Is Microsoft going to Violate the Military Secrets Export Laws ?

If Microsoft is going to put the entire image of Win7 on every system, that's begging to be cracked. Crackers the world over are going to rise to the challenge to crack the encryption used on the image. The computer world will be flooded with pirated copies of Win7 Ultimate in weeks or months after the release date depending on how good Microsoft's encryption is.

If I was a botnet owner, I'd hand out my cracked copies of Win 7 to everybody I could. I'd have included in it code that would allow me to take control of the computer as soon as it gets online. Rootkits could be submerged inside the Win 7 install. Most of the pirate users world-wide wouldn't have a clue that they'd been pawned.

What's really bad is if the cracked system ran well. It would run faster than the previous idiot Visaster release even though it was running with an embedded rootkit!

The smartest way to do it would be to use the botnets to run cracking code. Buy one system with Win7 Ultimate on DVD recover media. Image that system so you have target images of all the files you need to break out of the encrypted mass of code on the Home Basic or whatever system. Parcel out the decryption task to all your botnet minions with a distributed task program. If its good enough for Seti@home its good enough for cracking Windows. Half of the job is done when you know what the finished decrypted product will look like.

That brings up an interesting question. If Microsoft thinks they can release a product world-wide that depends on encryption for protection, how are they bypassing the military secrets export restrictions on encrypted products? Cell phones used to be "strategic" assets and not legal for sale to Korea, Iran, etc etc.

Years ago DES and PGP were classified as "military secrets". DES was a Dept of Defense code. But PGP, described and developed in a C programmer's manual, was deemed a military secret that was prevented from being exported in digital form even though the book had already been published and released world-wide! The US government wouldn't let the author put a CD or a floppy disk in the PUBLISHED book's SECOND edition!

Now we have a world-wide software monopoly that is going to release over 4 GigaBytes of operating system code encrypted with what Microsoft hopes is unbreakable encryption. Doesn't that qualify as a military secret?

I guess Microsoft thinks they can get around the export restriction laws since they "own" 90% of the desktops in the world. I look for Microsoft to move corporate headquarters from Redmond to some country less restrictive if this becomes an issue.

Now the other side of it. How would you like to be somebody with an 8GB solid state drive in your little netbook with half the drive space taken up with software you can't use since you can't afford it?

Microsoft is again showing how stupid they can be as a "corporate citizen" of the world.