Yes, this is very OT but there is some very scary things being planned or already in place by MS that I think everyone here should know about since it concerns your computer security and privacy, which if you use XP or win 2000 has already been breached. A bit from the quite long article - "To support all this, the Microsoft EULA (End user license agreement) you have "signed" (by the act of using Windows XP or by downloading recent Service Packs and security fixes) specifically states that Microsoft has the right to inspect software on your PC and to change or disable that software as they wish, without notice to you, and without liability to Microsoft, to protect copyrights (including their own). This means Microsoft has complete administrative rights to your PC - home or business" The whole thing is at www.aaxnet.com/editor/edit029.html The scary stuff starts below- The Microsoft "Road Ahead" and more so under- Longhorn - Big Changes for Windows. This is rather scary to me and I'm a Mac user!

That is scary! But there are so many people who use Windows, how could they check on everybody? I mean, that would be zillions of people, do they have the manpower (or computer power) to do that?

This whole paranoia about "Microsoft taking over the world" stuff has been going on for well over a decade. When Microsoft announced years ago that they were going to release a CD-ROM of phone numbers of people all over the country, everybody screamed that this was "invasion of privacy" and that it was part of Microsoft's "sinister plot" to "take over the world." They backed down and didn't release the phonebook CD-ROMs, but others did, and those discs turned into "shovelware" sold out for cheap prices in bargain bins. Last time I checked, none of the companies that released these discs took over the world. Microsoft has enough trouble trying to stay relevant in this increasingly Linux-filled world. I doubt that they care what you have on your computer. I think the stuff you're referring to was meant to address the "Windows Update" feature of Windows, which has been extremely useful, in my experience. Lighten up, Charlie Tuna. Microsoft only wants tunas that taste good, not tunas with good taste. -jjsemp

Well, jjsemp, MS already has you by the short hairs and anything they think is in competition with their stuff is subject to being disabled at the whim of MS and there isn't a thing you can do to stop it since you have signed over your privacy to them and agreed to allow them to snoop around your drives anytime they feel like it.

First it was the commies, then it was the UN, now it's microsoft. What the hell is it with people and world domination?

interesting, some of the "new features" in the new media player from microsoft is to figure out if you are trying to play a copyrighted item (music, etc) and prevent it from ever playin on your machine if you do. wish it was a joke! cheers, -Josh

Attached Link: http://www.epic.org/privacy/drm/

The scariest thing about this is it's all true & it's not just Microsoft that's in on it. Intel are in the process of making a brand new chip codenamed "Fritz" which is going to be tied in with the next version of Windows. This will have the ability of stopping anything "unauthorised" from being run on your machine & the worst part is that only Microsoft can authorise software to be run. The next version of the office suite will also be "fixed" so that you can only use documents created on a specific machine on that machine & nowhere else unless you "buy" a special license from Microsoft. Also if you type something that says anything not acceptable to the Government or anyone who is part of this they can delete it off your machine at any time & you have no say in that either. Not only that but when you switch your machine on everyday you have to be connected to the net so that it can check to make sure your license from Microsoft or whoever is uptodate if not then it'll shut down & you won't be able to use anything. Monthly fees will apply for this too. Once this all falls into place in the next few months none of us will have any say over what happens on our own machines again it will be all in the hands of Microsoft & their friends. This is all going under the name of Palladium, the info is all there to find on the net or at least it is today, it might not be once Palladium get's fully underway.

the market, people... THE MARKET ! the driving force of our economy; THE force more powerful than Microsoft, Intel and the rest of these control freaks put together. If they start playing it that way, we'll just have to switch to Linux or another OS... ... and never forget : there are NO systems that cannot be re-engineered, no security measures that cannot be circumvented.

go amd!

not until Intel AMD & the other chip makers who are all putting money into this include the fritz technology into the main processor, which they plan to do by the end of this year.

Everything that is done can be undone. They create elaborate copyright schemes only to have them undone by a sharpie marker. New software is released and within a week some bright spark has already decompiled it and release a counter-measure [aka crack]. Do I advocate it? Nope, just reality. Anything that Microsoft can do, there are equally talented reverse engineers who undo it. Usually some 13year old in Denmark.

hmm..I guess my Poser machine (Win 98, no internet connection) and my Bryce machine (Win 2k, no internet), running on Athelon chips means I have to...what? My work machine is NT 4, and we have a major firewall, so I guess.. When they came for XP, I didn't speak up, because I didn't run XP
When they came for Windows ME, I didn't speak up, because I didn't run ME
When they came for Intel, I didn't speak up, because I had an Athelon
When they came for me, I didn't speak up, because there was noone left
-paraphrased out the wazoo

Damn! That's the best reason I've heard all week for buying a Mac. Microsloth roaming at will through your hard drive disabling software is a scarey thought. Fortunately they can't do that with my Mac.

Thank you! and you will be supporting my family as well ;-) (my husband works for Apple)

JBroneske, don't tell on me, OK? But, um, if all goes according to plan, there will be very good reasons to switch to Mac by the end of this coming Summer. Unfortunately, the prices will remain high, but that's how it has to go. I seriously doubt if Apple will go down the invasive and distrustful route that MS has mapped.

Who controls your computer?
By Richard Stallman
October 22 2002
Who should your computer take its orders from? Most people think their computers should obey them, not obey someone else. With a plan they call "trusted computing," large media corporations (including the movie companies and record companies), together with computer companies such as Microsoft and Intel, are planning to make your computer obey them instead of you. Proprietary programs have included malicious features before, but this plan would make it universal.
Proprietary software means, fundamentally, that you don't control what it does; you can't study the source code, or change it. It's not surprising that clever businessmen find ways to use their control to put you at a disadvantage. Microsoft has done this several times: one version of Windows was designed to report to Microsoft all the software on your hard disk; a recent "security" upgrade in Windows Media Player required users to agree to new restrictions. But Microsoft is not alone: the KaZaa music-sharing software is designed so that KaZaa's business partner can rent out the use of your computer to their clients. These malicious features are often secret, but even once you know about them it is hard to remove them, since you don't have the source code.
In the past, these were isolated incidents. "Trusted computing" would make it pervasive. "Treacherous computing" is a more appropriate name, because the plan is designed to make sure your computer will systematically disobey you. In fact, it is designed to stop your computer from functioning as a general-purpose computer. Every operation may require explicit permission.
The technical idea underlying treacherous computing is that the computer includes a digital encryption and signature device, and the keys are kept secret from you. (Microsoft's version of this is called "palladium.") Proprietary programs will use this device to control which other programs you can run, which documents or data you can access, and what programs you can pass them to. These programs will continually download new authorization rules through the Internet, and impose those rules automatically on your work. If you don't allow your computer to obtain the new rules periodically from the Internet, some capabilities will automatically cease to function.
Of course, Hollywood and the record companies plan to use treacherous computing for "DRM" (Digital Restrictions Management), so that downloaded videos and music can be played only on one specified computer. Sharing will be entirely impossible, at least using the authorized files that you would get from those companies. You, the public, ought to have both the freedom and the ability to share these things. (I expect that someone will find a way to produce unencrypted versions, and to upload and share them, so DRM will not entirely succeed, but that is no excuse for the system.)
Making sharing impossible is bad enough, but it gets worse. There are plans to use the same facility for email and documents -- resulting in email that disappears in two weeks, or documents that can only be read on the computers in one company.
Imagine if you get an email from your boss telling you to do something that you think is risky; a month later, when it backfires, you can't use the email to show that the decision was not yours. "Getting it in writing" doesn't protect you when the order is written in disappearing ink.
Imagine if you get an email from your boss stating a policy that is illegal or morally outrageous, such as to shred your company's audit documents, or to allow a dangerous threat to your country to move forward unchecked. Today you can send this to a reporter and expose the activity. With treacherous computing, the reporter won't be able to read the document; her computer will refuse to obey her. Treacherous computing becomes a paradise for corruption.
Word processors such as Microsoft Word could use treacherous computing when they save your documents, to make sure no competing word processors can read them. Today we must figure out the secrets of Word format by laborious experiments in order to make free word processors read Word documents. If Word encrypts documents using treacherous computing when saving them, the free software community won't have a chance of developing software to read them -- and if we could, such programs might even be forbidden by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.
Programs that use treacherous computing will continually download new authorization rules through the Internet, and impose those rules automatically on your work. If Microsoft, or the U.S. government, does not like what you said in a document you wrote, they could post new instructions telling all computers to refuse to let anyone read that document. Each computer would obey when it downloads the new instructions. Your writing would be subject to 1984-style retroactive erasure. You might be unable to read it yourself.
You might think you can find out what nasty things a treacherous computing application does, study how painful they are, and decide whether to accept them. It would be short-sighted and foolish to accept, but the point is that the deal you think you are making won't stand still. Once you come depend on using the program, you are hooked and they know it; then they can change the deal. Some applications will automatically download upgrades that will do something different -- and they won't give you a choice about whether to upgrade.
Today you can avoid being restricted by proprietary software by not using it. If you run GNU/Linux or another free operating system, and if you avoid installing proprietary applications on it, then you are in charge of what your computer does. If a free program has a malicious feature, other developers in the community will take it out, and you can use the corrected version. You can also run free application programs and tools on non-free operating systems; this falls short of fully giving you freedom, but many users do it.
Treacherous computing puts the existence of free operating systems and free applications at risk, because you may not be able to run them at all. Some versions of treacherous computing would require the operating system to be specifically authorized by a particular company. Free operating systems could not be installed. Some versions of treacherous computing would require every program to be specifically authorized by the operating system developer. You could not run free applications on such a system. If you did figure out how, and told someone, that could be a crime.
There are proposals already for U.S. laws that would require all computers to support treacherous computing, and to prohibit connecting old computers to the Internet. The CBDTPA (we call it the Consume But Don't Try Programming Act) is one of them. But even if they don't legally force you to switch to treacherous computing, the pressure to accept it may be enormous. Today people often use Word format for communication, although this causes several sorts of problems (see http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/no-word-attachments.html ). If only a treacherous computing machine can read the latest Word documents, many people will switch to it, if they view the situation only in terms of individual action (take it or leave it). To oppose treacherous computing, we must join together and confront the situation as a collective choice.
For further information about treacherous computing, see http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/users/rja14/tcpa-faq.html.
To block treacherous computing will require large numbers of citizens to organize. We need your help! The Electronic Frontier Foundation (www.eff.org) and Public Knowledge (www.publicknowledge.org) are campaigning against treacherous computing, and so is the FSF-sponsored Digital Speech Project (www.digitalspeech.org). Please visit these Web sites so you can sign up to support their work.
You can also help by writing to the public affairs offices of Intel, IBM, HP/Compaq, or anyone you have bought a computer from, explaining that you don't want to be pressured to buy "trusted" computing systems so you don't want them to produce any. This can bring consumer power to bear. If you do this on your own, please send copies of your letters to the organizations above.
Postscripts:

1. The GNU Project distributes the GNU Privacy Guard, a program that implements public-key encryption and digital signatures, which you can use to send secure and private email. It is useful to explore how GPG differs from treacherous computing, and see what makes one helpful and the other so dangerous.
   When someone uses GPG to send you an encrypted document, and you use GPG to decode it, the result is an unencrypted document that you can read, forward, copy, and even re-encrypt to send it securely to someone else. A treacherous computing application would let you read the words on the screen, but would not let you produce an unencrypted document that you could use in other ways. GPG, a free software package, makes security features available to the users; they use it. Treacherous computing is designed to impose restrictions on the users; it uses them.
2. Microsoft presents Palladium as a security measure, and claims that it will protect against viruses, but this claim is evidently false. A presentation by Microsoft Research in October 2002 stated that one of the specifications of Palladium is that existing operating systems and applications will continue to run; therefore, viruses will continue to be able to do all the things that they can do today.
   When Microsoft speaks of "security" in connection with Palladium, they do not mean what we normally mean by that word: protecting your machine from things you do not want. They mean protecting your copies of data on your machine from access by you in ways others do not want. A slide in the presentation listed several types of secrets Palladium could be used to keep, including "third party secrets" and "user secrets" -- but it put "user secrets" in quotation marks, recognizing that this is not what Palladium is really designed for.
   The presentation made frequent use of other terms that we frequently associate with the context of security, such as "attack," "malicious code," "spoofing," as well as "trusted." None of them means what it normally means. "Attack" doesn't mean someone trying to hurt you, it means you trying to copy music. "Malicious code" means code installed by you to do what someone else doesn't want your machine to do. "Spoofing" doesn't mean someone fooling you, it means you fooling Palladium. And so on.
3. A previous statement by the Palladium developers stated the basic premise that whoever developed or collected information should have total control of how you use it. This would represent a revolutionary overturn of past ideas of ethics and of the legal system, and create an unprecedented system of control. The specific problems of these systems are no accident; they result from the basic goal. It is the goal we must reject.
   Richard Stallman is the founder of the free software movement.
   Copyright 2002 Richard Stallman
   Verbatim copying and distribution of this entire article is permitted without royalty in any medium provided this notice is preserved.

wow, im glad i do have a mac......

Folks, as was said farther up the thread... $$$ rules the world. If consumers refuse to purchase items, software, etc that they feel is in violation of their privacy, then the company will not continue to make the product. That's how competing OS systems like Linux got their foothold in the first place and are doing so well now. Information is the key. Widely distributed, accurate information is the only way to prevent widespread corruption. My biggest problem with the artical above is the assumption that the consumer/user is powerless to prevent the actions of MS. So what if your e-mail disappears from your work files? If it's important enough to keep, MAKE A HARD COPY. No corporate officer (i.e. the boss) is going to give improper instructions through the e-mail system because the risk is too great that it would be used as evidence in the future should something backfire. My second biggest problem with the artical is the assumption everyone is on the internet. There is still a large percentage of home PC users who do not have internet connection, nor could they care less about being on the internet. Do they miss out on the spiffy newfangled updates? Probably. Do they really care? Probably not. As consumers, we have the ultimate power to control what companies produce. If they want to make money, then they have to give us something WE WANT. If they don't, we won't buy it, and they will no longer be in business. Keep that in mind next time you see something from MS you don't like. If you don't agree with all the rules and regulations they require, then simply, "Just Say No".

Tygercub, If you have XP or 2000 and have installed the service packs (sr1 for xp and sr3 for 200) or the security patches MS already 'owns' your computer and can poke around at will

Charlie_Tuna, MS can poke only as long as my internet connection is "on" and my firewall is not up. There are alternatives to MS... why not take advantage of them? IF (big if) MS can push through invasive computing practices, they will lose millions of customers. People should have no qualms about moving to MAC, Linux, or anything else that provides them with the internal security and freedom granted by the U.S. Constitution. This includes freedom of speech, which Mr. Stallman implies will be lost if MS doesn't like what you're saying. Am I saying turn a blind eye to possibility? No. I'm saying don't panic. The consumer public still has an overwhelming say in what a company makes. Just like politics, we have the power to VETO what doesn't work for us by simply not buying it. So what if I can't play a game that looks really spiffy because it only works on a MS box? I don't own an XBox, or Playstation either, and there are some fantastic games I would really like to play. If MS wants to make me give up a freedom to have a few hours of pleasure, the pleasure is not worth it. Mr. Stallman's recommendation that you write to the companies that produce computers is one of the good things about the letter. It is a sort of warning shot before a "Just Say No" campaign. So being proactive is good. Just don't feel like a "1984" type government and corporate business is inevitable. As long as the consumer doesn't follow a herd mentality and believe they must accept whatever drek is fed to them, things like this will not come to pass.

"As long as the consumer doesn't follow a herd mentality and believe they must accept whatever drek is fed to them, things like this will not come to pass." There is truth is this but: I doubt the majority of 'Joe Users' is going to accept the task of switching to Linux, finding & perhaps buying alternative applications, if they exist (Star Office isn't the only thing many people need), etc. The same applies to getting a (more expensive) Mac. Next month, they start testing the system which will check the credit histories, buying profiles medical records, etc. of airline passengers - in the name of protection of course. Because enough people are scared they'll get blown up going to visit Aunt Tillie, they will go along with it. In the same way, if the gov't. can scare people into thinking that Osama Bin Laden is going to get into their computers make them spew anthrax, they will go along with whatever intrusive scheme they're told will protect them. I also don't think in the end it would be just a MS thing. It will be mandated for all computers and neither Linux nor Apple will be a safe haven. If the entertainment industry can convince enough pols that they need it to survive, it will happen. Perhaps there will be a massive backlash that will change things but I'm not optimistic. As long as there are enough bread and circuses provided, along with a healthy dose of fear, most folks will bend over and take it like a taxpayer, and not even ask for a kiss.

Exactly, lmackenzie. This isn't about panic. It's about spreading that information and hoping enough people will bother to notice. Yes, there are lots of computers not connected to the internet, but since the internet is getting to be a more and more important part of everyday commerce, there will be an ever-larger percentage connected. Unfortunately, as long as things like Linux don't run all the programs people want to use, are not 'plug & play' like windows, and require people to know some programming and be willing to do extensive 'tweaking' to their system, they won't get a really large share of the action. Joe user wants something that just does what he wants, and doesn't want to have to spend hour after hour setting everything up 'just right' so it will work. The average user feels mortally insulted if someone suggests he actually read a manual - no way he's gonna learn any amount of programming so he can 'tweak' his system to get it to run, he just wants to hit the switch and go. Linux/lindows developers need to get busy making it work, and people everywhere need to be informed of what's being done by MS et al. so they can know that there is in fact more than one choice.

There are a lot of "Joe Users" out there that never got sucked into the MS cabal because they got exposed to both win 3.1 and Apple DOS and found out that typing "Hello" then getting a catalog list then typing "Run 'program'" was a lot simpler than/entering/a/flaming/long/pathname to get a file that is restricted to a cryptic 8+3 name limit. Some later got sucked into the 'Big Lie' and a few of them have managed to make it back out and reclaim their computer privacy, those and the ones still 'inside' but can see the evil ahead are the ones that need to spread the word and stop this 'evil empire' before it completes its takover plans. It's YOUR computer, use it they way YOU want to NOT the way MS would decree you use it

We'll see Charlie. Apple certainly did popularize some innovative features that Xerox didn't know what to do with. MS has palyed catchup but with Windows 2000, they finally got a system that is stable, powerful and easy enough to use if you leave off the power tools. It may not be as "cool" as Aqua, btu then, Apple has always valued style. Unfortunately, they want a Gucci price for their fashion. Most folks either don't want to or can't afford the freight. When they killed off the nascent Mac clones, they killed their best chance to challenge Wintel. I tried Linux a couple of years ago. It had a goofy kinda compatible GUI but it was impossible to really use without cat, ls, untar and other unpleasant memories of the CP/M and DOS days. It was fub back then but these days, I don't have the patience. I'm sure the newer Linux distros are better and I will definitely try it again but it's still not ready for desktop primetime IMHO. At any rate, what a long, strange trip it's been.

Not being able to play a Celine Dion cd on my computer might be a good thing - LOL. Anyways, lately I've been very tempted to give Linux a shot. However, there are a few windows programs that I'm stuck on - Poser, a few games, some graphics apps - that don't seem to work with the Linux MS emulators. I could "dual OS", but to me, its against the point of going to another operating system. If anyone could give me some pointers as to which distro to look into - decent hardware compatibility, somewhat familiar shell (would need to get weaned off of that, heh), I still might though. ;)