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Mass Mailings for Microsoft by Vancouverite · 2002-03-02 09:52 · Score: 1 · on All MS Settlement Comments Now Online

I was randomly paging through the comments, when I came to this comment (#MTC-00013726):

From: Margaret Flint
To:Microsoft Settlement
Date: 1/17/02 9:59pm
Subject: Microsoft Settlement

Margaret Flint
1756 H. H. Rd.

Fonda, NY 12068
January 17, 2002
Microsoft Settlement
U.S. Department of Justice-Antitrust Division
950 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW
Washington, DC 20530
Dear Microsoft Settlement:
The Microsoft trial squandered taxpayers' dollars, was a nuisance to
consumers, and a serious deterrent to investors in the high-tech industry.
It is high time for this trial, and the wasteful spending accompanying it,
to be over. Consumers will indeed see competition in the marketplace,
rather than the courtroom. And the investors who propel our economy can
finally breathe a sigh of relief.
Upwards of 60% of Americans thought the federal government should not have
broken up Microsoft. If the case is finally over, companies like Microsoft
can get back into the business of innovating and creating better products
for consumers, and not wasting valuable resources on litigation.

Competition means creating better goods and offering superior services to
consumers. With government out of the business of stifling progress and
tying the hands of corporations, consumers - rather than bureaucrats and
judges - will once again pick the winners and losers on Wall Street. With
the reins off the high-tech industry, more entrepreneurs will be
encouraged to create new and competitive products and technologies.

Thank you for this opportunity to share my views.

Sincerely,

Margaret Flint

Continuing, I found this comment, and this, this, this, this, this, and this, all identical except for the names attached. There were even more as I continued to browse.

I wonder how many of the 'positive comments' were these mass mailed identical comments obviously sponsored by the Frontiers of Freedom and the Americans for Tax Reform?

Mass Mailings for Microsoft by Vancouverite · 2002-03-02 09:52 · Score: 1 · on All MS Settlement Comments Now Online

I was randomly paging through the comments, when I came to this comment (#MTC-00013726):

From: Margaret Flint
To:Microsoft Settlement
Date: 1/17/02 9:59pm
Subject: Microsoft Settlement

Margaret Flint
1756 H. H. Rd.

Fonda, NY 12068
January 17, 2002
Microsoft Settlement
U.S. Department of Justice-Antitrust Division
950 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW
Washington, DC 20530
Dear Microsoft Settlement:
The Microsoft trial squandered taxpayers' dollars, was a nuisance to
consumers, and a serious deterrent to investors in the high-tech industry.
It is high time for this trial, and the wasteful spending accompanying it,
to be over. Consumers will indeed see competition in the marketplace,
rather than the courtroom. And the investors who propel our economy can
finally breathe a sigh of relief.
Upwards of 60% of Americans thought the federal government should not have
broken up Microsoft. If the case is finally over, companies like Microsoft
can get back into the business of innovating and creating better products
for consumers, and not wasting valuable resources on litigation.

Competition means creating better goods and offering superior services to
consumers. With government out of the business of stifling progress and
tying the hands of corporations, consumers - rather than bureaucrats and
judges - will once again pick the winners and losers on Wall Street. With
the reins off the high-tech industry, more entrepreneurs will be
encouraged to create new and competitive products and technologies.

Thank you for this opportunity to share my views.

Sincerely,

Margaret Flint

Continuing, I found this comment, and this, this, this, this, this, and this, all identical except for the names attached. There were even more as I continued to browse.

I wonder how many of the 'positive comments' were these mass mailed identical comments obviously sponsored by the Frontiers of Freedom and the Americans for Tax Reform?

Mass Mailings for Microsoft by Vancouverite · 2002-03-02 09:52 · Score: 1 · on All MS Settlement Comments Now Online

I was randomly paging through the comments, when I came to this comment (#MTC-00013726):

From: Margaret Flint
To:Microsoft Settlement
Date: 1/17/02 9:59pm
Subject: Microsoft Settlement

Margaret Flint
1756 H. H. Rd.

Fonda, NY 12068
January 17, 2002
Microsoft Settlement
U.S. Department of Justice-Antitrust Division
950 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW
Washington, DC 20530
Dear Microsoft Settlement:
The Microsoft trial squandered taxpayers' dollars, was a nuisance to
consumers, and a serious deterrent to investors in the high-tech industry.
It is high time for this trial, and the wasteful spending accompanying it,
to be over. Consumers will indeed see competition in the marketplace,
rather than the courtroom. And the investors who propel our economy can
finally breathe a sigh of relief.
Upwards of 60% of Americans thought the federal government should not have
broken up Microsoft. If the case is finally over, companies like Microsoft
can get back into the business of innovating and creating better products
for consumers, and not wasting valuable resources on litigation.

Competition means creating better goods and offering superior services to
consumers. With government out of the business of stifling progress and
tying the hands of corporations, consumers - rather than bureaucrats and
judges - will once again pick the winners and losers on Wall Street. With
the reins off the high-tech industry, more entrepreneurs will be
encouraged to create new and competitive products and technologies.

Thank you for this opportunity to share my views.

Sincerely,

Margaret Flint

Continuing, I found this comment, and this, this, this, this, this, and this, all identical except for the names attached. There were even more as I continued to browse.

I wonder how many of the 'positive comments' were these mass mailed identical comments obviously sponsored by the Frontiers of Freedom and the Americans for Tax Reform?

3115 comments missing from categories? by Boatman · 2002-03-02 09:33 · Score: 1 · on All MS Settlement Comments Now Online

The DOJ page about the public response claims:

"This page provides links to: [...] Classification of comments received into one of these categories: [...]"

My comment isn't listed in any of the categories, so I wrote up a Perl script to see if there were any other inconsistencies. The verdict: 2 comments appear in the categories but not in the master list ( MTC-00031681 and MTC-00030211, both from the second category), and *3115* appear in the master list but not in any categories! That's almost 10% of the messages left uncategorized. Some examples from the first page of output:

Comment MTC-00000004
Comment MTC-00000008
Comment MTC-00000030
Comment MTC-00000035
Comment MTC-00000048
Comment MTC-00000112
Comment MTC-00000120
Comment MTC-00000123
Comment MTC-00000135
Comment MTC-00000139
Comment MTC-00000141
Comment MTC-00000142
Comment MTC-00000145
Comment MTC-00000146

Re:MOD PARENT UP by bshanks · 2002-03-02 09:17 · Score: 2, Informative · on All MS Settlement Comments Now Online

I have no idea about the others, but Red Hat submitted a comment. See the list of "major" comments at http://www.usdoj.gov/atr/cases/ms-major.htm

I read their reply. Well, sort of. by gsbarnes · 2002-03-02 09:13 · Score: 1 · on All MS Settlement Comments Now Online

My comment.

I spent some time yesterday going through the DOJ's reply. I was mostly looking to see if they even attempted to answer my concerns. Not really. It appears that they at least tried to handle the concerns of the 47 'major' commenters, although it's clear their reasoning on many of the points is mostly argument by authority. They appear to believe they will be given a huge amount of deference.

Anyway, the points of mine I didn't see addressed had to do with the ease with which it appears MS can technically exploit the loopholes of the settlement. For example, MS Office is not middleware, but it is ubiquitous, so one can essentially treat it as a backdoor communication conduit without documenting the APIs you use. The example I used: IE sends a message to Office on startup, which relays a message to the OS. If another browser tries to open a URL and the OS hasn't gotten a message from Office, it deliberately kills the browser after a random interval.

Or in another area, I suggest that MS could deliberately disclose cryptographic key information as part of a protocol, then claim the protocol must be kept secret per the clause in the RPFJ.

These are esoteric, I know, but do you think MS wouldn't try things like this if it thought it could?

Re:My comment's not there by cananian · 2002-03-02 08:26 · Score: 2 · on All MS Settlement Comments Now Online

The idiots *printed out* all the emails they received, and then *scanned in the print-outs*. That's how they're able to misspell a name from an email.

That's theory one. But ironically enough, my comment (yes, i finally found it, they misspelled my last name) reads *correctly* on the comment page, even though it is misspelled in the index. Which indicates that they *paid someone to manually type in all the names to generate the index*. Even the names from the emails.

I guess it's hard to change a bureaucracy. And the opinion that resulted is probably not that surprising by an agency so technically inept.

Re:My comment's not there by Lumpish+Scholar · 2002-03-02 08:20 · Score: 2 · on All MS Settlement Comments Now Online

My comment is there, but my name is misspelled (I'd like to know how they got an OCR-type error in what was sent as email).

Mine, too; my last name became "Chiselm" (a new mispelling, and I've seen plenty) in the index. It appears correctly in the text version

Looks as if they printed it, scanned it, and created a PDF file with a program from a company named "Pixel Translations," and (for the index) typed the name by hand.

These are the folks we're expected to believe have sufficient understanding of technical issues to rule correctly on this case? No; these are the folks who settled; it's the judge whose judgement we're relying on now.

Anyway, I'm glad my voice had an opportunity to be heard.

P.S.: My e-mail address does not appear, thank goodness (though that Yahoo! Mail address already gets about twenty spam messages a day).

Re:My comment's not there by Lumpish+Scholar · 2002-03-02 08:20 · Score: 2 · on All MS Settlement Comments Now Online

My comment is there, but my name is misspelled (I'd like to know how they got an OCR-type error in what was sent as email).

Mine, too; my last name became "Chiselm" (a new mispelling, and I've seen plenty) in the index. It appears correctly in the text version

Looks as if they printed it, scanned it, and created a PDF file with a program from a company named "Pixel Translations," and (for the index) typed the name by hand.

These are the folks we're expected to believe have sufficient understanding of technical issues to rule correctly on this case? No; these are the folks who settled; it's the judge whose judgement we're relying on now.

Anyway, I'm glad my voice had an opportunity to be heard.

P.S.: My e-mail address does not appear, thank goodness (though that Yahoo! Mail address already gets about twenty spam messages a day).

Re:A bad way of thinking. by fw3 · 2002-03-02 07:54 · Score: 1 · on Who Is Liable For Software With Security Holes?

lets say I purchased a registered copy of Eudora and implimented it in my company instead of Outlook, and people found a way to exploit it.

Does that change things?

If that happened no I don't think it should change things, with the proviso that as a monopoly MS will be held to a different standard.

However this is demonstrably not the case, at a time when IIS accounted for less than 25% of website servers against apache's 60% IIS represented 65% of defacements to Apache's 25%.

Today many NT/IIS servers have been compromised behind firewalls by virus/worm code vectored by email (Nimda). Microsoft's business model has to include security because even if endusers don't understand the implications, the corporate customers require it (and even MS's most loyal large accounts are not happy about their record at this point).

Judges, politicians and voters are human and MS's treatment in the courts will inevitably in part hinge on people's perceptions. MS's business model from the beginning has prioritized denying options to their customers, rather than providing the best possible product. This is part of why they it has been determined by the District Court's judgment that Microsoft violated 2 of the Sherman Act by employing anticompetitive means to maintain a monopoly in the operating system market

If MS had not acted with such incredible arrogance they probably could have succeeded in finessing this whole case.

And while I expect they are going to wind up with just a slap on the wrist it will be a harder slap than it would have been if they would simply focus on writing solid code in the first place.

If MS would compete on simply the merits of their product there would be no issue here at all. And I don't believe for a minute that they would have taken February for trying to cleanup their security problems if Bill didn't see clearly that their abysmal reputation is affecting the outcome of this case.

And that by the way is a positive outcome imo, I remain skeptical that they will actually succeed in improving quality. (having had my first experience with a serious bug in an MS Fortran compiler in 1983 and having made one of the earliest NT vulnerability reports to CERT in '95 I have little patience with the quality of their products)

Looks bad for Free software.. by fanatic · 2002-03-02 07:18 · Score: 2 · on All MS Settlement Comments Now Online

Doj is definitely taking a minimalist approach. IANAL, so maybe they have legal standing, but it looks really bad.

From Disclosure Of Communications Protocols :

321. Some comments argue that Section III.E should also cover licensing of communications protocols for use with non-Microsoft client operating systems, for example in enabling interoperability between a Microsoft server and a Linux desktop operating system.(315) Interoperability and communications between a Microsoft server and non-Microsoft client platforms, however, was an issue outside the scope of the litigated case. There has been no proof in this case that Microsoft has a monopoly in server operating system products, or that communications difficulties between non-Microsoft platforms and Microsoft servers somehow played a role in the maintenance of Microsoft's desktop monopoly. Thus, the RPFJ properly does not reach questions of interoperability between Microsoft servers and non-Microsoft platforms.

Right. No point stopping them from leveraging their desktop monoply into a server monopoly, huh? I thought that was EXACTLY wht this case was about - leveraging one monopoly into another.

322. Nor is it appropriate for the remedy to focus on competing operating systems vendors, given that the focus of the case was on middleware threats, not direct threats from operating system competitors. The licensing in Section III.E is limited to being "for the sole purpose of interoperating with a Windows Operating System Product" because the purpose is to enable server-based middleware threats to interoperate with Windows Operating System Products. Several commentors argue that the licensing should be unrestricted and not for any particular purpose, but this would not be consistent with the theory of the case and the rationale behind client-server disclosures.(316)

Right. No point letting those Commie Free Software and Open Source people in on the info, even though in many areas they constitue the ONLY remaining competition to Microsoft - because this settlement isn't about punishing or limiting Microsoft. It's about making the case go away by doing as little as possible because the jagoffs running our government don't believe in antitrust law.

Classic maneuver by Republican regimes - if you disagree with a law or regulation that you can't get overturned legitimately, just appoint assholes who will refuse to properly enforce it.

The only explanation is that Fucking DOJ is so far into Micorsoft's pocket that they taste dick everytime they open their mouths.

Re:My comment's not there by javacowboy · 2002-03-02 06:19 · Score: 1 · on All MS Settlement Comments Now Online

My comment's there:

my comment

As if the DOJ cares what the public has to say... by jmorse · 2002-03-02 06:16 · Score: 3, Insightful · on All MS Settlement Comments Now Online

Well, let me start by saying here's mine.

That said, I don't think the current DOJ gives a rat's ass about the public's opinion on the case (duh). Republicans repeatedly criticized Clinton for using public opinion polls...I guess they think that those corporate campaign contributors are much more worthwhile to listen to (DISCLAIMER: I am not a Clinton supporter or apologist, nor do I believe for a second that Clinton wasn't beholden to corporate interests...I'm merely pointing out a hypocrisy). Those $4M USD in campaign contributions will grab the attention of the DOJ over the public interest any day.

Someone with time on his/her hands should index these comments and come up with some statistics: how many of the comments were (a) for or against the settlement, (b) how many were form letters, (c) how many were submitted by corporations vs. individuals. Not that these are terribly meaningful, but they would shed some light on the DOJ's summary comments.

By the way - notice the .htm extension on all these pages. Netcraft says they're running Netscape-Enterprise 4.0 on Solaris, but I wonder if they didn't use Front Page to create these pages...

As if the DOJ cares what the public has to say... by jmorse · 2002-03-02 06:16 · Score: 3, Insightful · on All MS Settlement Comments Now Online

Well, let me start by saying here's mine.

That said, I don't think the current DOJ gives a rat's ass about the public's opinion on the case (duh). Republicans repeatedly criticized Clinton for using public opinion polls...I guess they think that those corporate campaign contributors are much more worthwhile to listen to (DISCLAIMER: I am not a Clinton supporter or apologist, nor do I believe for a second that Clinton wasn't beholden to corporate interests...I'm merely pointing out a hypocrisy). Those $4M USD in campaign contributions will grab the attention of the DOJ over the public interest any day.

Someone with time on his/her hands should index these comments and come up with some statistics: how many of the comments were (a) for or against the settlement, (b) how many were form letters, (c) how many were submitted by corporations vs. individuals. Not that these are terribly meaningful, but they would shed some light on the DOJ's summary comments.

By the way - notice the .htm extension on all these pages. Netcraft says they're running Netscape-Enterprise 4.0 on Solaris, but I wonder if they didn't use Front Page to create these pages...

Spelled my name wrong...grr by Thagg · 2002-03-02 05:07 · Score: 2 · on All MS Settlement Comments Now Online

In my letter my name is spelled correctly as 'Beier' but it is incorrectly spelled in the alphabetical listing as 'Bejer'.

What is odd is that the only previous time that I've seen that mispelling is in the credits to the movie Showgirls. Kinda makes you wonder.

Thad Beier