US Government Checking Up On Vista Users?
Found on Slashdot on Saturday, 21 July 2007
This article at Whitedust displays some very interesting logs from Vista showing connections to the DoD Information Networking Center, United Nations Development program and the Halliburton Company; for no reason other than the machine was running Vista. From the article 'After running Vista for only a few days — with a complete love for the new platform the first sign of trouble erupted. I began noticing latency on my home network connection — so I booted my port sniffing software and networking tools to see what was happening. What I found was foundation shaking. The two images below show graphical depictions of what has and IS trying to connect to my computer even in an idle state'.
First of all: I'm not posting this because I take that article serious. In fact, I'm posting because it obviously shows what happens when people without much knowledge try to act smart. First, you don't "boot" port sniffing software; you boot an OS and launch an application. And the graphical proof? Screenshots of PeerGuardian. Sorry, but that's not a port sniffing software. Furthermore, the setup of the systems involved is nowhere described. Typically, PeerGuardian is run by filesharers, so I assume he downloads via Bittorrent. At this point one should ask exactly what is the reason for those packets. Vista or the P2P software? There can be many reasons: spoofed IPs, infected hosts, P2P sharers inside the DoD and so on. Oh, and the entry in the lists can be simply wrong. To sum it up: it's an article which doesn't need to be read at all; it won't even make a conspiracy theorist nod in agreement.