Alias said:
I paid for all the parts and built the computer myself and installed vista
on it. Why isn't it mine anymore?
By design, the NT family of OSs leverage control by "the
administrator" over that of the user at the keyboard.
This is appropriate for NT's original target market, which was
professionally-administered business use. In that context, the user's
time has been bought, and the user's PC is also owned by the business.
The system administrator is the technical overseer that represents the
businesses' interests, and who is expected to override the user at the
keyboard, even from a different system over the network.
Hence NT's "security", which largely goes about testing that entities
are who they claim to be, and assigning levels of control accordingly.
As the user at the keyboard, you are merely one of these entities, and
not the boss one, either.
Because the Internet is built from the raw materials of networking,
Windows treats it as just another network. So now you have all of
these facilities designed to let "the boss" push you around via an
internal, professionally-administered network, waving around at the
Internet for anyone to bluff their way in as "administrator".
Then this whole mess was sold into consumer space as XP, and not too
long after, consumerland got the first taste of pure network worms
like Lovesan and Sasser that carved though the world in a matter of
minutes. Servers had already felt that whip with an ancient UNIX PoC
(Morris worm), and more recently Nimda, Code Red and especially (in
terms of method and speed) SQL Slammer.
Lovesan and Sasser didn't jump through authentication hoops to get in,
as OpaServ does through file shares; they simply attacked flaws in
networking surfaces that should never have been facing the Intrenet in
the first place. The core problem is that NT, unlike Win9x, was not a
user's OS with networking stuck on top; it's designed to be a network
chew-toy (sorry, "client") from the ground up.
Right now, 95% of spam is sent not through mail servers, but via
spambots. Most of the systems that host spam bots are Windows PCs.
Various surveys show a high % of Windows PCs are infected with
software unwanted by the user, and that's before we get to commercial
malware that is built in, in the form of DRM, WPA, etc.
Windows is made by a US company under US law, and the US derives a
fair bit of revenue from the entertainment industry, which is a net
inflow from the rest of the world. So what those industries lobby
for, they generally get, and that includes a new level of intrusion
into what you thought was "your" computer.
DRM's to be built into the hardware of modern PCs, as logic shrinkage
allows more logic to be built into devices that operate in parallel
with your processor. We've already caught one of the biggest media
pimps dropping rootkits from "audio CDs" - about as severe a risk
escalation as one could possibly make - and they're still around,
doing what they usually do. The will to curb this stuff is not there.
But I think what Alias is referring to in particular, is that
Microsoft retains ownership of the software that you pay to use.
That in itself, I don't have a problem with; it is, after all, nothing
new. What is new, is that one is forced into an ongoing dependence
with such software vendors, partly fostered by the need to keep fixing
defects in their code - defects that are largely exposed to the
outside world as a result of inappropriate design.
This is a perverse loop; the more unsafe a product is, the more you
have to leave yourself open to the vendor to fix it, and the more that
vendor has you in a head-lock.
Therefore, my main point of agreement with Alias is that when you've
paid for Windows, you aren't free of ongoing dependence on MS, even if
you never upgrade your OS. You'll have to leave your OS open for
patches, and these will include WGA and DRM updates that are,
essentially, hostile to you; they leverage other entities' interests
over yours, right there on "your" computer.
Even if you stay offline and avoid these updates, you still have the
product activation payload built into your OS. This facility is
purely hostile to you; it exists for the sole purpose of preventing
you from using "your" computer, should its logic determine you are
contravening MS's license terms.
You may have other practical obstacles in the way of rebuilding "your"
computer. If you bought it with MS Office 2007 installed, you
probably didn't get installation disks for that; in fact, if you
bought a "big brand" PC, you may not even have OS installation disks.
So if your HD's contents are lost, you'd have to go back and beg your
OEM for assistance, or re-purchase the software you thought you'd at
least owned the right to use - and this time, because you are buying
retail rather than OEM - you'll pay roughly double for it.
So, why haven't Apple or Linux taken this opportunity to blow MS away?
Partly because there are real technical reasons why it's so hard to
write code that doesn't need patching. We've got used to a very
"lively" Internet, where web sites work thier magic by automating our
web browsers. As long as you allow arbitrary web sites (and whatever
banner ads are hosted there, and whatever links are thrown up by
search engines, etc.) to automate your PC, you're in trouble, no
matter what OS you use.
So Linux and Apple also have their code defects and the need to keep
patching software they thought was "finished". The more market share
these get, the less difference you will see between these and Windows,
in terms of malware attack. Holes are there; malware, not yet.
The other factor is that it takes resources to make software of this
complexity. You can get these resources if a large number of users
pay for it, as is the case of Windows, or if a smaller number of
people pay far too much for it, as is the case with Apple.
If you think MS drives a hard bargain as a dominant OS vendor, wait
until you feel Apple on your back; you'd be forced to buy "their"
computer, even when it's built on the back of the generic PC platform
that's benefitted from the work of a larger market.
Linux's approach to the resource problem is different; a large
contribution is from folks designing and coding the bits they are most
interested in. The users are themselves part of this process, which
works best when user and volunteer developer are similar, if not the
same people. If you "just want it to work", you have a problem; if
what you want written is not what the tech volunteer are interested in
writing, then it won't happen, and that's only natural.
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