Big Brother Lifetime Award Goes To Microsoft

D4C5CE writes "Microsoft's ceaseless "success" in bringing instability, insecurity and breaches of privacy as well as a deplorable lack of open standards to almost Every Desktop on Earth has now earned them an "Oscar" for Data Leeches, the Lifetime Award for "outstanding mis-achievement" from the BigBrotherAwards 2002 in Germany. Microsoft's Data Protection Officer actually attended the ceremony to collect the prize (probably delighted that unlike the "laureates" of last year's event in Austria, at least he would not receive live cockroaches), and this unlucky winner took the opportunity to make some critical remarks on the company's communications regarding the Windows Media Player and Digital Restrictions (or, euphemistically, in his words: Rights) Management technologies which he deemed crucial for modern business models, rather than acknowledging that it's in fact not just the advertising but the approach itself which is fundamentally flawed."

Comments

Another troll article!

[NineNine]

I love it... another article that's a troll: "instability". By checking out the links, it doesn't look like they have anything at all to do with stability. On top of that, anyone's who's been awake in the past 2-3 years knows that W2K is incredibly stable.

Bad articles are one things, but blatant trolls are another. Who keeps approving these things?

Re:Another troll article!

[LordHunter317]

That's why I have to reboot my Win2K workstation every week to keep the performance up to an acceptible level, and my linux/BSD workstations are known for having multiple week uptimes and feeling just as fast, if not faster as tiem goes on.

Win2K might be stable, but the stability is like VMS stability -- at the cost of performance, especially over time. The is extra true when you have a memory leak or such other issues (which many windows applications do).

I refuse to use a "stable" environment that slows down unless I have to. And I'm runing nothing but a web browser, Outlook, telnet and a X server most days. Sometimes not even that much. Yet, I have to reboot every week to keep it running fast.

That's not real stability to me. Sorry, no dice.

Re:Another troll article!

[Saint Stephen]

I also kept my Win2k boxes up for weeks, and do the same for XP. It's called "knowing how the thing works". You need to spend as much time tweaking and setting up that Windows box as you do that Linux box.

For instance, you should log out occasionally, kill.exe bad processes, apply the latest patches, stop a lot of crap services enabled by default, and generally know what happens when what happens.

Really, I get a kick out of watching y'all complain about Windows stability, because at least 50% of the complaints are bogus.

Now, to not troll, sometimes you are right: You can't keep a Windows box up indefinitely because some crap patch comes out every couple weeks.

Modern business models?

[Anonymous Coward]

It has always seemed to me that it's the outdated business models that DRM is meant to protect.

Re:Another troll post!

[Jhan]

Windows is getting more stable all the time. However, an improvement from 0.01 acceptable to 0.5 acceptable isn't going to impress anyone, even if it's a 50-fold improvement.

You conveniently chose to ignore the other two points, namely:

• Insecurity. Sure, MS is currently putting lots of money into securing all their products, but the only reason this huge drive was nesescary is that most any MS product is shock-full of security holes!
• Breaches of privacy. MS is all for BoP! Hell, that's their middle name! They do everything they can to screw over their customers any way they can!

That they sent a rep is not unexpected

[infonography]

They did the same thing when slashdot and others tried the Refund trick a few years ago as documented in the fine film 'Revolution OS'. They had a table with free coffee and a banner that read 'Microsoft welcomes the Open Source community' (or some such thing). The Theory is very sound, if you duck an issue you get pissed off people, if you at least greet a attack with some grace it defuses the force of the argument. It's social aikido. You just can't punch out someone who offers you coffee....

Re:DRM is not "fundamentally flawed"

[Jeremi]

DRM may partially solve the pirating problem (until it is cracked, anyway), but only by creating a far worse problem: DRM gives someone else the final say over what your computer allows you to do. "No problem", I hear you say, "I trust Microsoft not to abuse that power". Okay, let's assume for the sake of argument that Microsoft does have your best interests at heart, and wouldn't knowingly abuse your rights. What happens when Microsoft's key generator get hacked, and all of sudden their "security through signed certificates" house of cards falls apart, as every virus and trojan suddenly becomes a "trusted app", allowed full privileges to your machine? What happens when your government decides that DRM is a convenient mechanism for suppressing dissent, and pressures Microsoft to remotely disable any program that isn't government approved?

Yes, Microsoft and other DRM advocates will assure you that they have thought of these things, and they have taken steps to insure they won't happen. But to paraphrase Murphy's Law, if anything can be abused, it will be. In the end it comes down to this: how much is control over your own computer worth to you? Would you give it up just for the chance to pay to watch some movies on line?

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