It would appear that some brave MS programmer pined for those days of remote BSODs, and thus has reintroduced this beloved feature in the SMB2 protocol driver in Vista and Windows 7.

Kudos!

Lost any mails in transfer lately? Using Hotmail? Go sue someone!

It is a lengthy piece, seems unbiased, and he even puts in a nice little disclaimer, stating that he is by no means an MS-basher. It could be hard to tell, though, from what he has to say about Vista.

The only mildly interested readers should at least read the conclusion (reachable from the article front page).

Cue Windows 2000 for Warships… Am I the only one who remember the case of Windows 2000 and LAX not mixing well?

At some point in time, Microsoft were ordered to deliver copies of email correspondence relating to Burst, but told the court it would be infeasible. The order was none the less repeated, but before said emails were delivered, the case was settled. Robert X. Cringely covered the case, and he recently received an email from a contractor involved in backup procedures within Microsoft.

The following timeline seems to cover the problem of the email correspondence:

• Microsoft is ordered to hand over the emails.
• Microsoft informs the court that this would be infeasible
• None the less, Microsoft instructs their contractors to gather backups from the specified period, and store them at a given location
• The court repeats it’s orders
• The backup contractors discover that the previously gathered tapes are “mysteriously missing”, and are held responsible by Microsoft
• The case is settled out of court without Microsoft producing the emails

How very convenient, and how very sad.

ISO adoption of the OOXML format has been blocked by IBM, backing ODF, which has sparked this open letter from MS, stating among other things that

When ODF was under consideration, Microsoft made no effort to slow down the process because we recognized customers’ interest in the standardization of document formats.

While it is true that MS did not hinder the standardisation process, it certainly did not forgo chances to hinder the adoption of it by interested parties: Inside story: How Microsoft & Massachusetts played hardball over open standards, Computerworld.com.

Furthermore, while a proposed standard may be openly presented, that certainly does not mean that it is openly implementable, as this article shows.

I will let it suffice to ask, if a standard containing the tags “lineWrapLikeWord6″, “useWord2002TableStyleRules” or “useWord97LineBreakRules” conveys a sense of openness or interoperabilty, considering that the formats for Word 6, Word 97 and Word2002 are strictly closed.

Contrary to all statements leading up to the Vista relase, she quotes Mark Russinovich of MS as writing that UAC is not “a security boundary”, and thus that:

Because elevations and ILs don’t define a security boundary, potential avenues of attack, regardless of ease or scope, are not security bugs.

So, not only is the much hyped security measures not reagarded as security measures by MS, and thus their failing to provide security is a non-bug.

Now isn’t that lovely?

Quote from her blog:

One thing that I found particularly annoying though, is that Vista automatically assumes that all setup programs (application installers) should be run with administrator privileges.
[...]
That means that if you downloaded some freeware Tetris game, you will have to run its installer as administrator, giving it not only full access to all your file system and registry, but also allowing e.g. to load kernel drivers!

Now how about that. She describes the XP option of customised privileges, enabling the user to assign only the strictly required privileges for installing software, and still disallowing e.g. loading kernel drivers. Seems neat, but, alas, a thing of the past.

Next, she finds that while Vista still does go through some work to protect itself, it seems a little more careless with actual user data. In other words, even processes running at the lowest “Integrety Level” might still read data from more privileged processes. As she puts it:

So, the statistics look better and everybody is generally happier. Including the competition, who now has access to stolen data

She goes on to describe her ability for an “IL” process to send keyboard and mouse events to a shell running as Administrator. How very reassuring.

Go Vista!