Microsoft sues over source code theft (News.com)
Microsoft sues over source code theft (News.com)
Posted Sep 27, 2006 17:11 UTC (Wed) by dmarti (subscriber, #11625)Parent article: Microsoft sues over source code theft (News.com)
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Another fun (for those who don't have maintaining proprietary boxes in our job responsibilities) observation is that the MSFT DRM has as a "feature" that it can be updated quickly from the home office. Let's see, "drm cracks per year" times "probability that a patch breaks something else" equals how much DRM-caused downtime per year?
Posted Sep 28, 2006 0:58 UTC (Thu)
by dps (guest, #5725)
[Link] (4 responses)
Are you really sure that crackers can not forge DRM updates which are malign? Anyone that manages to do this presumably automatically owns millions of boxen with minimal risks. The AV vendors would not want to risk legal threats related to the anti-circumvention bits of the DMCA.
LWN readers are probably more worried about the above than the people whose defection would really hurt M$. If a few governments, or very large corporates, decided that using any M$ software just was too risky and probited it entirely then things would probably happen.
Posted Sep 28, 2006 4:46 UTC (Thu)
by bryanr (guest, #25324)
[Link] (3 responses)
Bonus points for specifics on how it was injected.
Posted Sep 28, 2006 5:36 UTC (Thu)
by eru (subscriber, #2753)
[Link]
Posted Sep 28, 2006 15:03 UTC (Thu)
by jhardin (guest, #3297)
[Link] (1 responses)
Posted Sep 28, 2006 15:33 UTC (Thu)
by gnb (subscriber, #5132)
[Link]
It is unclear what the evidence, or lack thereof, is in this case. The DRM update feature *should* strike fear into the people---do you really trust MSFT DRM updates not to inlcude spyware or other malware, whether acidimentally or deliberately? Remember that M$ et al have distributed virii on with their paid-for software probably acidentally.The dangers of DRM...
Interesting. Please enumerate the MSFT products + versionsThe dangers of DRM...
that unintentionally included malicious, non-Microsoft code..
Wasn't there very recently a big ruckus about Microsofts "genuine advantage"
program collecting data about the user and sending it to MS without telling
him/her? The piece of software got installed as part of routine Windows
updates. Granted, that was not malicious non-MS code, but the user and
MS may occasionally have different ideas about what counts as malicious
(If I recall correctly, people still using dial-up modems reported PC:s
initiating net connections for transferring the data, which has usually
causes real cost$ for them).
The dangers of DRM...
I seem to remember a story about a CD master being created on in infected workstation a while back (5 or more years?) and all the CDs were infected.The dangers of DRM...
SeeThe dangers of DRM...
http://www.f-secure.com/v-descs/wazzu.shtml
but yes, that was a long time ago.