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I like how you left off the part about him lying to the EU commission about the effect on MySQL during the Oracle buyout of Sun:
    http://www.groklaw.net/articlebasic.php?story=20091204095942328
When the FSF's Eblen Moglen has to side with Oracle against his FUD, clearly something is up.

Florian set up a FUD campaign against IBM in the TurboHercules:
    http://www.groklaw.net/articlebasic.php?story=20100408153953613
Pamela Jones stated "It seems Groklaw will have to open a new category, answering Florian Mueller FUD."

Florian managed to delay and possibly kill the high-profile Munich migration to Linux:
    http://www.zdnet.co.uk/news/application-development/2006/03/29/munich-linux-migration-delayed-by-pr-stunt-39260037/
Then he bragged about it:
    http://www.groklaw.net/articlebasic.php?story=20091021164738392
His attitude seems to be "the end justifies the means".

Of course, I'm sure it's a coincidence that Florian is connected with CCIA, which is a Microsoft-funded proxy:
    http://techrights.org/2010/04/11/florian-mueller-and-erika-mann/

Florian seems to have a lot to write about... well anyone that Microsoft needs to spread some FUD about. It's always quite timely too, where he can start streaming out articles on something he never seemed to care about a short time earlier.

Believe who you want, but I'm with the FSF and Groklaw on this one. In many cases I may not like the companies Florian is attacking (Oracle, for one), but that doesn't mean you can just start making stuff up (FUD about the Sun acquisition).

This wouldn't be a BT first; the Home Hub, their free router, used to rather egregiously violate the GPL. MoonBuggy does appear to be right, though, it'd be an interesting debate to have over whether concealed attribution constitutes attribution.

That's funny. Didn't Amazon.com just announce something similar to this? Granted, Wikipedia doesn't get a cut from that deal, but maybe Jimmy Wales should be talking to Jeff Bezos?

regardless of how awed the media is in the wake of the stuxnet worm, things like this only work once, and only under certain conditions. In any functional nuclear program there exists a very strict information systems security policy to prevent exactly this type of malicious activity from occuring. I also wouldnt be surprised if the "two years" assertion is an overstatement to placate the middle east.

Iran will likely switch from windows controllers for their Siemens PLC's to hardened linux or BSD, taking a page from chinese internet security experts and refusing to trust western code that cannot be independently evaluated. and if we remember the cold war, irans woes feel like washingtons foreign policy from the cold war being flexed all over again

And every year you'll still wonder why Loonix still isn't accepted by anyone except sad pathetic nerds.

.... and corporations, and Google, and Microsoft WTF, etc.

This exists. Greater Manchester Police released an app which gives security updates and stuff. I haven't used it. It's not been without it's critics.

But worrying about texts to 911 ignores the real issue, which is easily available guns and ammo.

Why would a company that blatantly ripped off Cisco's IOS even blink at violating the GPL?

Can you find me an example of a hole in SELinux? Even one? I don't mean a flaw in policy affecting some distros, but an actual flaw in the subsystem?

Yes, I accept your challenge. Here is some light reading for you.

http://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvekey.cgi?keyword=selinux - Obviously not all listed here are flaws in SELinux itself, but there are some.
http://www.zdnet.co.uk/news/security-threats/2009/07/20/linux-exploit-gets-around-security-barrier-39688318/

So, while SELinux might be a good single layer of security (when it works), it certainly isn't impenetrable and should definitely not be viewed as the most important layer of any multi-layered security strategy. It is naive to assume that an OpenBSD system will necessarily be more or less secure without an SELinux equivalent.

Actually, for the last 3 years or so, the data is actually stored on tiny magnetic towers on the platter: http://www.zdnet.co.uk/news/storage/2005/04/04/hitachi-announces-3d-hard-drive-revolution-39193673/

You might want to read about a similar feat performed by the U.S. Government here

I know this is /., but that headline is still rather misleading (RTFA more carefully, perhaps).

Feargal Sharkey is not the UK Music Industry. He was a singer in the 80s and early 90s, who had a top-ten hit in the UK singles chart. He then became a middle-management guy for a record label or two and then in 2008 founded the (cleverly-named) organisation UK Music of which he is the CEO.

UK Music is another lobby group for the UK music companies. Basically, it is 7ish people who managed to get the big initials in the UK music business (BPI, PRS, PPL, BAC&S etc.) to agree to found (and presumably fund) it. From what I've heard/seen, it sends Feargal around the country to give talks and public appearances, but only when there is little risk of him getting any serious opposition (he pulled out of a Cambridge Union debate with Rick Falkvinge etc. at the last minute). Looking at their website, they don't seem to do much else. Also, it is my impression that nobody within the major lobbying groups takes him that seriously either (i.e. within the BPI/MPA). His offer of "a truce" is particularly amusing as he has neither the power, authority or influence to "call off" any of the lobbyists attacks on technology; the DEAct, ACTA (I wonder if he has even heard of it, even the relevant UK minister hadn't heard of it) or any of the restrictive licensing policies in place.

Anyways, on the subject of what he said... the idea of the "music industry being at war with technology" strikes me as rather amusing - something like a child standing on a beach throwing stones into the sea; they take every splash as a victory, but perhaps now the water is flooding into their wellington boots they call for a truce... the water doesn't care. Similarly, technology isn't really fighting music; and certainly the technology industry isn't - if it did, I think the music industry would lose rather quickly (total music industry is worth about $60bn - very rough estimate - compared with Google's $40bn, MS's $90bn, Apple's $50bn etc.). In the UK, the recorded music industry is under £1bn a year out of the £1tr GDP... it really is quite tiny.

Froyo (newest droid version) does have a remote wipe feature. http://www.zdnet.co.uk/news/mobile-devices/2010/05/21/froyo-takes-googles-android-into-the-enterprise-40089007/ Data encryption would be nice and a better lock screen as well. The way it is if you enable the lock screen which requires you to draw a pattern it's only a 3x3 grid instead of the 4x4 that the BB has. The other annoyance is once you've entered your "passcode" you still have to swipe down to "unlock" your screen, why do I need to do that if I just successfully put int he correct "passcode"?

I don't think all your examples are good and I believe there is some mis-attribution in there as well. Let's start with the ones that might support your argument. PulseAudio (Lennart Poettering), DeviceKit (David Zeuthen) and gnome-user-share (Alexander Larsson and Bastien Nocera) were all created by Red Hat employees. I would argue that neither Xorg/X, DeviceKit or PulseAudio are part of GNOME even though it runs on top of them. They are really Linux desktop infrastructure and someone's got to develop that...

Compiz was not developed inside GNOME but parachuted in from outside and sadly stalled. It is close to metacity but it wound up coming with its own set of quirks that exposed new problems in applications.

If you actually look back at the XGL/AIGLX history you will find that it wasn't just Red Hat devs (such as Adam Jackson) who didn't want to adopt it - NVIDIA believed it was the wrong direction as it prevented the hardware exposing certain features. Strangely enough, Ubuntu was probably the first major distro to ship XGL and compiz in a release, much to the chagrin of some in the SUSE community. It is worth noting that KDE didn't adopt compiz as their default window manager either.

Clutter was created by employees of a company called Open Handed which was later bought by Intel. I assume you mentioned this as the GNOME 3 gnome-shell window manager will use this library for compositing purposes.

GNOME Cheese was developed by Daniel G. Siegel when he was a student as part of Google's Summer of Code 2007 project and his mentor was Raphaël Slinckx (who currently appears to work for a company called Whatever SA).

The problem with the parent post is that it pointed to a couple of areas where GNOME has accepted "Red Hat outsiders" in, which weakens its argument. Could the situation be less extreme than it painted if such confusion can occur?

I'm curious, is there a precedent for a third company pressuring Dell to drop Linux, under threat of retaliation?

"We should whack them, we should make sure they understand our value .. I want them to understand that every day they lead with Linux over Windows in Unix migrations they turn our field against them (take the southeast region mail thread as an example). I want them to think very very carefully about when and which forums they decide to push Linux very, very hard. Today, they do not. When they do, you can bet, behavior will evolve"

"HP discontinued its Linux SKUs beginning on November 18th. This is based on joint marketing effort that spans six months to promote low cost Windows SKU's with $30 extra channel incentives that focus on white box resellers"

It'll be interesting watching the MicroAstroturfers try and put a positive spin on the above statements.

http://img96.imageshack.us/img96/1872/dellbeforeafter.png

Hopefully public pressure (e.g. the ideas on the "Your Freedom" Government run website for suggesting laws to scrap: here and here) will cause the Digital Economy Act to be scrapped.

Aside from public pressure, there is also a possible review in the Lords so there are a few chinks of light in the sky.

I reported on this for ZDNet.co.uk and the analyst i interviewed has a bit to say about what exactly is going to stop this from working. Feature, mostly about platform lock-in as the thing this scheme is fighting and the thing that may keep it from success is here: http://www.zdnet.co.uk/news/cloud/2010/07/19/nasa-rackspace-launch-openstack-cloud-interoperability-scheme-40089574/

The system relies on the chip to tell the terminal that a valid PIN was used, rather than the terminal+chip+PIN creating a cryptographic message to the bank so the bank can verify that a valid PIN was used. End result: All you need is a fake chip that always tells the terminal a valid PIN was used.

http://www.zdnet.co.uk/news/security-threats/2010/02/11/chip-and-pin-is-broken-say-researchers-40022674/1/

Russia is just being added to a rather long list of countries in this regard. Playing a little link-hopping tells us that both NATO and 30 countries (including the UK) have made similar deals with Microsoft albeit in refence to older technology. I would assume that all of those entities have similar updates to their agreements.

Ah, so we're down to playing word games.

I would much prefer to look at all of this from a common sense point of view but if others bring up terminology issues, then so be it and let's talk about them in that case.

simply gloss over the fact that the whole pledge was only about a small subset of the tens of thousands of patents that IBM has.

I criticized the useless quantity of patents covered by the pledge on the very day when it was announced, five and a half years ago. Here's one example of many articles that quoted me that day. Later that same year, I wrote a whole article here on /. in which I explained that those pledges are useless.

Yes, I know one or two of the patents listed on the pledge were on the list of 150 or so sent by Mr Anzani. Somehow I doubt that if they were not there it would make the slightest bit of difference in your statements.

Those are two different aspects. The pledged patents are important from an IBM trustworthiness angle. From another angle, they're just a small part of the overall problem. I discussed this in a blog posting: "the pledged patents are important in one way and unimportant in another"

By the way, any comparison to Google in their approach to patents is meaningless anyway. Google is primarily in the advertising business. IBM is mostly in the intellectual property business.

I've seen a whole more innovation from Google over the last 12 years than from IBM during that same period. Patent experts actually consider Microsoft's innovation much more valuable than IBM's patent-everything-under-the-sun-approach, as I mention in this blog posting on IBM's patent portfolio and patent-related practices.

You actually do think is perfectly OK for someone to simply rip-off an investment representing of billions of dollars by investing nothing yourself, and then claim that is 'competition'.

So would you then also have claimed that Samba, the open source software that interacts with Windows Server, is also just a "rip-off" scheme against the billions of dollars Microsoft invested in its R&D? IBM supported that complaint against Microsoft in the EU. I, too, believe that the EU was right to intervene and I would have liked the EU to go even further and also deal with the software patent problem as a whole. I brought the Microsoft antitrust case up just recently in a presentation I made at LinuxTag, Europe's largest Linux and open source trade show and conference.

Lets copy from Groklaw. I'll do this one for PJ, even if she might not want it. Lets skip pleasantries, shall we?

There are legal requirements to disclose who is funding you in the US. As Groklaw has confirmed, there is no funding from IBM.

Did I say she gets funded by IBM? Never. I pointed out she's welcomed every single thing IBM has ever done with respect to patents. She says she's against software patents but when those patents belong to IBM, she says it's fine to use them to sue the pants off an open source company. I didn't say anything about why this is so. I said clearly there can be any number of reasons for that, but whatever the reason is, it prevents her from unbiased reporting on many issues.

So, how about you tell us Florian - Who is funding you? Who pays your bills to lobby?

I did some lobbying in 2004-2006 against software patents and disclosed such backers as MySQL AB, Red Hat (only for a few months), 1&1 Internet AG and Materna GmbH. I don't believe that fighting for such a community cause makes me a traditional lobbyist. I got support from companies and without it I couldn't have pulled off a campaign like that. There was also a lot of support from volunteers, which enabled me to provide some of the content in 17 languages.

The only other lobbying I did since then was on behalf of Real Madrid, the world's leading soccer club. I had bought my first (of many) Real Madrid shirts in 1987 and 20 years later I helped them fend off a political scheme that would ultimately have made their team much less competitive on the field. Real Madrid is a non-profit: no shareholders who receive dividends, it's a club that "belongs" to its members and pursues sporting goals (but obviously needs money to do so).

Concerning my current project, the FOSS Patents blog, I started it three months ago and have since then done (I just checked) 38 postings. It's obvious that this kind of activity doesn't require funding. Concerning the positions I voice there, you can see that they're consistent with the ones I've always had on the same kinds of issues. Back in January 2005, when IBM announced its patent pledge, I criticized it vehemently, and I did so again in an op-ed right here on /. later that year. Five years later, IBM's bullying of TurboHercules proved my original concerns right, it even exceeded what I had thought. Just mentioned this because it should make it clear that my positions on patent matters are not for sale. They've been consistent over so many years that unbiased observers know they can trust me.

Such flaws are why professional developers do not put in random features that can be exploited. Sure it might be fun toi say that our application has a thousand more features than the competition, but to those that are savvy it is just a thousand more way to be put at risk.

First, if it's really open source someone else could have fixed it...

Second, virtually every software company releases software with known bugs... For example, windows 2000 had 63000 known bugs of various severity when released: http://www.zdnet.co.uk/news/it-strategy/2000/02/14/bugfest-win2000-has-63000-defects-2076967/

All software will have bugs, either known or as yet undiscovered... What matters really is that these known bugs are disclosed to users, so the users can decide wether they can live with them or they need them fixed.

It's going to become news when this hits the courts:

in what appears to be a legal fashion by querying a public interface

Since when does the interface being public have anything to do with whether accessing it is legal? The law makes statements about authorized and unauthorized access, not technically possible and technically impossible access. In all hacking crimes the system is happily serving up content exactly as built by the designers, but it's still a crime. In many cases, the system is even working as intended (no buffer overflows and the like) but if unauthorized access is obtained, it's still a crime.

Does anyone else remember this case that was on slashdot some years ago? A computer security consultant was convicted in the UK for typing "/../../" after a URL and hitting enter. Obviously this destroyed his career.

This is the text of the law that convicted him.

a person is guilty of an offence if: he causes a computer to perform any function with intent to secure access to any program or data held in any computer and the access he intends to secure is unauthorised and he knows at the time when he causes the computer to perform the function that that is the case

Close. It wasn't code that was injected, it was proprietary binaries. In other words, closed source kills. Yes, the same general category that gives us billions of lost hours from crappy drivers for good hardware. The same general category that is responsible for providing an incubator for the world's botnets.

That makes what Novell, Black Duck and other branches of Microsoft are doing so profoundly bad when they try to re-label their proprietary binaries 'open source' without releasing the full source. Just releasing some of the source doesn't count, it's as bad as all-binary proprietary. By release, that means read, edit and re-compile. Anything less is just plain dangerous.

You'd think that countries would learn. Or at least the US would learn. As things are, TSA is shaking people down for baby milk instead of doing something useful like nuking each and every NTFS partition on every harddrive that passes through customs. During a transitory period of a year or two, they could take it easy on the scum by just erasing every file ending in .com, .exe, or .dll and handing them a Fedora live CD. Tracking down and locking up the present and former executives of Microsoft and its partners would be another step forward. Off to Gitmo with the lot.

Now: http://www.zdnet.co.uk/news/security-management/2009/07/10/ibms-id-card-contract-to-last-seven-years-39672888/ "IBM will mainly use its own hardware and software to operate and integrate the NBIS database, and is the prime contractor"

Then: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_during_World_War_II

At least IBM never helped the Stasi manage their registration database.

Yes, what about it?

Wow, talk about needing a "-1, factually incorrect" moderation option. Check out http://mrgan.tumblr.com/post/257187093/pie-guy if you have an iPhone or iPod touch (not sure about iPad, and if you're on a desktop, at least you can watch a video of it). I'm only posting this one example because I see there are already other replies with additional examples.

Also, check this out: http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flashplayer/articles/mobile_demos_fp10.1/popup18.html It's a Flash game being played on a touch device. But look how simple it is! It's just a very basic tower defense game that can be played with just taps. No fast and accurate mousing or keyboarding needed. Even if Flash were working 100% on mobile devices, most current games wouldn't work ANYWAY!

I know this thread is about HTML5 versus Flash, not WIMP versus touch UIs, but it's related because this is where the world is going. Once upon a time there were relatively few computers--mainframes and such--and when they went to desktops, the number of computers in use grew by several orders of magnitude. Now everyone in the world who wants a desktop or laptop has one, and we're moving away from general-purpose computers to more limited computer-based devices and the number of users will again grow greatly. You say "Show me an even remotely decent HTML5-based game on par with a remotely decent Flash-based game" and I'll say "Show me a 'remotely decent Flash-based game' that's playable on a touchscreen device in the first place."

Speaking of mobile devices... Smartbooks have failed to materialise due to delays in Flash optimisation [emphasis mine], a lower-than-expected uptake of Linux on netbooks, and the sudden emergence of tablets, ARM's marketing chief has said.

"I think one reason is to do with software maturity. We've seen things like Adobe slip -- we'd originally scheduled for something like 2009." ARM and Adobe signed a partnership in late 2008 that was intended to see Flash Player 10 and Air -- both rich web platforms -- optimised for ARM-based systems. That work is only likely to come to fruition in the second half of this year, when an optimised version of Flash comes out for Android smartphones.

The second is a result of the USB Consortium.

Bzzt, wrong, but thanks for playing. I saw my first USB port on a Compaq Presario 3020 in summer/fall 1996. (I know because that Presario was an unusual model, and we had one at a place where I worked in mid-late 1996 only.) Over the course of the next two years, I saw approximately zero USB devices in stores. Then the iMac shipped in late 1998 and suddenly USB devices were everywhere--printers, scanners, etc. (Many of them translucent greenish-blue.) By shipping a popular computer with USB only, manufacturers were forced to move forward if they wanted to sell peripherals to the millions of people who bought this new, popular computer. The USB consortium did very little to push their standard. A bold move like what Apple did was required to get lazy companies to retool. Think about it: if every computer has USB and Parallel ports, is there any reason for Epson to spend the money to start making USB printers in addition to Parallel ones? No. But if USB is the only way to sell printers to the two million people who bought iMacs in the first twelve months then yeah, they'll retool.

In short: Invented? No. Almost single-handedly popularized? Yes.

they can estimate your position for Google Maps on a mobile device, even if you have no GPS on that device. This has been public knowledge for at least a year now.

2+ years. It's a great application, with no more privacy implications than if you were to call someone with local knowledge and describe the landmarks that you could see near you.

Nobody, least of all Google, cares who owns "BT Home Connect 9923123" or "Pr0n4Free4EvarLan", they just care that there's a SSID in that area with that name.

Cue objections from Tin Foil Hatters who don't want The Man to be able to describe the outside of their parent's basement, lest their very souuuuls be stolen and sold to, god, I don't know, the Saucer People.

Fill me in, Hatters. To what Evil use could this information be put? Try to use reasons that might actually be valid on Planet Earth, if you please.

We're taking advice from a company that gives its product away, and (despite amusing claims to the contrary) is still living on the proceeds of a huge IPO that was based on... giving its product away.

Personally I'd rather ask someone who's in the browser business, not an imminent footnote.

There's no need for a chip on the card; simply have banks do PIN verification remotely, and lock (and mark) the card after a few attempts. Use public key cryptography to both identify valid PIN pads and encrypt data (i.e. the PIN and transaction details) so only the bank can read it.

This avoids any possible crack on the chip itself, which has already been cracked at least once, and cracking the bank's remote systems is probably harder than simply breaking into a branch.

The real reason banks are pushing chip-and-PIN is because they all have a little clause in their contracts that states that if a PIN is entered, the transaction is valid if the card hasn't already been reported as stolen. It's a liability shift that they hope will fly under the radar, since, for them, it means losing less money refunding stolen funds, and making more money from the overdraft fees that result. This could be changed with regulation, but who's counting on that?

Liberal Democrat MP John Hemming pointed out in the Commons debate that the website-blocking law could be used to stop UK citizens from being able to view freedom-of-information sites such as Wikileaks. He raised the example of the US Air Force video published by Wikileaks on the weekend, which appeared to show the US military killing unarmed Iraqi civilians.

"Copyright exists with the US government, who under the bill could -- and would want to -- apply to ban Wikileaks from the UK," Hemming said. "That provision is clearly in the bill." He also noted that websites reporting on freedom of information requests could be banned, as the answers extracted from local authorities through such requests are usually copyrighted.

The website-blocking regulations will have to be approved by both Houses of Parliament before they can be enforced -- a measure known as the 'super-affirmative procedure'.
from http://www.zdnet.co.uk/news/regulation/2010/04/08/mps-pass-digital-economy-bill-with-few-changes-40088563/
-----------
So basically they will compile a list of sites that they deem not in the public interest and block them in the same fashion as they did this bill, in an underhanded manner whether the public like it or not. See the image linked in RadioElectrics post above http://news.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1611746&cid=31775082
-----------

Jim Killock, chief of the Open Rights Group, said the passing of the bill showed that politicians were out of touch. "This is an utter disgrace. This is an attack on everyone's right to communicate, work and gain an education," said Killock in a statement.

This raises a question I've been wondering about for a while, which is whether it would make sense to make a 64-bit ARM?

I don't know whether it made sense, but it was already done in 2001.

http://www.zdnet.co.uk/news/processors/2001/10/16/arm-to-unveil-64-bit-jaguar-chip-for-handhelds-2097352/

well, of course I meant the Government. If the 16-yo kid down the street can do it, I bet your Government can -- unless you live in England, but apparently they're working on it.

Maybe if they do better than chip-and-PIN, which is fundamentally broken.

In the UK, someone managed to get £270 + £30 costs from a spammer through the small claims court. Costs go up inline with the claim; £270 kept the costs under £30. This is from 2005; I believe the figure is £450 + £50 these days.

http://www.zdnet.co.uk/news/it-strategy/2005/12/28/court-victory-in-the-fight-against-spam-39244402/

That's not far off your $1,000.

I think it a good figure. It's high enough to shock someone without making them bankrupt.

I love throwing out the £450 figure when spammers originate from my home town (bless you Gmail and your search Gods). The threat of knocking on their door to collect makes me feel warm inside.

Historically, Microsoft licensed the Unix code from AT&T in 1980 to make its own version of Unix: Xenix. At the time, the plan was that Xenix would be Microsoft’s 16-bit operating system. Microsoft quickly found they couldn’t do it on their own, and so started work with what was then a small Unix porting company, SCO. By 1983, SCO XENIX System V had arrived for 8086 and 8088 chips and both companies were marketing it.
It didn’t take long though for Microsoft to decide that Xenix wasn’t for them. In 1984, the combination of AT&T licensing fees and the rise of MS-DOS, made Microsoft decide to start moving out of the Unix business.

So why did MS suddenly decide they needed to buy $ 10M worth of old Unix licenses in 2003?
BTW, Novell claims they're entitled to 95% of those licenses SCO sold, in their 2005: breach of contract counterclaim. We'll soon see how this all plays out because the SCO-Novell case is finally in court now (the part that's still going on, whether Novell has or hasn't sold the Unix copyrights to SCO, is moving forward because SCO is sueing Novell with Novell's own money :-) ). If it turns out Novell owns the copyrights, all other SCO court cases should quickly collapse, which *might* in turn get people to understand that this whole SCOsource anti-Linux FUD was in fact a scam to scare potential customers away--but I digress.. sorry..
2004: Baystar connection (warning: by Enderle), and here in 2006 new info
I quote:

Buried in IBM's recent motion for summary judgment against SCO is a Declaration from BayStar general partner Larry Goldfarb. Near the beginning of the long-running legal soap opera, BayStar invested $50 million in SCO. In exchange for their investment, BayStar received 20,000 shares of preferred stock in SCO.
In his declaration, Goldfarb testifies that former Microsoft senior VP for corporate development and strategy Richard Emerson discussed "a variety of investment structures wherein Microsoft would 'backstop,' or guarantee in some way, BayStar's investment." Goldfarb then said that after BayStar committed the $50 million to SCO's cause, Microsoft "stopped returning my phone calls and e-mails, and to the best of my knowledge, Mr. Emerson was fired from Microsoft."

> Did your tinfoil hat tell you some reason why I shouldn't trust them?

If my tinfoil hat talked to me, I don't think it would be doing its job correctly. ;)

Why shouldn't I trust Microsoft? Oh I dunno...

- Antitrust lawsuits: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft
- IIS Backdoors: http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/05/14/1858201
- OOXML bribery: http://www.wired.com/software/coolapps/news/2007/08/ooxml_vote
- Naked PC Campaign: http://news.zdnet.co.uk/software/0,1000000121,39261437,00.htm
- Vendor lock-in: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vendor_lock-in#Microsoft
- "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend_and_extinguish

Those are just the ones on the top of my head. Actually, there's a wikipedia page just on criticism of Microsoft, with other resources/references, here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Microsoft

Want more? I got plenty more.

Tell that to the ones who stole the software for the gas pipelines - (http://news.zdnet.co.uk/software/0,1000000121,39147917,00.htm)

A 3% marketshare for Bing is hardly anything to get excited about. Bing is seriously terrible compared to Google. Try any other language than english and you're fucked.

Also, Microsoft is terrible at privacy compared to Google. You may be too young to remember Google fighting off a subpoena to hand over user information, while Yahoo and Microsoft caved:

http://news.zdnet.co.uk/security/0,1000000189,39248192,00.htm
http://www.eff.org/press/archives/2006/01/19

Also, where was microsoft when Google was making a stand in China? Yup, nowhere...

Lastly, you mention that microsoft is deleting user data within 6 months as if it's a policy used today. If you read their own announcement, what they're saying is that they'll remove IP addresses from queries after 6 months and remaining cross-session IDs after 18 months. But they plan to implement this policy a year to a year and a half from now!

http://microsoftontheissues.com/cs/blogs/mscorp/archive/2010/01/19/microsoft-advances-search-privacy-with-bing.aspx

...someone they can scare with random stuff that never really happens...

• Yes, I suppose that
• you must be entirely
• right, despite the
• easily Googled evidence
• to the contrary.
• Of course, Googling is a rare skill, and one can't
• expect everyone to grasp it.

That, by the way, was a hit directly on your head with the clue-bat. :)

Despite expanding the acronym once, and linking to the organisation, the article manages to spell it incorrectly 3 times out of 4.

It's CSIRO, you numbnuts!

Also, IIRC, the CSIRO patents referred to pre-date any work on 802.11n, and their reluctance to release the patents for use by the WiFi consortium was due to the fact that they were still involved in outstanding suits and countersuits with IBM, Dell, HP, Microsoft, Netgear, Buffalo, etc. When all that was cleared up / dropped, CSIRO agreed to sign off on the LoA.

Short timeline here, at the bottom of the page.

There's also Maemo . . .

I believe that's included under the heading of "Linux/Other," along with Palm WebOS.

. . . and WinMo accounts for more then 15% of the mobile market

Care to back that up? No respectable figure I've seen puts it that high, and Gartner's latest figures suggest it's about half that. (And if you can't trust Gartner to inflate figures in Microsoft's favor, whom can you trust?)

How about curiosity?

There were lots of people who received email with attached encrypted zipfiles containing malware ( http://news.zdnet.co.uk/security/0,1000000189,39147909,00.htm ), and would enter the included passwords to access and run them. Some even feel a sort of compulsion to do it.

Then there's the case of "Traci Lords". She was a porn star who lied about her age and appeared in porn films and even Penthouse magazine when she was 15. So guess how many people might possess child porn unknowingly? Apparently those pictures and films are considered child porn by US laws.

Also think before you google for "Traci Lords" or similar stuff. Nowadays it is common for Google to automatically include pics as part of search results. I wonder how accurate the filters are at excluding stuff that is legally considered child porn in jurisdictions that you might wander into one day.

Do you feel lucky?

"Virgin Media executive director of broadband, Jon James, told ZDNet UK on Thursday that the trial will go live "within days". He added that the use of such traffic-monitoring technology was part of its distribution deal with media company Universal." http://news.zdnet.co.uk/security/0,1000000189,39906062,00.htm

Microsoft didn't invent that: it was invented by Goldtouch Technologies, from whom Microsoft simply ripped off the design which Goldtouch had shown them under a non-disclosure agreement to get Microsoft to license the mouse design. I actually used to have one of the old Goldtouch mice: the design was very similar. Check out http://news.zdnet.co.uk/hardware/0,1000000091,2070243,00.htm to see my point.

Yeah, I'm gonna say this is a non-story.

Well, let's look at the bill itself that was published today: http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/ld200910/ldbills/001/10001.13-19.html#j164

Yeah, I'm gonna say BoingBoing were right.

Also see http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/technology/2009/11/the_digital_economy_bill.html , http://news.zdnet.co.uk/communications/0,1000000085,39893271,00.htm .

Actually you'll find that most security flaws are treated like this, in order to give the vendor time to patch. It's part of the whole responsible disclosure credo. As an indication of how seriously MS take this they facilitated the disclosure of Kaminsky's DNS cache poisoning discovery. he was contracting there at the time. MS called all the major vendors, and hosted meetings in Redmond to kick the whole response off. He talked about it at Bluehat on 2008. Heck even Bluehat itself demonstrates something. They had speakers from Adobe and other "rivals" this year, and after about a month they put the session videos up and available to all for free.

Possibly; however, if it ever came down to an all-out litigious patent war, AMD may well have come out on top thanks to holding the rights to the x86-64 instruction set.

Actually no. Intel sued AMD for patent infringement and the case was settled back in 1995. The end result of that was patent cross licensing but the agreement was asymmetric. AMD have to pay Intel a license fee for all the Intel patents they use but Intel does not have to pay AMD.

http://news.zdnet.co.uk/hardware/0,1000000091,39146227,00.htm

Because of the details of a lengthy 1995 legal settlement between Intel and AMD, Intel can in all probability create and sell chips that are completely compatible with AMD's Opteron and Athlon 64 chips, which can run both 32- and 64-bit software, according to the companies and legal experts. Intel won't even have to pay AMD royalties if it incorporates ideas from any AMD patents into its chips.

"My understanding, based on the licensing agreement, is that Intel has access to AMD's patents so patent protection should not be a problem," said Richard Belgard, a noted patent consultant.

Intel may have to rename some of the instructions, or commands, embedded in any chip that is similar to Opteron, but "the code can be 100 percent compatible," Belgard added.

Though Intel spokesman Chuck Mulloy declined to comment on whether or not Intel is working on a 32/64 bit chip, he concurred with Belgard.

"There are no legal barriers" that would prevent Intel from coming out with a chip that is similar and compatible with Opteron, he said. "There are no pitfalls either way."

An AMD representative stated: "I believe that is the case," but added that it would all depend on the circumstances.

Here's the key point

Under the terms of the settlement, both companies gained free access to each other's patents in a cross-licensing agreement. AMD agreed to pay Intel royalties for making chips based on the x86 architecture, said Mulloy, who worked for AMD when the settlement was drafted. Royalties, he added, only go one way. AMD does get to collect royalties from Intel for any patents Intel might adopt.

AMD also agreed not to make any clones of Intel chips, but nothing bars Intel from doing a clone of an AMD chip, Mulloy added.

While the terms may seem one-sided, AMD has benefited from the agreement as well. Without the clean and enforceable right to make x86 chips granted by the agreement, AMD would not have been able to produce the K6, K6 II, K6III, Athlon, Duron, Athlon 64 or Opteron chips without fear of incurring a lawsuit.

So Intel already have a right to use x86-64 license free.

That was tried in the UK with ADSL providers advertising "unlimited" broadband. They got around it by reclassifying exactly what is unlimited - it is now "unlimited access" so at any time 24/7/365.25 you can have access, but it isn't unlimited bandwidth.

Not so - the ASA don't care as long as you can demonstrate that the vast majority of your subscribers aren't impacted by the cap and that you mention clearly that a fair use policy applies. See here, here, here, and especially here. Extract from ASA ruling:

The ASA noted all the ads made clear that a fair-use policy applied to the service and the level at which the allowance was set. We noted the information provided by Vodafone demonstrated that only a very small proportion of their customers had exceeded the fair-use policy limited and that action was likely to be a request to moderate their usage in the first instance. We acknowledged that the vast majority of customers used only a small amount of the available allowance and concluded that the existence of a fair-use policy did not contradict the claim "unlimited mobile internet".

Sue all you like - they'll find a loop-hole somewhere and the only people to really gain will be the lawyers.

Agreed - they're all bastards