home user, Linux is still better because it will be a LONG time before any significant number of viruses exist that are likely to warrant installing AV software - compared to the scores of thousands of viruses, spyware and worms that plague Windows.
But he is right - if malware destroys a home users's home directory, it's as bad for that user as if it wiped the whole hard disk.
He's getting reamed.
I thought Geek Squad was a francise that required a fairly hefty investment to get in, but once you were on, you made good money based on the rates they charge.
Obviously the deal with Best Buy is to hire the usual peons, call them Geek Squad Agents, but not let them have any of the "own your own business" benefits of being a Geek Squad franchisee.
"An initial diagnostics call, for example, could run $99. Cleanup jobs usually run one to two hours, and some franchisees say they charge between $149 and $165 for one hour and $265 to $275 for two hours."
You'd have to be Paris Hilton to pay these rates as a home user. Even small business users might squawk.
It's highway robbery. It's extortion to charge those rates.
Now you know why most people just wipe the machine and reinstall when there's a problem. Who wants to wait on the phone for two hours on a call to the manufacturer or pay these ridiculous rates to some geek?
My trojan cleaning client of the other day ended up paying $175 for nearly 16 hours of my time - mostly because I wasn't very efficient and my tools were not totally adequate. And I hate charging a client for a half-done job because I was too inefficient to finish it before they run out of money.
Now, if it was a small business user, I would have charged $35/hour, and probably just backed off their data, reinstalled the OS and apps, and been done in three hours or so, because they would have had the CDs and could afford to do it that way.
You haven't seen the right pictures. I have several hundred of her on my hard drive and believe me, she looks good in most of them - both the posed and air-brushed mag shots and the candids. Her sister Nicky isn't bad either, but less of a "glam hound" than Paris.
She has a beautiful face (even if it looks pretty vapid most of the time), good hair, long legs. She could put on five or ten more pounds in the right places is her main problem - that and being brainless (or acting that way on purpose, I'm still not sure which.)
Well, first of all, she wasn't sure she could find the Dell CDs.
But mostly you don't know if the problem is bad enough to warrant a reinstall until you've already spent two or more hours on the job.
Also, I'm charging a relatively cheap rate. If I was charging $75/hour, it would have been cheaper to reinstall.
Then you have to count the time added on to back up any important data the client has on the machine. That could take another hour depending on circumstances.
And then you still have to install all the anti-malware tools to make sure it doesn't happen again.
And reinstall all the apps the client might have downloaded or bought and configure them.
I ended up charging her only about $175 for all the work, so while it was an expensive lesson in computer security, it was still way less than I or someone else could have charged. I wasn't as efficient as I could have been. I also don't like to leave a job half done if the client can't afford a full cleaning, so I don't bill for every hour. Then there were some issues that sidetracked me because I forgot some things, so I didn't bill for that time either since it was my own fault.
When I get my bootable tools buffed up to enable me to clobber any malware quickly, I'll be able to charge for every hour and it will take less hours. This job should have only taken a couple hours at most with the right tools applied more efficiently.
I do recognize that. I was thinking more along the lines of how the humans hadn't changed significantly in three or four hundred years - which simply isn't going to happen. The degree of technological change and advancement of the ability to intervene in the human body and brain just in in this century alone will be enough to change human nature radically.
Also, Q is more the standard use of "divinity" in science fiction and the Borg are the usual Star Trek "humans are better than machines" story line that was used countless times before. They're both still recognizable concepts.
I'd like to see the Star Trek crew actually run into a nanotech civilization based on Hans Moravec's "bush entities" or something that looks and acts more like the UFO stories - entities that appear and vanish, that can make anything from any matter around them, that think a million times faster than any human - and have utterly no interest in humans at all rather than trying to conquer them or exterminate them or any other standard biological entity motivation.
It's been said the toughest thing in sci-fi is to write a story that puts the reader believably into a superhuman perspective. That's the problem with Transhuman entities - I would expect there would be almost nothing recognizable as human about them - unless they deliberately allowed it.
I know that a virus that is not able to be executed is harmless - it's the ones that can use a flaw in the email client or other program to run that worries me. I mean, jpegs that can contain viruses - who would have suspected that before the GDI flaw was found? Theoretically possible, of course, but ONLY if the program displaying them had a flaw that allowed it.
I can risk my AV having a flaw that allows them to get past, but why should I take the risk that all the other programs I use DON'T have flaws? Your suggestion that security products just add vectors makes no sense, as one could say the same about any software. The issue is whether the security software protects against more vectors than it contains.
It's a matter of common sense, not paranoia. You take the security precautions you can, because while most of them may be superfluous under NORMAL conditions, you can't know which ones are until the attack occurs or which ones turn out to be critical. This is common security practice in any area of security.
And despite the fact that, in some cases, the very security you employ can be used against you by a clever attacker is not justification for not using it. It is merely justification for being aware that it can be used against you.
Being complacent about security is the best way to have NO security at all when an attack comes.
AV products may be overhyped, I have no quarrel with that, but "education" that ignores some of the possibilities is nearly as bad as no education at all.
So, no, I don't believe in a Star Trek future - although I do enjoy the shows and movies.
I believe in a MUCH more EXTREME future. One that would probably be unrecognizable by most sci-fi writers and fans.
"Einstein rules, and FTL space travel has about zero chance of ever existing."
/. story yesterday or whenever it was do not give me any confidence that modern day physics necessarily has all the answers. And I DO think time travel is utterly impossible in any form. But I cut slack for FTL.
Sorry, I think that's bullshit. Low probability perhaps, but zero? Nope. Any physicist who talk about time travel like these guys in the
I've no idea how you did other than pure luck.
I also don't know what you mean by AVG not stopping any viruses since it stops mine quite nicely. I know there aren't any known Thunderbird exploits that would make it easy for the viruses in my emails to infect my system, but it's nice to know that AVG is in fact stopping the ones that do show up.
Patches help, but they're not perfect, either. And patches have new vectors, too, in some cases.
But if you can do it, fine. I still say that 95% of computer users who try your advice will end up like my clients.
You do know who Conrad Hilton was, right?
If you think naming Paris was odd, wait til you hear who's she engaged to - a guy named Paris Latsis. I kid you not.
Three guesses what they might name their kids.
Thanks. I know there are utilities to do that and I have them but it's nice to know the Registry keys involved if I have to do it manually.
So IE is not integrated into the OS, only the shell, eh?
And why then can it not be removed without significant problems?
"Windows NT has always had a secure, multiuser design. (unlike UNIX where security was taped on as an afterthought)"
This statement is too bizarre to even consider responding to, if for no other reason than that UNIX predates NT by twenty years. And yes, for a good part of that twenty, security was not a great issue - mostly because viruses weren't even discovered until the early 1980's (and were developed on UNIX machines since sys admins in those days were naive - much like Windows sys admins are still today.) It changes nothing - UNIX has had more security features than Windows for many years.
I've seen that one, too - no bootable media! NO CD! No floppy! You can imagine how my face fell on that one!
Best to tell them to throw the fucking thing in the trash since it's never going to be a usable machine. I can't imagine WHY ANY company would sell such a POS.
I agree that Microsoft probably doesn't see this as a huge money-maker like Office or the OS itself.
But to suggest they're "spending a lot of money building their own" is disingenuous. They BOUGHT these products and are re-engineering them to fit into their product line. Then they intend to CHARGE for them - presumably at a price-point where they at least break-even.
The bottom line: they're charging for products to fix their own mistakes.
OTHER security companies are charging for providing a service that Microsoft was unwilling to provide until the money and the PR problems got big enough to force them to get into the market.
It's that simple. No amount of excusing changes the bottom line here.
You're missing my point.
What is it costing you to develop Web solutions in a language and platform never intended for Web solutions? That's GOT to be costing you more than some script kiddie managing to break a newer platform and defacing your Web site.
I can believe the Windows 2003 Server platforms are inadequate, but a properly hardened Linux platform - running on an IBM mini-mainframe or large SUN systems if necessary - should be quite scalable enough for your needs and would allow you to develop more productively. I know Linux is running on very large clusters handling very large Web sites, so I find it hard to believe it can't handle your requirements.
24/7 reliability is a function of system design, not platform. But platforms go obsolete.
Are you going to be running VMS and COBOL in the year 2020? That's just short-sighted. It's old stuff, it needs to be updated. Deal with it.
Did you see the SNL Jimmy Fallon interview with Paris?
"So there really is a Paris Hilton!"
"Can I get into the Paris Hilton?"
"I'm a celebrity, I might have to enter by the back door."
To which she replied, "I don't care who you are, it's not happening."
I agree - Paris is skinny and stupid (or at least deliberately acting stupid), but she does look good. Have you see the Carl's Jr. ad video?
Windows, I'm not so sure about. It definitely isn't skinny, it definitely is stupid, but I suppose it looks good to some people.
That's why a tech support person needs stuff like Knoppix and Bart's PE - so you can boot an OS from a CD which is not compromised and run a scan on the file system no matter what file system it is - and preferably with an OS like Linux that has NTFS support so you can bypass NTFS file permissions and kill anything.
Only problem now is getting Knoppix and Bart's to run really industrial-strength tools that can detect and kill stuff effectively.
All in all, though, the security tools aren't doing too bad IF they're installed FIRST on a clean install machine. I always install a firewall and AV on a new Windows install BEFORE allowing it to connect to the Net.
You have a point - at least for tech support people like me.
I need to be MUCH more familiar with every process and file and Registry key on Windows in order to spot trojans and spyware that the security software CAN'T find. And I need to be more familiar with hex editors and tricky ways of getting around the Windows OS to get RID of things.
For end users, however, this is completely hopeless and it's a waste of time to suggest it.
And it's a damn great argument for using Linux - even if you have to know more about Linux to use it than you do Windows, it's easier to get that knowledge since it's mostly all out there whereas Windows is closed to most people.
If you don't get hundreds of virus-laden emails a day, switch to the free-for-home-use Grisoft AVG or Avast. They're light on resources, do automatic updates, and while they're not as good as McAfee or Norton at detecting 100% of viruses, they're adequate for home use. I've used one or the other for over two years with no problems. Of course, I don't run IE or Outlook or Outlook Express either which helps.
Ahem - they BOUGHT their software from a third party.
And yes, they WILL be charging for their full security package. Maybe not the antispyware one alone, though.
Read this from back in January of this year (if the plans have changed, I didn't hear of it):
Microsoft Readies 'A1' Security Subscription Service
By Mary Jo Foley
January 4, 2005
Publicly, Microsoft continues to be cagey about packaging and pricing plans for its anti-spyware and anti-virus solutions. But privately, Microsoft has begun informing partners of its plans for a security subscription service code-named "A1," according to developers who requested anonymity.ADVERTISEMENT
Microsoft bought anti-virus vendor GeCAD in the summer of 2003, and anti-spyware maker Giant Company Software last month. As to how it plans to deliver these technologies, Microsoft has declined to give specifics. How, when and if it will repackage GeCAD's technology remains uncertain. Ditto for Giant's--although according to the Windows enthusiast site Neowin, Microsoft is expected to field its first anti-spyware beta based on Giant's technology this week. Neowin said the anti-spyware beta is code-named "Atlanta."
Microsoft officials have said the company is planning to make some form of its anti-spyware product available as a free tool. But that isn't the ultimate plan, partner sources said.
See more stories on Microsoft Watch
Microsoft is currently expecting to field its A1 anti-spyware/anti-virus bundle in the form of a renewable subscription service, the same way a number of other security vendors do, sources said. The service will allow users to keep current on the code needed to combat ever-changing viruses, worms, spybots and the like.
Some elements of A1 are likely to be built directly into future versions of Windows, according to partners. Specifically, some of the security management functionality, such as the security health-validation technology that Microsoft officials discussed last year, would likely be bundled into Windows itself, partners said.