Author of Paper Critical of Microsoft is Fired

chongo writes "Daniel E. Geer Jr., one of the primary authors of a report Reliance On MS A Danger To National Security, was fired from @stake Thursday morning. @stake said that 'The values an opinions of the report are not in line with @stake's views' and that Geer's participation was 'not sanctioned.' Microsoft, who has worked closely with @stake in the past, denied that it was involved in @stake's decision to fire Dan." There might not be anything fishy going on at all, but that's no reason to stop making perfectly good conspiracy theories.

Comments

Re:Hey!

[captainktainer]

That's great, I'm pleased for you- but I've found WinXP telnet almost impossible to get through a firewall with. Especially when one is trying to connect to an SMTP server to find out what the heck is wrong.

On the flip side, it also presents a security nightmare for school networks. If sysadmins don't know about it- and at two high schools and an undergrad college, apparently they haven't, in any version of Windows- script kiddies and bored teens can wreak havoc with the systems, or eat up unmonitored bandwidth transferring files to CDs.

Personally, I'm a little bit split on its inclusion in WinXP- on the one hand, it's a useful, basic tool that works for most uses that don't involve firewalls, and is a nice tool for a home user. On the other hand, it's yet one more open, unsecured route through which a crafty worm writer could access yet-uninfected machines, or through which malicious children could wreak havoc for poorly informed admins.

It's things like these- the little "features" that could have been left out- that were part of the reason David Geer wrote his article, and thus doomed him to be axed by the Microsoft-worshippers at his company. He was probably stupid to write about it on company time knowing the biases of the company, but he was dead on.