RE: Defense Secretary Defends Microsoft

[Michael Motyka <mmotyka@lsil.com>]

/*
I was told by my computer hardware supplier that when you visit M$hit
site, they "stripe" your hard drive by writing on it a serial number
that won't get erased when you format or re-partition the drive.  
Is that true?
*/

Perhaps if they ID the drive mfgr and model then manipulate the bad
sectors map. I'm no HDD expert but I think all drives are shipped with a
small number of good sectors that can be put into use if a working
sector fails. You could mark a working sector with a dataset (
signature, encryption, ECC, serial number ) and then force the HDD
controller to mark it as bad and bring another sector on in its place.
Then you need a routine that gets the bad sector map, searches for the
signature then returns the ecrypted serial number + ECC.

I haven't looked at the details of drives in years but I think some of
them could be reformatted - ie test sectors, generate bad sector maps
and generally start clean. This would wipe out the proposed serial
number.

I don't think MS could alter any of the low-level formatting. I think MS
would be restricted to the data fields of the sectors. 

Hell, there could be a little extra room in some flash somewhere on the
HDD...

/*
I was also told that they download your directory tree.  
Is that true?
*/
It would be easy enough. I would expect the worst. Didn't Prodigy do
that at one time in the past? 

Use two drives - one a junk drive, the other for projects. The prj drive
is *never* in the machine while the dial-up is active. No matter how
nasty Windows is it can't talk. Except via a serial protocol using RFI
as the physical connection.

Drives are cheap ( 10Gb UDMA $170 ) and you can get a removable hard
drive carrier at Fry's, ( IDE, $20 , SCSI $60 ). Buy two.