How NSA access was built into Windows

[Robin Laing]

John Bowden wrote:
> On Thu, 2007-01-18 at 16:07 -0800, Les wrote:
>> On Thu, 2007-01-18 at 23:55 +0800, Ed Greshko wrote:
>>> If you guys really want to continue this silly ass thread I can create a

>>
>>
> Personally I would like to see this discussion continue as when it
> started I had a vague idea of what SElinux was. Now I know a lot more
> and have even done a little googling about it. One thing that does
> confuse me though, is If m$ has been getting advice from the NSA about
> secure operating systems since 98 or so why is windows security so
> bad ;-).

Simple.

They have so many things interlinked that depend on this minor DLL that 
has become critical that to control and monitor all of this is almost 
impossible.

Can you imagine the performance hit when you go to open a single 
application and a background security monitor has to check how many dlls 
and applications?  I was trying to run some Windows software under wine 
yesterday and was surprised by the number of other applications that 
opened in the background and the application I was trying to run, still 
wouldn't run.

I read an article recently about being able to enable Firefox as your 
default browser on Windows XP and how an outside program can change your 
settings and call IE, even if it isn't your default browser.  The 
problem was this happened to a witness in a Microsoft court case, 
luckily before he hit the stand.

Hopefully the NSA can convince MS to separate application from the OS 
under security.
-- 
Robin Laing