Microsoft Vista and the worldwide growth of illicit activities

26/08/2006 Written by Massimo Cotrozzi

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 21^st 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?