If you read reddit or digg, you probably don’t like the Church of Scientology very much. You probably don’t pay to see Tom Cruise movies because you don’t want your money going to fund such an organization.
But did you know that if you’ve bought a copy of Windows 2000, XP or Vista, or bought an OEM PC with one of those OSs pre-installed, you’ve indirectly funded the CoS?
The reason why is that Microsoft packages a third party created disk defrag tool called Diskeeper with those versions of Windows. Diskeeper is made by a company called the Diskeeper Corporation, formerly Executive Software International, inc., whose CEO, Craig Jensen, is a member of the CoS. According to the wikipedia entry for Diskeeper Corporation:
The corporation’s CEO, Craig Jensen, is a member of the Church of Scientology and has stated that his employees are schooled in the principles of Scientology’s founder, L. Ron Hubbard.[2], saying “I attribute [our] success directly to the management technology developed by L. Ron Hubbard. Simply put, I couldn’t have done it without his help.” [2] In 1991, Executive Software denied Ciba-Geigy technical support for the VAX version of Diskeeper after learning that Ciba-Geigy makes Ritalin, a drug opposed by scientologists.
Because this connection to the Church of Scientology, the German government’s Federal Office of Security in Information Technology refused to certify those versions of Windows for use on government computers in Germany (the Germans have a long standing antagonist relationship with the CoS, see this wikipedia article for more info).
According to this Wired article, Microsoft had to turn over the source code to its operating system so that it could be audited by the German government to check for “backdoors” placed by the CoS. Eventually, the dispute was settled by Microsoft offering a patcher to remove Diskeeper software from Windows for all German customers.
So what can I do about this, you may be asking right now. There’s really only two solutions:
1, Buy a fucking Mac. Apple doesn’t include Diskeeper with OS X.
2a, Build an PC yourself and Install Linux, Problem Solved (or pirate XP, but SHHHHHHH, you didn’t hear that from me).
2b, Buy an OEM PC from a manufacturer who’ll sell you one with a Free OS installed on it, such as Linux or FreeDOS. (Dell does this on some models)
Any other tips, please leave in the comments.
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Holy shit, that’s effing nuts. Thank God (L.Ron?) I haven’t paid for software in 10 years or so. Nuts.
So you’re saying that we should try to economically penalize people with ideas that are different to our own?
Fantastic, I’m in.
In the meantime, we won’t worry about the backdoor put in by Microsoft for the NSA. After all, this is only the US government, and we know we can trust them.
I quite literally was going to buy a copy of Diskeeper this week. I’ve used the trial and liked it. I think I’ll stick with PerfectDisk then.
or use the free: jkdefrag