great, so now Microsoft is using rootkit developers to force everyone to new OS?

Considering that Billy Gates is hiding about a billion per year from taxes in his Gates Foundation ( considering his foundation's donation rate, his tax bracket is below 10%, not too shabby for billionaire) , they should be able to afford to fix this for XP users.

Microsoft is not giving people rootkit infections. Wouldn't you rather know about a potential problem like this? You could then fix the rootkit issue and then update XP.

Bill Gates philanthropic efforts are admirable by most standards. I don't see how you could tie them into allowing XP to update a rootkit infected OS...

The alert of an existing root kit infection is good IMO, and should warn the end user to take measures. Kudos MS for attempting to raise awareness AND to not let the intrusion continue on updated systems.

The article didn't make it clear if the update installation will just halt, or if it will also alert users to the presence of the root kit. My experience has been that very few users actually read the patch notes.

bill,

Gates has no benign philanthropic efforts. It is a classical tax evasion schema, done by every other billionaire. They put billion in (no taxes), and donate $10 million (give or take) - and do that every year. Everyone who doesn't understand a thing about accounting runs around and says what a benign individual the guy probably is, but in fact the guy just evaded taxes, and instead of giving out $400 million A YEAR to tax officials he's getting away with $10 million - which is 1%.

Another words, unless he gives away $400 million a year, he'd fooled everyone.

Some one must be wearing their tin foil hat to bed.

Wikipedia [en.wikipedia.org...]

A tin foil hat is a piece of headgear made from one or more sheets of aluminium foil or similar material. Alternatively it may be a conventional hat lined with foil. One may wear the hat in the belief that it acts to shield the brain from such influences as electromagnetic fields, to limit the transmission of voices directly into the brain

hebr, it is MATHEMATICS, which is a skill greatly lacking in this country. So yeah, I understand your sarcasm, most of you believe anything that a banker or TV moron says... just can't add 2 and 2 together.

But getting back to XP machine rootkits...besides forcing you to new OS, they've also "collaborated" with CIA on a Windows 7 backdoor (for those "get tin foil hat" people - of course they deny it, they signed an agreement):

Microsoft denies it built 'backdoor' in Windows 7
Don't worry, company tells users; NSA involved only in security compliance standards.

Microsoft today denied that it has built a backdoor into Windows 7, a concern that surfaced yesterday after a senior National Security Agency (NSA) official testified before Congress that the agency had worked on the operating system.

"Microsoft has not and will not put 'backdoors' into Windows," a company spokeswoman said, reacting to a Computerworld story Wednesday.

[computerworld.com...]