Bonum Certa Men Certa

Microsoft Breaks the Law by Not Patching Windows as Per the Agreement

Balance



Summary: Microsoft's legal obligations are hanging in the balance while Windows 2000 does not receive security patches

ABOUT a month ago we showed that Microsoft broke its contract with the customers by refusing to patch Windows XP. As it turns out, Microsoft is doing this with Windows 2000 as well.



Our reader Ryan, who is a former Microsoft MVP and an expert in this area, wrote in IRC: "You should drive home a point that you aren't when talking about Conficker and its brethren. Windows 2000 will be TEN YEARS OLD on February 17, 2010, and still manages to get at least a dozen security patches a month, even now. It's a good way to point out that no matter how many patches you install, there's always more vulnerabilities. Several thousand of them have been patched in Windows 2000 and it's still regularly patched. You would think that the patch rate would have slowed down and the OS would have more or less settled by now, but it's going to be patched from birth to abortion. You should also mention that companies won't necessarily throw out Windows 2000 on their systems just because it's out of support. From Wikipedia: 'On 8 September 2009, Microsoft skipped patching two of the five security flaws that were addressed in the monthly security update, saying that patching one of the critical security flaws was "infeasible".[93] According to the Microsoft Security Bulletin MS09-048, "The architecture to properly support TCP/IP protection does not exist on Microsoft Windows 2000 systems, making it infeasible to build the fix for Microsoft Windows 2000 Service Pack 4 to eliminate the vulnerability. To do so would require rearchitecting a very significant amount of the Microsoft Windows 2000 Service Pack 4 operating system, [...] there would be no assurance that applications designed to run on Microsoft Windows 2000 Service Pack 4 would continue to operate on the updated system."' Windows 2000 not only shares all the vulnerabilities in XP, Microsoft has started refusing to patch some while the damned thing is still supported (to try and force an upgrade). It's not the first time that Microsoft has refused a security patch for operating systems still in support, they left some critical Windows 98 and Windows NT 4 vulnerabilities unpatched, with a year left on the support lifecycle.

“In other words, Microsoft can flagrantly violate the hell out of their side of the agreement, but don't you dare to step out of line or install Windows on two systems with one license.”
      --Ryan
"Windows 2000 is supported until July of 2010, meaning that per their support agreement, every security patch should be delivered on until then, so they're violating their own support agreement, but insisting that you obey your obligations under their EULA. This is kind of like the times Microsoft was found violating their side of the privacy agreement in Windows Media Player 7 (they probably still do). In other words, Microsoft can flagrantly violate the hell out of their side of the agreement, but don't you dare to step out of line or install Windows on two systems with one license."

Fewa responds with: "Microsoft has always been an outlaw corporation. They only obey the laws that benefit them and disregard those that would dare limit their greed of monopoly. They even wish to impose on other those laws. It's not just that; of course having the government totally hijacked for 6 years did not help. The democrats got a majority in 2006 (in the house)."

"8 years," insists Ryan, "and I'd argue that they still do. Obama has packed the DOJ with more RIAA mafia types." Here is a collection of references.

Ryan is not optimistic. "They're one of the richest companies and have hundreds of lawyers," he says. "You could sue them, in theory, but they could just stall forever."

To summarise, writes Ryan: "What kind of confuses me is that according to Microsoft, breaking their EULA is "illegal", but when they break their side of the agreement it's OK as long as they can say "It would have been too much work to close that critical patch on Windows 2000." It would be like me saying "Well, I installed the same copy of Windows on ten computers cause it would have been too much of a strain on my finances to buy 9 more licenses"; Same defense they're trying, too much of a strain on limited resources, so it's OK to break the agreement."

In other news, Microsoft's cryptology is broken again.

Microsoft releases fix for crypto patch



[...]

The ocsasnfix.exe (direct download) program is to fix the glitch both in the client and in the server. In a knowledgebase article, Microsoft describes how to run the program and what other actions may need to be taken.


Perhaps Microsoft could not just disable the features this time around [1, 2].

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