Sorry about your parents, there.

You are welcome to your opinion in any case. It was neither trollish nor FUD just because you disagree with my opinion or don’t like it. You’re also focusing on the first half of what I wrote but that’s ok. If you want Microsoft handing out “Forensic Tools for Dummies” on a USB flash drive to cops around the world, you’re welcome to it.

You might be able to do all of these things (and, heck, I can probably do most of them as well) but you aren’t creating a series of custom applications to do it, sticking them on a USB drive, and showing a bunch of non-technical cops how to use them after they requested you to create these apps for them. Do you do spec work for police who want to data trawl people?

Oh, and better yet, you aren’t the creator of the operating system in question, which still has more than 90% of the desktop market.

It’s one thing for people to be able to use network analysis or disk tools, etc. to gather forensic data. If you know how to use the tools, by all means do so. It is quite another for the creator of the dominant operating system on the planet to create and distribute a series of applications to non-technical cops that asked them to make it per spec to data mine their own operating system. That just leads to abuse, both on the part of Microsoft and on the part of random cops. Once law enforcement has an easy tool to mindlessly do a job, they tend to overuse it. That’s what happened with tasers, which are now treated like nothing more than a non-polite way of forcing people to do what a cop wants rather than being treated as a tool with serious responsibilties.

If you cannot see the difference, I think that is really a separate problem and doesn’t say much about me, even though you have decided that I am clueless on things technical.

I guarantee you that if any of the maintainers of the main Linux distributions had a bunch of cops come up to them and ask them to create these tools so they could do the same thing on their distros, the cops would get politely (or not so politely) told to go away. More likely, they would be told to get bent and never come back. That’s the difference between Windows and Linux. I’d like to think that Apple would tell them to take a hike too but I expect they’d play ball with cops.

I’m not am MS lover, but your post is FUD and you obviously have no idea what you are saying. Even worse I had to read your uninformed post while reading all the truly smart, informed and useful post at p.m.o. Thanks for lowering the bar. For my sake I hope they remove you from planet so I can go back to my Mozilla/Firefox news!