Giveaway of the Day Forums

1. 

   mikiem2
   Moderator

   thurrott[.]com/windows/109962/windows-bloated-thanks-adobes-extensible-metadata-platform

   Windows Explorer, for example, is a critical Shell component in the startup hot path. But despite its importance, it’s comprised of ~20% pure garbage. ApplicationFrame.dll, responsible for Windows app title bars and frame gizmos, is ~41% garbage. Twinui, imageres, and other related components scored with much lower numbers but couldn’t fully escape Adobe XMP.

   It sounds like nitpicking but this stuff impacts Windows in all sorts of areas, such as boot time, redistributable and on-disk image size, servicing (delta patches), and runtime Authenticode validation. Funnily enough, these are the exact areas that a special performance team at Microsoft are supposed to be monitoring. Oops.

   Posted 7 years ago #
2. 

   ChrisS
   Administrator

   I'm not sure that the "garbage" isn't an integral part of the program, particularly since the MS team didn't weed it out. I'm inclined to the notion that it's part of the "Surveillance State"; I'm just not sure whether it's at the behest of the Feds or Google/Facebook/Advertisers but a good guess is probably "both". The metadata is your digital fingerprint (well, footprint since it's so big) that enables tracking you where you go to predict where you're headed.

   I recall old articles like this one from 2008: Should Printer Companies Tell You Your Printer Leaves Secret Identifying Info? which states
   

   Every few years or so, the press picks up on the story that laser printers leave some dots that are invisible to the naked eye on every print. These dots are included for the purpose of anti-counterfeiting efforts. Each printer leaves a unique mark that can be read with special blue LED light, and interpreted with a decoding system that only the printers and the secret service are supposed to have. The story is getting some press again as the EFF is pointing out that laser printers have become cheap enough that many people have them and it's possible that the identification dots could be used for other purposes, meaning that people who print stuff out on the assumption that the documents would be anonymous, may be wrong.

   It's more invasive now. Post a picture of a new car and get offers on car insurance, post a picture of your house and get solicitations from contractors, post a picture of your fancy jewelry and get robbed in your hotel room. Big Brother and his crazy Uncle Earl are spying on us. And they're lazy so we have to do all of the work for them.

   Posted 7 years ago #
3. 

   mikiem2
   Moderator

   You're probably right Chris. [Unfortunately]

   There are a few things that bug me in particular...

   The Wikileaks stuff from the CIA included exploits or compromises for cell phones that would need to be installed before the phone's owner opened the package on their new phone. Where do they get into the supply chain & how often?

   To tamp down the impending panic after the recent Shadow Brokers release, Microsoft published in an official blog that they had everything already patched. This alarmed some folks [but not others] in the security community, because a lot of the Shadow Brokers stuff was not publicly known. If that's true, that would probably mean that either Microsoft's security team(s) discovered these vulnerabilities on their own, and broke unofficial rules by not sharing the info with the security community, or through their government ties were forewarned, & everyone kept quiet.

   Third, the Snowden docs revealed that the NSA [so likely the CIA too etc.] placed agents in the working groups or bodies developing standards, so that they could poison the code used. I would think that logically that meant that they had [have?] agents working wherever there was access & a means to influence the final code base in any major software, including Microsoft & in the Linux community.

   Posted 7 years ago #

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