[CS-FSLUG] IE6 in todays market place

[Ed Hurst]

On Fri, 10 Jun 2011, Josiah Ritchie wrote:

> The other issue is that pirated MS software can't be updated. Is that
> perhaps the reason so many Chinese users are on IE6? This is one
> reason why I discourage people, especially our missionaries, from
> buying software from the cart down the street. From what I understand
> in Brazil it is expected that your software is pirated and this
> actually makes it harder to share open source software. The initial
> hook of "free" doesn't mean much.

(cynicism=1)

It's probably part of the picture. I can go right now to a friend and
get pirated copies of any MS OS for nothing. These work by simply
installing a valid-but-rescinded Volume License, removing WGA and
declining to update it. Otherwise, they update same as any legitimate
copy. To all appearances, the cracked ISOs are clean, including the
bundled scripts for inserting the bogus license. I am told the ISOs were
available in a select few languages. "Win7 Ultimate, anyone? Would you
prefer 32-bit or 64?" As I understand it, Chinese is excluded from that
list, so the Chinese ISOs probably come through an entirely different
set of crackers with less "noble" motives.

Of course, I agree there are probably a lot more of those older systems
which can only run older OSes for which IE 6 was the last update.

OTOH, plenty of commentators suggest MS is not really serious about
stamping out piracy, for much the same reason federal criminal
prosecution of major crime never touches the banks who make the crime
possible. That is, if most of the world uses your stuff, it retains
its value, whether it be Windows or dollars.

So while I would not be worried about any real dangers from using these
pirated copies in terms of viruses, I am very much worried about the
vast security risks of using Windows even at its best. If you like it,
fine, I'll try to help you make it work. But I don't like sacrificing
that much control to some software Borg which hasn't shown much
kindness, nor all the other agencies capable of cracking every version
of Windows at will. I won't say MS is in bed with these others, both
government and private, but I'm sure the list of unreported and
unpatched vulnerabilities noted in the HBGary fiasco represents the
difference between those who tend to report those when they are found,
and a rather large number who do not report them. And they never seem to
run out of new holes.

I don't fear the snooping. I'm wide open. Rather, it's the same reason I
urge my clients to let me secure their computers and routers with a
strong password, or even by moving to Linux. There are enough risks
without being promiscuous to abuse. If they *must* run Windows, at
least be as secure as you reasonably can handle, with all the good
protective software. I also urge them to learn more about compsec
procedures and risks. All it takes is one roving crook with a netbook
tapping someone's unsecured wifi to ruin innocent lives; it happens far
more often than is reported. Just so, Windows machines are too easily
turned into bots. (I know, preaching to the choir here.)

I'm not sure I can utterly reject the theory governments and other
crooks really do prefer to keep people using Windows as much as
possible.

(cynicism=0)

And then there is the moral question of whether software piracy is a
sin...

Ed Hurst
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