Stan Beer
Saturday, 07 October 2006 21:41
Opinion and Analysis
Page 1 of 2
While Microsoft is busily spreading the word about how it is going to crack down on pirate copies of Vista, there are some quite disturbing issues being raised by commentators and bloggers about the way the software company intends to go about its task. One of them is that Microsoft's zealous anti-piracy Software Protection Platform (SPP) could pose the mother of all security risks.
Leave aside the arguments about whether
building anti-piracy tools into an operating system that keeps watch on
you like big brother is a desirable thing. There are some serious moral
questions about whether disabling anti-spyware functions of suspected
pirate systems is acceptable to the wider internet community.
If a suspected pirate system has any part of its security features
disabled, then it is a security risk not only to itself but to all the
other computers that it has contact with on the net.
Malware is often spread through computers that have been recruited into
botnets. Disabling any security mechanism on any computer, suspected
pirate or not, therefore is an act of corporate irresponsibility.
Notice that I keep saying suspected pirates. That's because even
Microsoft admits that its piracy detection software isn't perfect.
Even if it gets it wrong say just one time in a thousand (0.1%), with
500 million or more users, that's half a million or more that would
have to contend with being incorrectly labelled as a pirate. What's
more this could happen more than once because the SPP system will allow
other Microsoft software besides Vista to validate whether their
systems are pirated also.
