THE TROJAN HORSE RACE'S JUST STARTED
(An appell to Micro$oft's slaves)

by SiuL Hacky

(15 August 1997, slightly edited by Fravia)

---

Courtesy of Fravia's page of reverse engineering

Well, this is actually not a crack, nor a reverse engineering exercise... it's more an INVITATION to a crack and to a very interesting reverse engineering exercise that we all ought to perform... Micro$oft (and many others) are indeed more and more heavily monitoring, all our software and hardware activities (all human activities if we follow master +ORC's slaves of the supermarket essay). Let's strike back, and hard, through our sublime reverse engineering knowledges... AT WORK! This will be a full-fledged +HCU 1998 project: WHAT ARE THEY GATHERING WITHOUT ASKING US? (Orwell's world? Just say no :-)

THE TROJAN HORSE RACE'S JUST STARTED

=====================================



Indeed my dear friends, the great race against anonymity is starting. 

But, once more, there will be no fair play, Bill has bought off all 

the competitors.



Microsoft hunger for controlling the market is only disturbed by its 

hunger for controlling the people. 

Rather interesting, a turning "software to political" . Perhaps in the 

next elections Microsoft will openly support one of the candidates, 

just wait ...



Well, I have in front of me the NEW version of the microsoft internet 

implorer. 

Huge and overbloated, as  usual, this beta version (which should be 

alfa version BTW) is a good example for showing you the "software to

political" turning. 

I wouldn't even think to install it, but let's have a look at 

the readme.txt of its spanish version. 

Amazing, a 58K file of plain ASCII full of bug notes and compatibility 

problems. I picked this very important phrase:



- Asegzrese de estar conectado a Internet antes de ejecutar el 

  programa de instalacisn.



... it is



- Make sure you are connected to Internet before starting the installation 

program.



Of course, in some other instructions for the installation you are told 

not to interrupt the installation process, otherwise you may not recover 

all the information previous to the installation. 

Wow, we must trust Microsoft goodwill. 

What happens actually during the installation process? Who knows? 

I didn't check it out, but remember WINDOWS 95 REGISTRATION WIZZARD 

(aka "online registration"):



( .. taken without permission from an article by Andrew Schulman)



"Of special concern is RegWiz's ability to collect information on

applications (both Microsoft and non-Microsoft) that a user has

installed on their hard disk, and to send this information back

to Microsoft via the Microsoft Network (MSN).  As explained

below, the internal name for this process is "Product Inventory":

it is a feature of the PRODINV.DLL module included with Win95." 



You thought it was impossible. Remember we are in 1995, when Microsoft 

was "out of the Net", trying to sell its failure project MSN to the 

world. Now the Net has grown, unfortunately the beast and its hunger have

grown too.



This background process dores not look for "statistical information", like 

a kind of software poll, it does search for 100 specific applications from 

Microsoft and its competitors (included our beloved Microsoft Money, 

and its Payment BILLS :-). Come on, look and find if w95 warned you about 

this activity. 

As Schulman points out, the key of this action is that Microsoft uses 

again his privileged position (selling its platforms) against 

its own clients, which are competitors in the software applications 

market; and this in an almost (if not completely) illegal way. 

Just like the old soup of the "undocumented functions" that +orc warned us

about. 

Read the rest of the article, it's a good essay. We could entitle it  

as: "Registration wizard reverse engineer, the dirty details".



That's what Microsoft does when it has free-way to communicate with "the 

head office". So trust them. 

"This online registration is specially appropriate to upgrade Ms. 

Office", and such preposterous (and false) things you could read. 



I repeat it was in 1995, so imagine what Int. Explorer can do with the 

Internet link. But Int. Explorer is just a front-end for the new Microsoft 

projects. 

You'll see that the vicious aspect of doing things without asking, or, 

better formulated, to do things that "normal stupid user" cannot and will

not understand nor investigate, does not stop here. 

Do you know that when installing Office 97 (just a couple of megabytes :-) 

the w95 kernel is modified ? Imagine: hundreds and hundreds of new 

undocumented functions added without noticing you about this...



BTW, I have a particular theory about the dawn of Windows 95:

Some light-years far from Earth, Bill Gates is invited to an 

interstellar biggot meeting and in one of his 

most striking actions, succeed in stealing (once again) the most 

advanced quantum OS, but in the return 

journey, the OS is affected by nuclear radiations and mutates, so it 

started growing and growing out of 

control. Finally it stops. When he tested it, back on Earth, he realized 

it was something BIG, something 

GREAT, something HUGE: THE SLOWEST OPERATIVE SYSTEM ALL OVER THE 

UNIVERSE. 

Then he snapped: So, we got it... I'm just wondering how we could slow 

it down.       



So, what are the new trends ? Well there is not so much information 

about Microsoft's new spaghetti-code generators (full of new 

technologies like ActivePollaX :-), but this is the information I 

could pick up:



* The new version of w95, released next year like "Memphis", "win98" or 

whatever (who cares) will be offered as an upgrade of Windows 95. Je, je.



* Is Ms decided to make a "toy-upgrade" like win31->win95 ? Probably 

not. 



* Are they going to allow the upgrade to the millions of copies not 

registered (with "online registration" :-DD)? Probably yes, they need 

to spread the new product. 



* Will we have a partially disabled Windows if not registered ? Very 

probably, only name-surname users will be periodically registered.



* If Internet operations are given to this OS, what is gonna happen with 

our anonymity ? I don't know my dear Watson. 

Now you can imagine which future +hcu projects we need :=).



* The beta version is upgraded continually from Microsoft. Now it is a 

(fake)beta version, but it is gonna be a beta version as well in the 

final release. 

This is the story: go to Microsoft site where you'll be able to find a 

section called "Update Manager" or something ... and then you download 

the upgrades, the drivers, and what else ... ?



* The version runs on a i386, YES YOU ARE NOT DREAMING. Bill you're a 

genius.



The race has just started, and we have to fight against Bill's horses. 

You +hcukers, you readers from the deep deep net, contact us if you have 

any answer to these questions or something interesting on the subject. 

Knowledge is always the key, and a pretty powerful one for that matter!



Before ending you must know that Microsoft, being consistent with its 

staff, control the software they use, checking if it is from the 

company. Run away horses!  



SiuL Hacky 1997

Project 9
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