Ask The Admin

It has been a month since my upgrade to Vista. I like to keep up with tech
trends and though reluctant to throw out XP, I forced myself to just 'swallow
the pill'. After all - change is inevitable, and resistance to change shows only
our inability to adapt to new scenarios and obstacles. I refuse to be left in
the dust of an evolutionary sandstorm. I have thus relinquished my pride and
dipped into the improvements Vista has to offer. Improvements such as increased
performance with audio hardware and DAW(Digital Audio Workstation) software.
We're talking about a Microsoft upgrade that almost rivals the audio development
quality seen on Mac DAW's for years - but with none of the proprietary hardware
BS that is forged into the Mac world.

"Wait!"You exclaim, "What does this have to
do with the title of this post?"

I'm getting to that.After installing all of my
usual apps on Vista I was impressed to see most everything was 100% backward
compatible. I expected much of my software to be rendered incompatible. Out of
everything I've tried to run on it - 99% produce excellent results in both
loading time and performance as compared with those same apps running under XP.
Improved support against malware, spyware, and trojans - complete with a user
rights management system that a seasoned Linux user could appreciate. All these
positive aspects and more, and then.....ALERT!After running Vista for only a few
days - with a complete love for the new platform the first sign of trouble
erupted. I began noticing latency on my home network connection - so I booted my
port sniffing software and networking tools to see what was happening. What I
found was foundation shaking.

The two images below show graphical depictions of
what has and IS trying to connect to my computer even in an idle state;NOTE;DoD
Network Information Center(Department of Defense)United Nations Development
Program(Seems to correlate to the parent branch of the
U.N.InformaticsDivision)Halliburton Company(We all know these guys) There have
been many other unwarranted connections that I thought too redundant to
post images for.





To list a couple;*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 legit and 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(MICROSOFT FAN BOY! ;P ). After installing
monitoring software on his system, the hits it caught on his network were
immediate and almost identical in source. Attempts on both TCP and UDP by
suspicious government owned addresses. Again, even when idle and running only a
bare minimum of system processes. I've written a college report on the same
phenomenon, which has gained considerable attention by even my instructor. I've
posted similar articles on a few tech sites and the like that I frequent more
often than this bored, and there are a number of Vista users who have replied
with similar claims.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?

[aBondondia]