Symantec attempts to halt Vista with lawsuit

With the breakdown of negotiations between Microsoft and Symantec over the continued use of storage tools originally licensed for use in Windows 2000, the 2 companies will be heading to court to settle the matter. If Symantec’s claims are upheld in court I would expect MS to pay damages and relicense the software. I wouldn’t expect this to have any effect on the use of current versions of Windows. However, this case will likely push back further the release date of Vista.

Windows Vista Capable and Premium Ready PCs

While Microsoft may believe it’s minimum requirements, I tend to agree more with Ken Fisher’s take on the subject over at Ars Technica. Based on my experience installing the last few betas on a 1.9Ghz P4 with 512M, I can tell you, you’re gonna need a lot more than that.

The quest for ring 0

All x86 CPUs in modern systems (Intel, AMD, etc.) have a feature that could be exploited on some operating systems to take total control of that system. Interestingly, modern versions of Windows actually aren’t vulnerable to this type of attack because of their implementation of a hardware abstraction layer or HAL. There are also ways to harden other OSs against this sort of attack, but it’s more a matter of mitigation than prevention.