Friday, May 15, 2009

The "I Can't Access" Client

It's become apparent to me that Microsoft and organized religion have much in common. A few examples:

1. a Cult-like following for no apparent reason

2. They are convinced that they have the absolute *and only* truth despite any claims or evidence to the contrary - effectively lumping Linux and Wicca into the same category (which is not as far fetched as it may sound)

3. They both need all your money and will do almost anything to get it.

Point three apparently includes kicking your bedpartner off onto the floor in the morning after a great night of high caliber ugly bumping.

"CG, what in the mickey mouse fuck are you talking about," you may ask?

A fair critique.

I give you http://support.microsoft.com/kb/949914

The jist of it is that Microsoft's money grab is causing issues with older versions of the ICA client. You see they updated the encryption of the TSCal from 512 bytes to 2048 bytes.

This plays havoc with older versions of the ICA client because they choke on the new key and consequently take a dump - or actually they write a dump assuming you've got some kind of debugging going on. None the less...

You can't tell me that there's a line of people trying to crack the TS license encryption. Defeating the terminal server license model is trivial. I've never met anyone that honestly cared that much about it. That is of course unless you're using Citrix and in that case you're screwed because upgrading your terminal server build gives your user base the middle finger.

This is where I would normally make some cheeky remark about how maybe Citrix should write some function in their XenApp Server code that causes the server to blue screen, but upon reflection I realize that it's hardly necessary. Microsoft seems to be doing quite well in that regard.

Just in case you were wondering what a 182 billion dollar douche bag looks like.

-CG

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