Windows 7 Sins — The case against Microsoft and proprietary software The Windows 7 Sins campaign is over, but our work isn't finished. Tell Microsoft to #UpcycleWindows7 and set it free. Translations of this page Windows 7 Sins With Windows 7, Microsoft is asserting legal control over your computer and is using this power to abuse computer users. Education "Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach him how to fish and you feed him for a lifetime." Increasingly, computers are expected to be useful tools in our children's education. But today, most children whose education involves computers are being taught to use one company's product: Microsoft's — Microsoft spends large sums of money on lobbyists and marketing to procure the support of educational departments. How proprietary software attacks education Link to the 'Education' sin The education of children represents a major revenue stream for Microsoft, and a strategic opportunity to embed their products into the lives of future adults. By enticing schools to teach their students using Windows and associated software, Microsoft can also make parents feel obliged to provide the same software at home. Where else do we see one corporation able to put their marketing and corporate branded materials in front of children as requirements in this way? Many US states even boast about how they are cooperating with Microsoft, either ignoring or not understanding the corrupting influence that accepting freebies from this huge corporation has on their government. Because Microsoft's software is proprietary, it is incompatible with education — users are simply passive consumers in their interactions with Windows, they are legally forbidden from adapting the software to solve a particular problem, or from satisfying an intellectual curiosity by examining its source code. An education using the power of computers should be a means to freedom and empowerment, not an avenue for one corporation to instill its monopoly through indoctrination. Free software, on the other hand, gives children a route to empowerment, by encouraging them to explore and learn. Nowhere was the promise of an educational platform using free software more significant than the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project. Launched by MIT professor Nicholas Negroponte in 2003, OLPC was designed to lead children around the world to an advanced education using the combination of information technology and freedom. The project aimed to produce low-cost devices (starting with one called the XO) so that millions of children could have access to them, and free software, so they would have the critical freedoms to explore and share their software. Then under pressure from Microsoft, Negroponte backed the project away from its commitment to freedom and announced that the machine would also be a platform for running the nonfree Windows XP operating system. Microsoft is not the only threat to education — Adobe and Apple are both firmly placed in education, even on Windows. Adobe's proprietary Flash and Shockwave players and Apple's QuickTime and iTunes are widely used by educational software. Microsoft is now targeting governments who are purchasing XOs, in an attempt to get them to replace the free software with Windows. It remains to be seen to what degree Microsoft will succeed. But with all of this pressure, Microsoft has harmed a project that has distributed more than 1 million laptops running free software, and has taken aim at the low-cost platform as a way to make poor children around the world dependent on its products. The OLPC threatens to become another example of the way Microsoft convinces governments around the world that an education involving computers must be synonymous with an education using Windows. In order to prevent this, it is vital that we work to raise global awareness of the harm Microsoft's involvement does to our children's education. A great way to do this is by downloading Sugar and helping a child in your local area experience free software. How does free software stand up to this? Freedom 1: The freedom to study how the program works, and change it to make it do what you wish. Further reading: Why schools should exclusively use free software Microsoft loves DRM. Digital Restrictions Management (DRM) are technology measures that restrict what people can do with their computers. DRM is built into the heart of Windows 7, and many Microsoft services push DRM on users. In some cases, Microsoft has added these restrictions at the behest of TV companies, Hollywood and the music industry. In other cases, Microsoft DRM goes way beyond these companies' demands, suggesting that Microsoft is using DRM simply to create lock-in. Whether Microsoft is merely a co-conspirator with big media companies or an advocate for DRM in their own right, the result for software users is the same... Using Windows 7, you give control of your computer to the media. Link to the 'DRM' sin The monomaniacal fear of big media companies is that people will share digital media with their friends, building a free public library of cultural works. Public libraries are wonderful institutions, and in a digital age they become almost miraculous: we can now provide universal access to human knowledge and culture—or at least anything that's been published—at little or no cost. The amazing thing is that it's almost automatic: once people can share freely with their friends over a global network, you get a digital public library. P2P networks are one example of a digital library, and the web is another. The value of these libraries to the public is historic and immeasurable. But media companies serve shareholders, not the public, and are therefore very ready to destroy in its infancy any public resource that might interfere with their profits. The personal computer is built from the ground up to make sharing information fast and easy, so for media companies to restrict sharing they need the full cooperation of software makers at the deepest level. Enter Microsoft. In order to completely prevent sharing, media companies needed Microsoft to do two things: First, they had to make sure that any outgoing digital signal is just as locked down as the DRM'ed music or movie file. Otherwise you could simply play a video on your computer out to another device (like your digital camera) and press record. So Windows, when playing a file with DRM, needs to constantly check to make sure any connected device is cooperating with the DRM scheme. This anti-feature is called Protected Media Path. Microsoft introduced it with Vista, and it continues in Windows 7. Second, media companies needed Microsoft to keep other programs from observing the playback process and intercepting the audio and video in unencrypted form. After all, it is still your computer, and (as much as media companies hate this) you can install and run whatever applications you want. Vista and Windows 7 close this "loophole" by monitoring all the applications currently running whenever a media file with DRM is playing. If Vista or Windows 7 detects an unapproved application running in the background, your song or video will simply stop playing. In practice, the encryption on most popular DRM schemes (including DVD and Blu ray) has been cracked, and DRM-free copies of almost any piece of film or music are available on the internet. But users of Windows 7 and Vista still have code running on their computer—at all times—that is trying to limit their basic right to share media with each other and their power to build libraries. These restrictions have gone beyond what many would expect. For example, at the request of NBC, Microsoft prevented Windows Media Center users from recording television shows that NBC would rather you didn't, even though this kind of recording is an included feature of Windows Media Center. They claimed that they were just following FCC regulations, though the Second Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the FCC has no authority to make such regulations. Microsoft even adds DRM in contexts where media companies have largely given up on it. This year, after every major online music store went DRM-free, Microsoft launched a DRM-encumbered music store for mobile phones — this music service has one particularly charming limitation: many people switch cellphones every 6 months to a year, but there is no way to transfer songs from one phone to the next. If you switch phones every 6 months, then you lose your music every six months. But more importantly, this is a level of DRM that music companies are no longer demanding, indicating that Microsoft has its own aim in promoting DRM: lock-in. Because DRM creates artificial incompatibility, it is the perfect tool for tying users of a service to a particular product. When people buy music from a Microsoft service, they cannot use any other music players (like the iPod, for example). Even when Microsoft launched its own "Zune" music player, the Zune did not play tracks with Microsoft "Plays for Sure" DRM sold by other music services (including the MTV URGE Music Service built in to Windows Media Player 11). Pressure from big media companies is not the only reason Microsoft pushes DRM; lock-in is central to Microsoft's business strategy and DRM is a great way to pursue it. Microsoft is not the only company guilty of this. Apple, via its iTunes software, and its Macintosh, iPod, iPhone and Apple TV devices also imposes DRM on users. Adobe and Sony also impose DRM on users. But Microsoft is a particularly aggressive user of DRM, and the integration of DRM at the deepest levels of Windows 7 is a key reason not to buy it. Free software, by its very nature, does not support DRM — if DRM were added to free software, the users and developers would work around it and remove it. Further reading: Opposing Digital Rights Management Security "The security of your computer and network depends on two things: what you do to secure your computer and network, and what everyone else does to secure their computers and networks. It's not enough for you to maintain a secure network. If other people don't maintain their security, we're all more vulnerable to attack. When many unsecure computers are connected to the Internet, worms spread faster and more extensively, distributed denial-of-service attacks are easier to launch, and spammers have more platforms from which to send e-mail. The more unsecure the average computer on the Internet is, the more unsecure your computer is." -- Bruce Schneier Proprietary software is inherently less-secure than free software Link to the 'Security' sin But how do you know your computer is secure? If you're using proprietary software, you don't! With free software, even if you don't have the skills to evaluate the software, you can be certain that someone else can. Windows has a long history of security vulnerabilities, enabling the spread of viruses and allowing remote users to take over people's computers for use in spam-sending botnets. Because the software is secret, all users are dependent on Microsoft to fix these problems -- but Microsoft has its own security interests at heart, not those of its users. In 2005, a vulnerability was discovered that affects all versions of Windows from Windows 3.0, released in 1990 until Windows Server 2003 R2 from December 2005, with XP and later versions most severely affected. The problem, which affects the Windows Metafile image format, a format commonly used for clip-art and other vector images. Files containing specially crafted 'Escape codes' allow for arbitrary user-defined function code to be run when displaying the image files. Security researcher, Steve Gibson, believes the flaw may be intentional, too. The situations where such files are viewed is wide: Viewing a website in Internet Explorer. Previewing an image on your desktop or using Windows Explorer. Previewing …