Traffickers, mafia and pirates always existed. But today they are stronger that ever. Fed from the same forces that have driven the globalization, the ability of modern organized gangsterism has grown to excess, concurring to world-wide level operations and to connect all remote angles of the planet, with the speed of Internet or of private jets. Never before crime could employ such financial ability, fruit of an economic organization that moves the ten percent of the total amount of goods in circulation, ten times more than how much was performed a decade ago.
And never, finally, it has been much more pervasive, richer and more influent, at a social, economical and political level.

How this could happen?
Why the international piracy, weapons trafficking, human smuggling, money laundering and music bootlegging, human organs and drug trafficking, and last but not least, copyright infringements, have grown in such a spectacular way therefore?

What have transformed local thieves into powerful criminal nets with an ability to intercontinental action to the point that national governments are not in the position to exercise some control over them anymore?

The cause for this success is to be found among the same forces - technological, economic, political and social - that are modelling the 21st century and that have redesigned the world from the fall of the Berlin wall. Since the beginning of the decadence of the eastern block, a lot more possibilities have arisen for extending once local trafficking to abroad. This have started also being fighted with special forces brought to life all over in an attempt to initially understand, then fight the new sets of crimes that were being perpetrated.

So we have seen police forces starting years ago to understand that new crimes were committed, for which no law existed. From these activities, regulator authorities started understanding that new sets of general rules should be made, since old ones were not general enough to catch all possible variants and implications of infringements.

A lot of new laws, both local and international, have been set up, lot of newly hired personnel have been trained in police and in special and secret forces, and the new pirates were being tracked and charged with allegations according to the new sets of rules. This happened up to September 11 2001. After that date, we are seeing what appears an endless swing between two different attitudes.

The "War against Terrorism" turned lots of the forces once dealing with old and new pirates to the search for terrorism evidence or suspects, to analyze all possible data to identify terrorists or potential terrorists. All with the goal of preventing new attacks to be placed. Of course this goal is legitimate, and apparently working if we have to stand to what we're continuously told. But the implications of this aspect, that were outlined in the beginning, have far more implications, to the other crimes, which are not really dealt with, nor fully analyzed by any officials that we know of, so far.

Ok, you might ask "What does Microsoft Vista have to do with that?"
The question stands. But here is the answer.

What we think is that since all the efforts are currently directed into the fight against other crimes than the ones Microsoft is facing, the Company had to undertake the technical rather than the political way to deal with all -some of- their problems.
The news regarding Microsoft Vista disallowing deep interaction with its kernel looks like an attempt to fight against those who use the system in a way Redmond's not even wanting to think about, while from a technical point of view it looks like a complete closure against the "open source" world we're slowly moving into.
Patchguard and the Trusted Platform Module are aimed at closing the possibility to run unwanted code or run legitimate code on different machines.

So this is a first attempt to close the "windows" that were left open in previous versions and it represent a strain to protect MS's intellectual property. This attempt is actually not the first one. For ages lots of programs have come with hardware key for which it was very difficult (yet not impossible) to find cracks. Now the purpose is to get further.
Since this will be letting all users in the hands of the sole software makers that will be allowed to install software on most machines in the world, let's hope they know what they do.

And also, history tells a lot about this, just look backwards: remember that if you close down "Windows" a lot of (back)doors wanted or unwanted may lie down, hidden between the billions of code-lines which the new OS is composed of.
Some of these backdoors have been found already.

Patching of those will only be able to come from Microsoft.
Security experts for hire anywhere?

Comments Index (Total Messages: 6)

My bad Written by Guest on 2006-08-26 15:29:00 Re: My bad Written by Guest on 2006-08-26 23:54:04 Re: Re: My bad Written by Guest on 2006-08-28 03:03:59 Re: My bad Written by Guest on 2006-08-28 09:47:58 Re: Re: My bad Written by Guest on 2006-08-28 14:11:36 Re: Re: Re: My bad Written by Guest on 2006-09-11 19:34:44

Powered by a Zone-H(ified) version of AkoComment 3.0!