Suramya's Blog : Welcome to my crazy life…

As some of you know Vista is supposed to come out next year and its going to require a big upgrade for most of the users. Now in a move to alienate even more of its customers MS has changed its licensing terms, limiting the number of times that Windows Vista can be transfered to, to ONE. Thats right One, Uno. In the older versions of windows if you bought a new computer you could install your old version of windows on it provided you uninstalled it from the old computer. With the new licensing you can only do it once so if you upgrade your computer more than once you need a new Vista license.

Hows that for utter stupidity. It is supposed to restrict piracy but the only thing its going to do is annoy regular users. A lot of people upgrade their computers a lot and if MS thinks it can force people to buy a new license every time they upgrade its sadly mistaken. Its going to be a pain for everyone involved and the only people it won’t affect are the software pirates as the pirated version will probably have this check disabled.

I know I transfered my windows XP license from my original 350 Mhz system to a 1.1 ghz system to another system before it got its final home in the machine its on now (All the older systems are now running Linux).

If I had vista I would have had to spend additional money to install an OS that I have a license for on a system that I am going to be using. You know what, I think I will stick with Linux and XP for now. I wasn’t planning to upgrade anyways but with news like this I have even less incentive to try it out.

Original Article: Microsoft Restricts Vista Transfers

Update: Some more thoughts on the new MS Licensing: Lxer.com

– Suramya

There have been rumors to the affect that Google might be releasing a new service that allows users to store unlimited amount of data on their servers and access it from anywhere… While this sounds really neat and useful there are a couple of issues with it that you might want to think about (If you are planning on using it. I am not)

1. First as soon as the data is off your computer and on google’s they have full access to it, they can scan it to generate targeted ads. (They already do that with your email). If a google employee wanted to they could read you private documents (You tax returns, your love letters, your whatever… ). Not saying that they will just they can.

2. Storing it on Google’s servers will make it easier for law agencies/lawyers to get search access to your data using a subpeona. Adam Fields has a good writeup on why storing your data on google is a bad idea.

So if you still want to store stuff on google feel free to, but I am not. I might store encrypted files for a short time if I needed to free up space for something, but for a more long term solution I will stick to my DVD burner. 🙂

Original Article: Google: A giant hard disk in the sky?

– Suramya

According to Bruce Schneier’s blog a group of researcher’s from Berkeley have developed a process that lets them identify the keys being typed by analyzing an audio recording of someone typing at the computer for about 15 mins.

There was some research done on this earlier but their method required specific training tapes where the system knew what keys were pressed and when to configure the listener before it was able to accurately deciper the input. In this case the training tape is an actual recording of a target.

This brings an interesting possibility for hackers/crackers to steal passwords/information by setting up hidden mic’s etc.

Saw a technique somewhat like this being used in a TV show called ‘MI-6″ (Or was it MI-5? It was 3 am… ) In it one of the spies gives a special cufflink to the target and gets him to type her resume out. As the spies knew what was on the resume they were able to get a readout of each key (They didn’t explain what readout’s they were taking in too much detail) and once they got that they were able to see what ever the target typed on the computer in realtime as long as he was wearing his cufflink. Neat eh?

But before you start panicking, remember the bad guy’s still have to either get physical access to your system and/or the area around your system in order to bug it and you know the law: “Physical access is root access”.

So to lower the risk of this attack all you have to do is follow the same basic rules you have been following about not granting unknown people access to your workplace and keep an eye out for people carying video camera’s and mic’s.

To make the risk go away completely play loud music to drown out the typing sound when working on sensitive data.

Original Source:
Schneier on Security: Snooping on Text by Listening to the Keyboard

Link to the Paper: Snooping on Text by Listening to the Keyboard (PDF File)

– Suramya