Windows Vista won't have a backdoor that could be used by police forces to get into encrypted files, Microsoft has stressed.
In February, a BBC News story suggested that the British government was in discussions with Microsoft over backdoor access to the operating system. A backdoor is a method of bypassing normal authentication to gain access to a computer without to the PC user knowing. But Microsoft has now quelled the suggestion that law enforcement might get such access. "Microsoft has not and will not put 'backdoors' into Windows," a company representative said in a statement sent via e-mail.