Winter Patriot Community Blog

Hi Arry - good to see you here.

Re:Shenanigans

I guess my feeling is you can never be too suspicious of the government...but then I'm a former 'hippie' from the 60's, when everyone was suspicious of governments.
I wish I was more techy, then maybe I'd have an answer. However, I did a bit more checking and followed the links in the original post. I found the post on the Abandonia.com Forum, which appears to be a huge forum for hard core gamers.
http://www.abandonia.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=15364&st=0

There were lots of pages of comments but for some reason they were closed after three pages (maybe they expire?). Someone from there had posted this on Digg so I went there to check this out. There were lots of 'yes they are spying' - 'no they are not' comments - with most people apparently having no idea what they are talking about. One that stuck out for me was a comment (with six replies) from a poster named Xanaver. http://digg.com/microsoft/Windows_Vista_lets_US_Government_Spy_on_your_PC
"Let me set the record straight for all you guys out there. I work in the IT department of a small ISP comapny. Roughly 1 year ago we had to install some hardware on our equipment, so the DOD had a clear connection that was always on. I checked with some other ISP's in my area and they had to do the same thing. So the problem does not lay in Vista but rather with your ISP. Unfortunately there is nothing that can be done about the situation."

...and from the replies

"I worked IT for a University, and we faught our asses off to make sure we did not have to install this hardline to the DoD. We tried to tell everyone, get in the newspaper (we were bound by a gag order) and a number of other things. We finally beat them at their own game by declaring ourselves a private network and implementing a few protocols to back that up.

And its not called Carnivore... quit watching swordfish and alias... it falls under the phone tapping laws of the 70's"

"they most likely just put the tap on your provider's equipment, that's what they did to us. I can't believe this isn't mentioned anywhere in the comments, but lots of organizations are doing this to attempt to comply with CALEA.**"

**CALEA -Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communications_Assistance_for_Law_Enforceme...

...also this interesting link to an article from Jan 2006 about something called MICE (Meta Image Code Execution)
http://www.grc.com/wmf/wmf.htm
"Which versions of Windows have MICE?
Microsoft introduced Metafile Image Code Execution (MICE) in Windows NT4. Every version of Windows starting with NT4, including their not-yet-released Windows Vista (aka Longhorn), incorporated this code. As soon as clever hackers discovered it, Microsoft released patches to remove it. Also remember that any fresh installation of Windows will initially be vulnerable to MICE exploitation until it is patched to eliminate this behavior.

...Was MICE added to Windows intentionally?

Software engineers who have looked closely at the Windows code that enables the MICE capability have concluded that, for whatever reason, it is operating exactly the way its designers intended it to.

Mark Russinovich, well known professional developer at SysInternals, performed his own examination, the results of which he sent to both Microsoft and me (which you can read in full here). Mark concluded:

"The bottom line is that I'm convinced that this
behavior, while intentional, is not a backdoor."

Mark agreed that Windows MICE behavior was intentionally incorporated into Windows. I respect the fact that he chose not to characterize it as a "backdoor", since that term carries such malicious connotation, and no one believes (myself included) that Microsoft would act in a deliberately malicious manner. But despite Mark's wishing to avoid characterizing this intentional facility as a "backdoor", the entire personal computer industry freaked out as much as it ever has when the power of MICE became public knowledge.

It was certainly usable as a "backdoor".

Another professional developer and industry associate with a great deal of reverse-engineering and low-level systems programming experience wrote to me, which I quote with his permission (emphasis is his):

"I've learned more and talked this over with peers. I think your argument is MUCH more convincing than Microsoft's explanation; though if this back door is intentional, the Microsoft guys answering the accusations likely don't know anything about it .

The idea of it being intentional has met considerable resistance by people when they first hear of it, and even I was originally resistant. But when people learn all the facts they grow surprisingly less resistant . One guy said, "its not like it's a jmp eax".. which is ironic, since that's EXACTLY what it is."

"They say that patriotism is the last refuge to which a scoundrel clings. Steal a little and they put you in jail. Steal a lot and then they make you king"
Bob Dylan

Thanks for the links.
I'm not sure how the ordinary citizen will be able to abide by the laws as they twist and turn to accommodate the needs of the police state. It is certainly scary stuff.
I'm wondering if the same 'spying' is going on with XP and other versions of Windows. I have also read that there is a 'backdoor' into the new iPhones but don't know if that is true.

Re: HTML codes

Under your comment post you should see the link "Imput Format". Click it and you will see at the very bottom another link that says "More Information About Formatting Options" where you can find information about HTML.

NJT is just getting this sight running (and learning as he goes...I believe ) so I'm sure there is lots of tweeking he needs to do to get it all running smoothly.
Use [br/] (only with angle brackets <> instead of square brackets [] ) when you want a line break. You don't need to open/close it like other HTML tags, just use it once where you want the line break (or twice if you want more than one line break).
Hope that makes sense.


"They say that patriotism is the last refuge to which a scoundrel clings. Steal a little and they put you in jail. Steal a lot and then they make you king"
Bob Dylan