said by toadlife :

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All Microsoft did was cripple their network stack of Windows XP and force network admins to use a *nix OS to do their network snooping.

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Several years after the release of Windows XP, my predictions for the consequences of making raw sockets available in a mass market consumer operating system (see all the pages below) came to pass. In fact, the famous "MS Blast" Internet worm used XP's raw sockets to attack Microsoft themselves!

Microsoft first began blocking XP's raw socket features with the release of their second XP Service Pack (SP2). Then an April 2005 security patch finished the job by completely killing off raw sockets. This final move caused a great deal of frantic running around and arm waving from fringe factions of the PC industry who still adamantly refuse to "get it". If these folks still don't "get it" they're never going to. But I am very pleased that Microsoft finally did, and does.

See ZDNet Story: Microsoft tries to quell TCP/IP 'danger'

Microsoft absolutely hates "taking back" operating system features, and thus breaking compatibility with applications that were using them. So this could NOT have been an easy or casual thing for them to do. I am sure it was only done after a great deal of thought and careful consideration. And it means that raw sockets in XP really WERE causing the huge amounts of trouble I knew they would.