How many available OS's are there besides XP?  Is this a campaign to make people NOT buy XP?
My thought is that people won't care.  Remember that hoax email that claims that microsoft could track who forwarded an email, and you would get 5 dollars for every person you forwarded it to?  I told people time and time again that it is a hoax, that they won't get any money, just waste bandwidth. All that did was get me removed from mailing lists, because the ignorant people will continue their feel good activities even when the truth has been set right in front of them.

I met the guys from the Cult of the Dead Cow a number of years ago and it doesn't seem like this is something they would do. They've gone commercial and might have sold their souls to the man. They're will be plenty of ways to block this type of software when it's needed.

THE CULT OF THE DEAD COW OFFERS A HELPING HAND IN AMERICA'S TIME OF NEED

In an effort to turn the tide in the war on terrorism, a private-sector think tank offers its expertise to the FBI.

LUBBOCK, TX, November 26 -- Never before has the United States faced a more troublesome enemy. To meet this growing challenge, the Federal Bureau of Investigation has announced an ongoing effort to create and deploy best-of-breed electronic surveillance software.

In July 2000 the FBI unveiled Carnivore (now called the DCS-1000), a sniffer capable of plucking relevant packet headers out of live data streams. To augment the investigative value of the DCS-1000, last week the FBI announced the development of "Magic Lantern", a rootkit for gathering information on target computers.

According to all accounts, this represents a major leap forward in the fight against all forms of computer crime. But we in the CULT OF THE DEAD COW (cDc) believe that there are opportunities here for public/private sector synergy.

"While we applaud the innovation and drive of the federal law enforcement agency, those of us who are U.S. citizens would be remiss if we did not offer our expertise in this area." said Reid Fleming, a cDc member.

The CULT OF THE DEAD COW has more targeted experience than anyone else in this field. We have repeatedly demonstrated our long-term commitment to this technology area with the release of the original Back Orifice in 1998, and its successor, Back Orifice 2000.

We are quite confident that the FBI's Engineering Research Facility is more than capable of ramping up on the challenges posed by this new arena of surveillance. But we are in a unique position to assist them in their new mission. For our part, conceptual work has already begun on an all-new remote administration tool focused specifically on the needs of the law enforcement community.

So we intend to re-architect Back Orifice from the ground up. There will be absolutely no shared code between the two projects, in order to skirt detection by commercial antivirus packages. The code will remain totally secret. The software will never surface publicly. And it will be far more stealthy than anything we have ever released, demoed, or publicly discussed.

It will contain roughly the functionality of the current Back Orifice 2000 product, plus many new features. The central design principle is to create an artificial witness which is capable of intercepting any and all relevant activity during, after, and even leading up to the commission of a computer crime.

---more---

The new system will be designed to guard against internet fraud, identity theft, unauthorized system access, virus writing, industrial espionage, child pornography, information warfare, public corruption, composing hate speech, and other serious felonies which threaten the security of our nation and the safety of its citizens.

To avoid becoming obsolete, the proposed system will be expandable through the use of plug-in components. This will enable rapid development of new operating system ports, as well as entirely new features. Several plug-ins are already under consideration or active development:

IMAGE ANALYZERS for recognizing certain shapes and images in digital photos, like: flags and emblems of terror groups, blueprints and schematics of critical national infrastructure, representations of nude or missing children, as well as faces of known or suspected criminals.
ELECTRONIC FIELD AGENTS leverage recent advances in fuzzy logic to perform much of the data acquisition and analysis on the remote PC. This enables the program to conduct wide-ranging data hunts and filter out any materials which do not conform to federal search and seizure law. Using the power of the suspect's own computer system, the software can scour stored files and live traffic across the internal network for items which conform with a high degree of probability to Title 18 legal requirements.
UNICODE-AWARE TEXT SEARCHES for matching live typing against a list of trigger words in any language, including Arabic. The dictionary of trigger words can be updated at any time over subliminal channels without arousing suspicion of the most knowledgeable systems analyst. The dictionary can be used to match proper names, book titles, airport codes, and general terms like "bomb" or "virus" in any Unicode language.
LOGIC AND GRAMMAR ENGINES will be able to detect telltale signs of mental disturbance. In conjunction with the text search capability, this feature will weed out the merely neurotic from the dangerously insane.
This will be nothing less than the ultimate intelligence-gathering tool. And we intend to construct it, at no cost, exclusively for the use of the federal government.

"This will be better than other available tools," said Oxblood Ruffin, foreign minister of the cDc. "We wish to provide infrastructure as part of a successful, multi-layered, pyramidal cybercrime strategy. Our system will provide information to help federal prosecutors determine their legal strategy before anyone is tried or even indicted."

"We are confident that the government will limit the use of this technology only to targets relevant to legitimate investigations," said Fleming, further underscoring the cult's faith in federal law enforcement organizations. "The FBI has a long history of following Title 18 to the letter."