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Sorry, that link was bad. Here is the good link to the news archiving explaining that Microsoft and Apple put their "differences" behind them:

Clicka here for article!

Slashdotters defending DRM... am I crazy or am I the last sane one? I'm not sure sure anymore.

Slashdot continues to get more mainstream readership, even getting mentioned in print articles these days. As a side effect of this visibility, the activity of astroturfers has increased -- notice that the pro-MS AC(s) tend to have the same writing style and logical fallacies. When other readers put them in their place, a handful UIDs dog pile one or two posters with ad hominem attacks or the "you-just-don't-like-Microsoft" (appeal to emotion?) attack. Microsoft has a long practice of 'turfing in it's marketing:

• MSFT paid Gartner to publish MSFT material as Gartner's
• fake "grass roots" letter writing
• another fake letter writing campaign
• paid for people to hang out in AOL forums
• paid for people to hang out in ZDNet "talkback" forums
• paid for people to hang out in CompuServe forums
• MSNBC doctored Wall Street Journal material
• Stuffed an on-line ballot box
• planned to plant fake op-ed pieces in local newspapers
• funded favorable think-tank whitepapers
• 'Astroturf' PR campaign exposes Microsoft goals.
• Joseph Menn. "Lobbyists Tied to Microsoft Wrote Citizens' Letters." The Los Angeles Times; Aug 23, 2001; pg. A.1 (print)
• Windows Outstuffs Linux in Poll
• Dead People, Fake Letters, Support Microsoft - Report
• Dead people rise in support of Microsoft
• Microsoft employee's move against AOL backfires
• The Freedom to Innovate Network - an 'Astroturf' Organisation

Also, right now MS is in a panicked marketing blitz. notice all the product placement on the tech sites. The embarassing stuff just disappears from the top page less than a day, but the press releases sit there for weeks.

It makes sense. Most Windows users have both Windows and Office because it's what the OEMs had installed on the machines they bought, nothing more or less. Most of these are either apathetic or know nothin else, so they will not write. Others are pissed off at the low quality, made worse by Microsoft treating security and stability issues as PR issues -- How many times have you heard "computers" crash from BSD, Novell, QNX, Linux, or OS X users? Or is it just the MSCEs? Most remaining clients could go easily over to OS X or one of the Linux distros and the next IT boom would start, like the previous one, without Microsoft.

In short, they need DRM to survive the summer and few, except for MS and RIAA staff

Actually, yes. MSFT has an amazing history of shilling and astroturfing:

• MSFT paid Gartner to publish MSFT material as Gartner's
• fake "grass roots" letter writing
• another fake letter writing campaign
• paid for people to hang out in AOL forums
• paid for people to hang out in ZDNet "talkback" forums
• paid for people to hang out in CompuServe forums
• MSNBC doctored Wall Street Journal material
• Stuffed an on-line ballot box
• planned to plant fake op-ed pieces in local newspapers
• funded favorable think-tank whitepapers

I'm sure there's more, that's just all I can scrounge up in a few minutes. I seem to remember another MSFT-funded think-tank ("Indepence Institute"?) white paper, and there was an interesting "Brill's Content" article on how MSFT tracks reporters and what they write about MSFT. Actually, isn't the above enough? 10 items from 9 different sources about all varieties of shilling and astroturfing in forums from small to nation-wide. Yes, I think it's prudent to believe that MSFT employees watch Slashdot and mod-up pro-MSFT articles, or even submit them.

I'd go so far as to say that the average person should be suspicious of any pro-MSFT article or viewpoint posted in a public forum. If you, the reader, are pro-MSFT, I'm sorry: if you lie down with pigs, you can't expect to wake up in the morning smelling like roses.

Here is a live video feed. 56K, 100K, and 300K Real Video.

Stop trivializing the problem, Shill-boy. Of course I expect MSFT to have people use the APIs. MSFT programmers have to use them to do things like write the POSIX subsystem, write the login system.

Of course, if what you shill I mean say is true, then MSFT is keeping the native API under wraps because it's so crappy. That's not true, of course: there's some things you can do in the native API that you can't do in Win32. You can't clone a processes address space in Win32, so you can't emulate the Unix fork() system call in Win32. The POSIX subsystem does emulate fork(), so MSFT does use the native API.

But go on, tell me how to emulate fork() using Win32 calls. Tell me how to do things like write my own login service. Tell me how to cancel an outstanding asynchronous I/O request in Win32. Tell me how to do disk defragmentation using Win32 calls. Tell me how to write an IFS using Win32: I want to put my Solaris UFS disks on my W2K box so I can get rid of this expensive Sun hardware.

Really, you should read the URLs I put in my article. You don't have to believe me, you can believe Open Systems Resources, you can believe Mark Rossinovich. Read the references I put in my last article before shilling further, and please, back away from the crack pipe.

Here is an actual television news station's report of the Code Red II Worm. Apparently nobody told them that the Internet has no borders.

The music companies have just announced a joint venture to distribute tunes online. Doubt this hearing will result in much more than a hearing. Once the legal scribbling starts up on any type of "forced licensing" this sort of joint venture rules out the notion that the music companies are just being lazy.

From someone who was raised Adventist, lives in Indiana, and is currently a hopeless Counterstrike addict :) this article definitely caught my eye. Ashcroft isn't an Adventist. He's an Assemblies of God member

The Minnesota Wireless Foundation is joining a statewide effort to collect used cellular telephones for the victims of domestic violence. The wireless service providers hope to collect 2,000 used cell phones by the end of the year. The phones will be donated to "Call to Protect," and reprogrammed to dial local emergency services and domestic-violence hot lines using airtime donated by the Cellular Telecommunications Industry Association. The phones collected this year will be activated by early 2001 and distributed to violence-prevention organizations. Collection boxes have been placed in more than 30 retail stores around the metro area to collect the phones.

Think about it, one minute you're emailing one of your buds to tell them they better patch the server, here's a link to SecurityFocus. Next minute, they're cutting a hole in your ceiling and SWAT enters your pad via a portable fire pole.

I suppose the end result will be that .jp will become the cyberspace eqivalent of Mc Donalds Playland for the script kiddiez.

Check out the article below (from 2/17/2000). Although it involves a case related to criminal activities, the charges imply that *anybody* simply in possession of L0phtcrack is committing a felony.

This is important because L0phtcrack, if you are not familiar with the software program, is widely used (legitimately!) by Network and Security Administrators, and Security Consultants for Network and System Security Audits.

Logical extrapolation of the charges mentioned in the article implies that Microsoft is guilty of a number of felonies, and conspiracy to commit numerous additional felonies, in Minnesota, because they manufacture the NT Resource Kit, a favorite "criminal hacker tool". In fact, anybody in possession of the popular Unix "Crack" program, in the state of Minnesota, is surely also guilty.

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http://www.channe l4000.com/news/stories/news-20000217-164727.html

According to this article (and a Hopkins Minnesota police department), it is a felony to posess l0phtcrack. Two people were charged with
"...two counts of possession of burglary or theft tools (specifically, a software program for extracting user IDs and passwords from a computer
system). "

Later, the articles explains that these two people '...accessed the VP Projects computer system and installed a software program called LOphtCrack, which is designed to extract user IDs and passwords. "

According to the article, its also a felony to attempt to gain access using it as well as another felony when you actually gain access.
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