If a EU regulation was at fault, only systems in the EU should’ve been affected. There would be no reason to adhere to complicated EU rules everywhere else globally.
This doesn’t add up. They need to find a more believable fall guy.
There would be no reason to adhere to complicated EU rules everywhere else globally.
But there are a ton of websites that do adhere to complicated GDPR rules even though they serve 99.99% US based clients.
I think this has nothing to do with EU and it’s just some far fetched bullshit excuse from Microsoft.
So I don’t agree with this blame game, but in order to limit the scope of this to EU, they would have had to maintain two different designs, so it just makes sense to change the global design to suit the EU agreement. If it were something like bundling, then that’s light enough to maybe change regionally, but it’s too much to maintain a whole other kernel architecture.
Happens all the time with regulations. For example my company doesn’t have different products to comply with different environmental regulations, they just compose the strictest superset of the international regulations and follow those. California passes a law and it may change the global strategy.
tl;dr The crash came from kernel level influence that Microsoft was blocked from denying by regulation.
This is a good thing for consumers as it continues to allow the user more control over the computer.
This doesn’t have anything to do with user control - modern windows versions need drivers to be WHQL signed to get that kind of access. Alternatively you’ll need to enable developer mode on your system, and install your own developer certificate into its keyring for running own code, which has its own drawbacks.
Crowdstrike is implemented as a device driver - but as there is no device Microsoft could’ve argued that this is abusing the APIs, and refused the WHQL certification. Microsofts own security solution (Defender) also is implemented as a device driver, though, and that’s what the EU ruling is about: Microsoft needs to provide the same access they’re using in their own products to competitors. Which is a good thing - but if Microsoft didn’t have Defender, or they’d have done it without that type of access it’d have been fully legal for them to deny the certification for Crowdstrike.
Both MacOS and Linux have the ability to run the type of thing that requires those privileges on Windows in an unprivileged process - and on newer Linux versions Crowdstrike is using that (older versions got broken by them the same way they now broke Windows). So Microsoft now trying to blame the EU can be seen as an attempt to keep people from questioning why Microsoft didn’t implement a low privilege API as well, which would’ve prevented this whole mess.
Microsoft has Windows Defender, its in-house alternative to CrowdStrike, but because of the 2009 agreement made to avoid a European competition investigation, had allowed multiple security providers to install software at the kernel level.
Its all the EU’s fault for having the temerity to think users should be able to control their own hardware instead of us!
Why is Microsoft defending Crowdstrike?
My guess: Because they reviewed and signed the kernel space code which calls code that is unreviewed and unsigned (or, at the very least, pulls directly from files that are unreviewed and unsigned without proper validation or error checking), calling out CrowdStrike’s failure puts them on the hook too.
Typical MS gaslighting and manipulation to subvert meaningful regulation.
