Michael Howard mentions on his blog that recently MS had all the major OEMs on campus to discuss SDL(Security Development Lifecycle). MS asked the OEMs to enable DEP/NX in the BIOS by default on all their shipping PCs in time for Windows Vista.
The reason for this ask is pretty simple, for ASLR to be effective, DEP/NX must be enabled by default too.
Michael mentions that all the major OEMs (you know who they are!) have agreed to not disable DEP/NX in their BIOSs by default.
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