Re: seeking info on Microsoft's spyware

From: george (george_at_nospam.com)
Date: 03/12/05 

Date: Sat, 12 Mar 2005 11:01:25 -0500

On Sat, 12 Mar 2005 10:18:11 -0500, "xpyttl"
<xpyttl_NOSPAM@earthling.net> wrote:

>"Yef" <e97y@yahoo.com> wrote in message
>news:1110635650.091003.263790@z14g2000cwz.googlegroups.com...
>
>> 1. when you use Window's search mechanism, it sends the
>> subject of your search to an M$ server.
>
>Interesting. I watched the packets and search does indeed phone home, but
>only when you launch the search window. It never calls after you have
>entered your search criteria. I wonder why they would do that. If I were
>wanting to "improve customer service" I would want to see what kinds of
>searches people were performing. It seems like a simple count of the number
>of searches would be close to useless.
>
>> 3. M$ servers can detect whether a computer on its network is
>> a Windows machine or a Linux machine; I know this from experience
>> because at some businesses, Linux's DHCP (which presumably follows
>> a standard protocol) fails whereas Windows works fine. M$ must be
>> using nonstandard changes to the protocol to selectively prevent
>> non-M$ machines from getting an IP address.
>
>Every operating system has a slightly different profile in how it behaves on
>the net, and it is fairly easy to see what the underlying OS is. It's not
>that there is something "nonstandard" about Windoze ... you can tell Linux
>from BSD from MacOS from Solaris ... etc. A lot of businesses have a
>problem with Linux boxes on their networks and take measures to prevent
>that.
>
>> 5. M$ servers in some businesses will periodically try to
>> determine machine information about systems to which they
>> have given IP addresses.
>
>Hell ... any Linux/Apache logs keep pretty detailed information about who is
>connecting including operating system, browser, browser versions, etc. This
>is useful for webmasters wondering how much effort they should put into
>dealing with the weirdness of different browsers. This isn't some nefarious
>Microsoft conspiracy.
>
>This, of course, is only good business. The company's LAN is for the use of
>employees carrying out company business. If I have provided, say, XP
>workstations to my employees and have a fixed set of software to carry out
>the business of the company, then a Linux box appearing on my network can
>only be for some unauthorized purpose. I have an obligation to my
>shareholders to try to prevent this unauthorized use of company resources.
>Ditto if some strange piece of software shows up. Of course these could be
>for some valid purpose, but just like an unexpected file showing up in /bin,
>I better be suspicious of any unexpected intrusions to my network.
>
>I have actually watched my machine call out to a microsoft server on my port monitor when searching for files.
There is a registry entry to prevent that, however the HOSTS file is
much easier to deal with. There was an interesting article in
Wallstreet Journal last year about the Europeans suing Gates and
calling him the world's biggest snoop because of all the data he
collects. I don't care if anyone calls it spyware, it just plain
isn't anyone's business what we do on our computers.

Wallstreet Journal and others also ran tests on SP2 and decided the
3rd party security measures already in effect were much better and
stayed with them rather than use sp2.

Another program installed by the likes of Kodak is a program called
Backweb. It always check for updates every time you connect to the
web. Other sites have learned to take advantage of this program to
snoop and download their trojans..
>

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