W0UN--John Brosnahan wrote:
> What I was referring to in my comment about "phoning home" is the reported
> property of XP that it sends information on your system and configuration
> at future dates--ala "spyware".
------------------------
Well, this is probably an educated guess, but all BIOS systems have
some few bytes of memory that when interrogated, will return binary
information on all hardware installed. And this info contains also the
date of manufacture of the motherboard!
So, if you have two floppies installed, and you remove one, the next
call to the BIOS will reveal this.
When I was selling some "vanity call" data back in the mid 90s, I used
this feature.
When the disk I sold was put into a machine, this data was written to
the disk. If you then took the disk to a buddies house ( aka piracy ),
unless he had an exact twin of your machine, the software would do
it's thing, and when a mismatch came back, the database was destroyed,
and additional data about the other machine was written to the disk.
And yes, I fully documented this in the "readme" file, and the disk
was set so the first screen asked: "Would you like to read the
"readme" file?."
I guess it really depends on how much you value your privacy. In my
case, I agree with the guys who are
paronoid about it!
73
Ed
|