XP phoning home to MS. . .

[krp]

. . .On a daily basis.

For those folks who dual boot to either Win2000 or XP and have Windows Genuine Advantage, you may well desire to read this article (http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20060608002958907).

krp

[jpaulb]

wunde if there is a way of sending spyware to the M$ server farm :twisted:

[danieldk]

That's the problem with closed-source, you can't check it :(.

[Mike]

I think you meant "That's the problem with closed-source, you can't LEGALLY check it."

If you have the object code (the executable) for a known machine then you CAN examine the source. Sort of. You may or may not be able to identify the original language and decompilers are rare (never used one) but a disassembler, sure. It's a lot of work though because the tool typically doesn't give you READABLE assembler source and converting the output of the disassembler into something useful is a slow process (take me all day to recover a readable BAL program for an "object" several hundred bytes in size -- my practical expereince being limited to dealing with "lost source code" problems, need to change the program in the IBM mainframe enviornment so the assembly language would be BAL -- and if you want to know "how could the source be lost" well remember, the orginal in an application that has grown from the 70's might have been a deck of cards).