From: "Neil Johnson" <njohnson@interl.net>

Wasn't there some articles some time ago about Microsoft doing research into Tempest/Van Eck (sp) radiation ? It was speculated at the time that they were going include software to "broadcast" their serial numbers so that illegal copies could be detected.

This entire story is complete nonsense (and I am the closest person on this planet to the source of this rumour). There was a slightly misleading article in Scientific American, issue 12/1998, http://www.sciam.com/1998/1298issue/1298techbus4.html on this issue that was presented on http://slashdot.org/articles/98/11/16/0028250.shtml in a completely wrong and misleading way. The original idea of using broadcast serial numbers in electromagnetic emanations appeared in Markus G. Kuhn, Ross J. Anderson: Soft Tempest: Hidden Data Transmission Using Electromagnetic Emanations, in David Aucsmith (Ed.): Information Hiding, Second International Workshop, IH'98, Portland, Oregon, USA, April 15-17, 1998, Proceedings, LNCS 1525, Springer-Verlag, ISBN 3-540-65386-4, pp. 124-142. http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/ih98-tempest.pdf as well as in patent application GB9722799.5. This was based on (early ongoing) research done by myself and Ross Anderson and was not funded by anyone. Microsoft never had anything to do with it. We showed early results among others to Microsoft Research, and they decided that they were not interested in pursuing it any further, mostly because of the "big brother" aspect of the entire idea. As far as I know, Microsoft has not done or funded any research on compromising emanations. If someone is really using today serial numbers embedded in compromising emanations of PCs to track software pirates, then I would most definitely like to know about it. Not only out of academic curiosity, but also to talk about patent license issues ... Markus -- Markus G. Kuhn, Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge, UK Email: mkuhn at acm.org, WWW: <http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/>