A Counting School - Hardcore Chartered Accountancy

Anti-Vista partisans appearing everywhere

I've seen various criticisms of the new Windows Vista popping up here and there, such as in this embedded video.



While the video may be little more than showmanship, the revelation of "shout hacking" is, if anything, pretty funny.

In a nutshell, a hacker could in theory attack a Vista computer by using its voice recognition software to issue a command to run a program. The whole point of hackign is to gain access to a system to run programs of your choice - so once you're in, you can do whatever you want.

The Microsoft people understandably want to minimize the potential harm that can arise - among other factors, you need speakers and a microphone set up so the computer can "hear" the voice command.

Funny thing is, that isn't as rare as you'd think - lots of laptop computers now have built-in microphones. If the microphone isn't set to "mute" mode, this could conceivably leave many systems exposed to trouble.

This is, of course, one of many reasons why big companies - such as most accounting firms - don't bother upgrading to the newest Bleeding Edge system seemingly for ages. In addition to wanting to see all the nasty bugs like this one get squashed, they need to test all their customized software on the new system to see if it'll be compatible.

Not to mention the fact that there usually needs to be some sort of business case for upgrading - will the new system do something the old one can't?

Not likely to be an issue anytime soon - at least, until Microsoft tries to strong-arm customers into upgrading by discontinuing support/sales of the old system - something the XP authentication system could, in theory, facilitate.

Which is why I hate product authentication - it's a complete loss of consumer control over their own systems. Sure, you could hack the system to work without 'calling home', but that's a hassle coupled with a burden.