Does Windows Vista Send Information to the Government?

Is there more to Windows Vista being big brother than was originally thought? There appear to be features and services bundled into Windows Vista that stay in touch with the government and their associates, too.

If this is true, Microsoft has gone too far. This post was in an abandonia.com forum, and appeared to get overloaded from all the attention it was getting. Whitedust.net had a copy of it on their site.

A forum user switched to Windows Vista a month ago and actually had some good luck with it. He began noticing latency on his home network connection. He used port sniffing software and networking tools to see what was going on. What he found he referred to as "foundation shaking." There are some graphical images of a peerguardian 2 log with some very interesting information. The computer was in an idle state.

It shows the computer connected to the following (in his own words):

  • DoD Network Information Center (Department of Defense)
  • United Nations Development Program (Seems to correlate to the parent branch of the U.N. Informatics Division)
  • Halliburton Company (We all know these guys)
  • Ministry of Defense Data Return Agent
  • DOHS-Recon (traceroutes for this address provided nothing, suspected blocks on traceroute. Many of us who are monitoring this situation have suspected the acronym stands for the Department of Homeland Security Reconnaissance. This is merely a guess, but an educated one at that)

I ran traceroutes on the IP's, and sure enough they came back government owned. I thought this might be exclusive to my system, so I ran over to a friend of mine who upgraded to Vista when it first became available. After installing monitoring software on his system, the hits it caught on his network were immediate and almost identical in source.

Is there anyone in the abandonia community with a US based connection who is experiencing this watchdog behavior? Are any foreign Vista users experiencing similar attacks from their own countries ministries and governing agencies?

It would be interesting to see how common this is. If Microsoft is doing this to all their Windows Vista consumers, it's time to take a long hard look at how they do things.

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