Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft Fakes Citizen Letters of Support
An Anonymous Coward writes: "According to this Seattle Times article, Microsoft is sending letters to Utah's Attorney General in support of the company, but with fake signatures of citizens (some of whom are dead!). The article says: "Letters sent in the last month are on personalized stationery using different wording, color and typefaces, details that distinguish Microsoft's efforts from lobbying tactics that go on in politics every day. State law-enforcement officials became suspicious after noticing that the same sentences appear in the letters and that some return addresses appeared invalid."" The original source appears to be this story in the LA Times today. We here at Slashdot would like to take the time to say that strong competition and innovation have been the twin hallmarks of the technology industry, and if the future is going to be as successful as the recent past, the technology sector must remain free from excess regulation.
Asuming the answer is "no it's not a crime" the next questions I wonder are - can it be (given the First Amendment), and should it be (seeing that it's essentially political fraud)?
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
Is there a mail fraud case in this?
http://windows.scares.us
The part that just kills me is this
The maker of Windows and other software also has stepped up campaign donations, becoming the fifth-largest soft-money donor to the national Republican and Democratic parties in 1999-2000, and it has hired a slew of well-connected lobbying firms.
These letters contained this information.This is all out bribery at this point...and not even close to subtle.
The first intelligent phrase ever spoken occurred today
" We here at Slashdot would like to take the time to say that strong competition and innovation have been the twin hallmarks of the technology industry, and if the future is going to be as successful as the recent past, the technology sector must remain free from excess regulation."
While I'm reasonably sure this was irony as originally posted, but as this AC notes, there are a lot of people who believe--like Sunday morning Gospel singers--that competition and innovation have actually occured, and this has been a Good Thing.
Now, I'm not blind to the appearance of some major conveniences that have been showered onto rich Westerners, but where is the innovation when it comes to feeding people and protecting the environment? Really, all the tech that AC and people like him fetishize has been handed down from the State-Military Nexus as second-rate gear fit for the consumer masses that paid for the original research that created the tech to start with. I'd hardly call that innovation, and you certainly can't say that Raytheon and Lockheed *compete* for the government contracts that float their boats (unless you call the bidding graft sessions "competition".) In this context, "regulation" has no meaning: who watches the Watchmen?
Comfort and longevity do not equate to happiness and wisdom, even if those wonderful gifts are showered only on those rich enough to afford them.
"The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws."--Tacitus, The Histories
> I honestly am hard pressed to believe the people at
> the top could be 'this' stupid.
I'm not so sure it's stupidity so much as an astonishing amount of hubris. For example, shortly after Judge Jackson's remedy was thrown out, Mr. Gates himself held a news conference in which he explicitly said that the event was proof that Microsoft did not illegally tie its browser to it OS. Since several courts since then have not overturned the conviction (only the punishment), this statement was either an horrific mistake on his part, or a bald-faced lie. In either case, with this episode (and the falsified benchmark video) in mind, it does not strike me as out of character for the top brass at Microsoft to try something like this.
Virg
> Nothing new here, par for the MS course.
Wait, I think there is something new here.
Using the US Mail to commit fraud! That's a whole
new ballgame, and probably a lot easier to try and
convict than antitrust accusations have been.
They only need one count, and executives get locked up for decades in small rooms with large
men deciding what tv channel to watch.
You really don't want to do the whole mail fraud thing, even if you are a multitrillion dollar company.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.