[DMCA-Activists] Re: [DMCA_Discuss] MS Windows Update is Spyware

[Jay Sulzberger]

There are of course laws against this.  Microsoft is not exempt from these
laws.  Microsoft has some money.  They should be prosecuted for their
crimes, and they should be sued for money damages.

This particular massive wiretapping is part of a long pattern of repeated
crimes, including extortion.  Microsoft should be prosecuted under the
criminal conspiracy statutes and other laws, and the company dissolved.

That the mass market press has not reported this as a large scale crime is
part of why the Continued Actions for Refunds is so important.  If we
cannot create a more free market in operating systems for low cost home and
business computers Palladium will be imposed with hardly a peep.  Without a
more free market, the newpapers and CompUSA and Dell and IBM and Toshiba
will say "Well, you really have no choice, everybody knows this.  You must
run only Microsoft OSes on low cost computers.  After all, you cannot even
buy a low cost computer running anything else.  Sure, all of have concerns
about Palladium, but what can you do?  None of us have any choice in what
OS we run.".

http://www.windowsrefund.net

Trial date is 23 April 2003, in the Queens County Courthouse, Small Claims
Court.

oo--JS.




On Fri, 7 Mar 2003, Seth Johnson wrote:

>
> (Forwarded from Boing Boing Blog)
>
> -------- Original Message --------
>   Subject: [Boing Boing Blog] MSFT's braindead back-door
> reveals sneaky spyware hidden in Windows Update
>     Date: Thu, 06 Mar 2003 20:03:16 -0800
>     From: "Cory Doctorow" <address@hidden>
>       To: address@hidden
>
>
> Windows Update spies on your XP box and sends information
> about your installed software back to the MSFT Death Star.
> Best of all, this was discovered by sniffing the "secure"
> SSL protocol that MSFT uses to communicate. How? By
> exploiting  an undocumented API in MSFT's own system.
>
>     Evidence obtained by German hardware site tecChannel
> suggests a list of software installed on an XP machine is
> sent to Microsoft when users run Windows Update. When
> patches are downloaded, a few kilobytes of data are  sent in
> the opposite direction over a secure SSL channel. Because
> the data is encrypted a simple packet sniffer  can't be used
> to see what this data contains. However tecChannel's tecDUMP
> utility takes advantage of an  undocumented WinInet API,
> enabling an examination of the data before it becomes
> encrypted. According to  tecChannel, the information sent to
> Microsoft includes details of all the software installed in
> a machine, not only  Microsoft applications.
>
> Link: http://www.securityfocus.com/news/2746
> Discuss: http://www.quicktopic.com/boing/H/bkV58ZQrqKv8
> (Thanks, Pablos!)
>
> --
> Posted by Cory Doctorow to Boing Boing Blog at 3/6/2003
> 8:02:01 PM
>
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> --
>
> DRM is Theft!  We are the Stakeholders!
>
> New Yorkers for Fair Use
> http://www.nyfairuse.org
>
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> http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/cc/cc.html
>
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