Microsoft-Antitrust.gov Opens for Public

prostoalex writes "The Attorney General of the State of California has opened up a Web site, dedicated to Microsoft antitrust violations. In 2002 Microsoft received 2 court judgements, one from California and 7 other states, another one from New York and nine other states. If you believe the company has violated the conditions stipulated in either of the statements, visit Microsoft-Antitrust.gov Web site. Notice that the site collects only the complaints related to two final judgements mentioned above."

Comments

Re:Nitpicking

[Anonymous Coward]

The US get's to use TLDs without country extensions for the same reason that the British get to use stamps without the name of their country on them - they invented the system.

Re:Oh the irony.

[gowen]

First, they aren't complaining about anything.

Well, they did. Thats how they got the settlement in the first place. The judgement is linked to from the website -- which is up so users can complaing about non-compliance with the judgement from the original complaint.

Sheesh.

(RIP Johnny Cash)

But they *are* leveraging the server market.

[Compact Dick]

With Office 2003 and its Information Rights Management features, which rely on Windows 2003 Server to act as a secure repository for the authentication information.

Re:But they *are* leveraging the server market.

[Anonymous Coward]

hmmm.. let's give credit where credit is due.

The IRM initiative uses XrML, an emerging standard. NOT a MS standard.

Just because MS is the *first* to engage an open technology does not translate to leveraging. Creating their own methodology and refusing to publish it's specifications IS leveraging.

IMO, antitrust enforcement should be in the hands of consumers, not the government or lawyers. /. is an example of this at work, yet consumer enforcement is a responsibility to be taken seriously. When a company makes strides in a direction commensurate with the complaints of the consumers some acknowledgement is appropriate.

MS "bashing" can be a form of responsible consumer activism, mindless MS bashing is nothing more than academic intellectual masturbation.

Re:On to more relevant things

[Anonymous Coward]

I am being FORCED to pay for a PRODUCT that I NEVER asked for nor implied that I wanted.

You weren't forced to buy shit. You chose to buy a product that it came bundled with. You could easily have said no thanks, I just won't buy. Instead you made the decision to buy it as well. Don't get mad because you are a dumb butt-fuck that doesn't want to take responsibility for your own actions.

Best viewed with Mozilla link

[bluGill]

Start here.

Re:Oh the irony.

[HiThere]

Until I used MSWindows, I thought MS was a decent company. The made the best word processor available for the Apple Mac. And I still think that MSWord 5.2a was the best word processor to exist. It's a high point that hasn't again been reached. This despite the fact that a few useful tools have been created since then (e.g., as-you-type spell checks. I note that others have listed this as an example of useless bloat, but I disagree.).

Since I switched from the Mac to MSWindows, my opinion of MS has nosedived. A lot! When I switched to Linux, it took me 6 months (in the days of Red Hat 5.2) to really start using it. Now it is my primary OS, and I only use MSWind part time at work. (My work machine is configured to dual boot.) And my intention is to migrate entirely to Linux, but this has been difficult, as there are pressures to develop in MSAccess. (Anyone know a good substitute? It's got to do data entry screens and reports...Well, I could kludge the data entry screen with Ruby-GNOME2 [or, perhaps, Glade], but the reports are stickier. The reports are the main reason that I haven't pushed ahead more vigorously, despite the on-coming threat of MSXP.)

Re:Complaint form's final (upload) field...

[HiThere]

That seems rather silly. text and pdf seem quite legitimate choices. text should always be allowed.

And since OOo can export in *.doc format, it doesn't even exclude anyone. It's just silly.

Re:Great

[mobiGeek]

Good ol' wget:

bash> wget -Sv http://www.microsoft-antitrust.gov/
--10:55:54-- http://www.microsoft-antitrust.gov/
=> `index.html'
Resolving www.microsoft-antitrust.gov... done.
Connecting to www.microsoft-antitrust.gov[167.10.5.164]:80... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response...
1 HTTP/1.1 200 OK
2 Server: Microsoft-IIS/5.0
3 Date: Fri, 12 Sep 2003 14:48:59 GMT
4 Connection: keep-alive
5 Connection: Keep-Alive
6 Content-Length: 9968
7 Content-Type: text/html
8 Set-Cookie: ASPSESSIONIDAQQRCBRQ=OHDIKLLDIABEJEPCNJNFEDEI; path=/
9 Cache-control: private

Re:Oh the irony.

[NightSpots]

What's funny is this line:

Fortunately, the CA attorney general understands the case better than the average "MS is bad" slash-drone.

As a California resident, I can assure you that the California attorney general is interested in nothing more than pandering to special interests.

Someone with enough money stepped forward to make this happen. I assume it was someone from either Sun or Oracle.

Issues like the recent 'drivers license for anyone who has a piece of paper with a number on it'* bill show how little the powers-that-be in the state care about the wellbeing of the people.

*: The bill was vetoed twice by the 'governor' because "it lacked safety measures". The bill that was eventually signed, in the last week that the governor facing recall was able to sign bills, had even fewer 'safety measures' than the previous, but was rushed through to pander to minority action groups.

Re:Complaint form's final (upload) field...

[DA-MAN]

But every Windows user does however have WordPad, which can write to Word. You may not be able to read all word files with wordpad, but Microsoft Word should be able to read all wordpad files.

Re:Great

[Malcolm Scott]

Yes... take that with a pinch of salt :)

The reason for that bogus response is that their servers do indeed run IIS 6.0, but they're behind Akamai's distributed server platform. Akamai happen to run Linux.