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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."
that's about right...
can you say troll?
news for trolls, flamebait that matters. this article is nothing more than a well-crafted troll
Get out the tin-foil, it's getting deep around here.
"That's why I have to reboot my Win2K workstation every week to keep the performance up to an acceptible level"
Probably because you run shit-faced programs?
My uptime right now is 112 hours which includes playing MP3s, using my tv tuner, developing some genetic simulators, playing 1942 battlefield and reading my email/browsing the web.
According to taskman I have the same # of ram used now as I did over four days ago.
And unlike the typical *nix box I am not just running a httpd server [I'm running IIS btw...]
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
"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. "
r es s_releases/USBank-release.html
Is this sort of like the reporting that Linux has gone from 1 user to 50 users, representing a 5000% increase in marketshare?
"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! "
Of course the sad fact is... all software is shock-full of security holes. Only Microsoft seems to be receiving criticism for it, and so they are doing something about it.
"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! "
This is where this gets strange. There have been lot's of accusations over the years. Ever since the Win95 beta asked to send information about your system during the registration process. But there's never been any proof that Microsoft has violated any consumer privacy. Rather they seem to do their utmost to insure that they are not collected personal information. Even the Windows XP activation does not require you to register the product with your name/address.
Microsoft is one of the few companies I've ever given my address to that has not turned around and sold it to someone else. One of the advantages of giving slight variations on your address when registering or subscribing.
There's plenty of real examples of companies that violate privacy... Just read the news.
http://www.state.ia.us/government/ag/consumer/p
It just seems a shame to attack a company for trying to do the right thing, while ignoring companies who are flagarant violators. It dilutes your entire argument.
Let me ask you this...which is better:
a)Being able to drive a Lexus
OR...
b)Sex with a mare?