That didn’t take long, Bill is thought to be visiting the Jon Stewart Daily Show tonight to brag about the security of Vista and a student living in Montreal has already cracked the DRM and PMP while still in his first year of obtaining a bachelor’s degree in software engineering. Seems the degree is just to put another feather in his cap, he’s been chopping through kernel layers since his teens and is a major player for the ReactOS.
What is really scary about this for those that are relying on Windows and Microsoft to keep them safe, is he’s not the only one and there is no reason to think that other crackers are not on the same track and they won’t be as nice as a student in Canada. Those that frequent the doom9 forum already know muslix64 as the one to get Blu-ray working in full HDD, without even owning a Blu-ray player no less. He’s not a hacker, just a jilted customer and his term for it is exquisite: “fair use enforcement” – priceless. There’s a nice interview with him here.
If someone really wants security they should run computer operating systems that anyone in the world can look at the source code and not because someone is paying them to do it, for sure not some proprietary unknown kernel from a humongous corporation that is more interested in their bottom line than in their customers. Groklaw had a real nice summary of just how duplicitous the M$ corporation is with a post from Jan. 10 in the Idaho case that is still on going.
Also part of the Comes vs. Microsoft suit still going on is confirmation of Eric Raymonds’ insightful release of internal M$ documents that are still being called Halloween I and II as real, and entered as exhibits in the trial. These are the documents that show that from the beginning M$ has engaged in the extremely sleazy “embrace, extend, and extinguish” way of doing business.
Some choice quotes from a Microsoft employee taken from H-II about Linux:
Linux represents a best-of-breed UNIX, that is trusted in mission critical applications, and – due to it’s open source code – has a long term credibility which exceeds many other competitive OS’s.
Most of the primary apps that people require when they move to Linux are already available for free. This includes web servers, POP clients, mail servers, text editors, etc.
An advanced Win32 GUI user would have a short learning cycle to become productive [under Linux].
I previously had IE4/NT4 on the same box and by comparison the combination of Linux / Navigator ran at least 30-40% faster when rendering simple HTML + graphics.