Ghosts live inside the Windows Vista holograms. Microsoft officially confirmed this detail through the voice of Nick White, Microsoft Product manager. "An astute Windows user", as White put it, managed to stumble across the microscopic ghosts in the holographic image on the face of the Windows Vista Business DVD with the help of a Nikon 5700 camera.

"On the left and the right of the circle containing the Vista logo there are two rectangular areas, and above and below them there are four minuscule holographic photographs. Here, you will be able to see one of them, the rest I don't know yet what they are," Kwisatz wrote on his blog in a post accompanying the adjacent images.

Early reports speculated that the images included in the Windows Vista hologram are Easter eggs, and that the detail had simply escaped Microsoft's attention. This is not the case. White explained that the ghosts' inclusion in the Vista hologram is premeditated.

"The real story is interesting, but conspiracy theorists will be disappointed to learn that it is not the result of a deliberate attempt to deceive. The photo displays members of the team who worked on the Windows Vista DVD hologram design. Microsoft's Anti-Piracy Team designed a counterfeit-resistant digital "watermark" for the non-encoded surface of Windows Vista DVDs. The photo in question is only one of multiple images contained in the hologram design, all of whose inclusion serves to make it more difficult to replicate a Windows Vista DVD," White said.

According to Microsoft, all the images are intended as additional security measures designed as an integer part of the Vista "media, packaging and certificates of authenticity." In addition to the image at the beginning of this article, engadget has highlighted other examples. The picture on the left is a reproduction of Girl Reading a Letter at an Open Window (1657-1659) from Dutch painter Johannes Vermeer. White acknowledged the fact that Microsoft has also placed old master works of art belonging to the public domain in the Vista hologram.

"The images are less than 1mm in size and are not visible to the naked eye, so must be viewed using optical magnification. Their presence does not affect the contents of the DVD any more than would applying a label to the front of an audio CD you may have created at home. These security measures were never intended to be impossible to find, but rather difficult to reproduce. While it's extremely difficult to replicate a holographic design in general, the inclusion of original images makes it that much more so. Incorporating optical security into our physical media is just one of many efforts to ensure that Microsoft customers get what they paid for," White concluded.