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Missed Opportunities in U.S. v. Microsoft
Chin is currently an associate professor teaching antitrust and intellectual property law at the University of North Carolina. According to his faculty biography, Chin also earned a doctorate in computer science in 1991 as a Rhodes scholar at the University of Oxford. After a few years of teaching math and CS, he picked up a J.D. at Yale Law School, and eventually ended up working behind the scenes on the Microsoft case.
Chin's article raises some new points about the Microsoft case that don't seem to have been considered by any of the parties, courts or commentators during the trial, such as the fact that the Windows and Internet Explorer software products actually consist of legal rights and technological capabilities, not lines of code. A longer piece by Chin is being published in the Harvard Journal of Law and Technology."
I didn't finsih reading the article but since Bush dropping the "tie-in" charges, MS must have made large donations that year.
Sure a secure Microsoft product is what the consumer wants but so is profit margin and familiarity. Sometimes inferior products dominate the market for no good reason whatsoever, remember the Chrysler K car?
...another reason to remove the Bush administration from office: it's inability to push for open markets when it would hurt existing market stranglers like Microsoft. Republicans like to talk about free markets, but as soon as it takes away their power, they cringe in fear.
+1 Insightful, -1 Troll. What can I say, I'm an Insightful Troll.
"Internet Explorer will continue its chokehold on the World Wide Web. " Only if a better alternative is not adopted as the 'browser of choice' by the WWW community. Go FireFox!
It slowed down Microsoft's monopoly engine long enough for Linux to rise, Apple to recover and release a very successful new OS and for groups like Mozilla to start fighting against Microsoft. Does anyone really want the court to hand a "victory" to those of us not fond of Microsoft? Does anyone think that Netscape or Sun or any of the other plaintiffs were really good, noble, altruistic companies that didn't salivate at the thought of filling in the vacuum left by a devastated Microsoft?
The way I see it, the case was good for another reason as well. It forced debate on both sides of the political spectrum, especially the right. Many conservatives were floored when Robert Bork, a well-respected conservative legal authority, agreed with Ralph Nader on Microsoft's trial. It helped bring new ideas and attitudes into respectability on the right, and it allowed left-leaning libertarians to point to a good example of how unfettered corporate power is still a real danger.
I would go so far as to say that the case did its job just fine, and coupled with Microsoft's recent security problems, a door is opening for free market enterprise once more. I will go so far as to say that there are a lot more Firefox users out there than we'd have previously guessed. I read comments all the time on sites like FreeRepublic which aren't known for their technical insight saying how Firefox kicks ass. In fact, of the dozens or so on threads about Firefox, most are overwhelmingly "I can't believe I ever used IE now that I have Firefox."
Microsoft, like Rome, didn't build their Empire in a day, and thus we won't dismantle it in a day. It'll take several more years of whittling away at them on multiple fronts. We just have to learn from history and be more civilized and cooperative if we win, than the barbarians were when they took down the Roman Empire.
Click here or a puppy gets stomped!
Either Mr. Chin is living in a cave, or he wrote this piece some time ago. With Firefox numbers skyrocketing and even CERT suggesting that running IE is inviting virus infections, his statement, "Internet Explorer will continue its chokehold on the World Wide Web" seems quite out of touch with present reality.
About the word "if": If bullfrogs had wings, they wouldn't bounce around on their little green butts.
Any company that purposefully builds a Web browser (IE) into an OS (Windows) as deeply as possible and as quickly as possible in an attempt to win a court case is asking for trouble. Any software engineer with an IQ above 70 knows that this is a bad idea. The sad part about this is that people who use Windows/IE/Outlook pay the price. How many IE vulnerabilities are in the wild? Hundreds.
In short, MS tossed sound engineeing principles out the window and placed legal and marketing concerns ahead of everything else. They deserver the shitty security reputation they have. They built it themselves... purposefully to win a court case (period).
This is not flamebait.
"A witty saying proves nothing." ~Voltaire
"d'Oh!" ~Homer
Who'd have thought an editorial would be biased?
p -7930186c.html
http://www.newsobserver.com/opinion/story/1686331
"Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge"
- Charles Darwin
Just like the assault weapons ban and stem cell research funding. Soon you'll see things quietly expiring all over the place... the Bill of Rights, the US Constitution, and the political opponents of the 'quiet expiration' domestic policy.
The D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals agreed, describing Windows and Internet Explorer as "physically and technologically integrated" through this sharing of code.
Just a side note: Safari is integrated into Mac OS X (share some GUI code with the rest of the OS and probably some HTMl rendering with Mail.app) and if a user decides that he doesn't want it installed all he has to do is delete it - why can't Microsoft make this work?
However the real question is not why can't one remove IE, but why can't there be a level playing field? Why does M$ get to use its OS monopoly to prevent OEMs from also installing Netscape, Mozilla, or any other browser? Anyway, is any of this a surprise? No; not at all.
-Scott
Apparently no other browser ever has had a security flaw. Ever. Mozilla and Opera bugtraqs are empty files
This isn't just about some browser's security problem. It's about software monoculturism (is that a word?).
IE is not without merits and people will continue to use it. But it's market dominance create a chicken and egg problem: people will build web sites tailored to it, and people will use IE because the web sites are built so.
Then if a flaw appears in the browser, *everybody* will be affected. (ok, not everybody, but the non-IE users will be so few as to be negligible).
Of course other browsers have flaws. And those IE users that don't bother patching/updating will most likely don't bother patching/updating Firefox/Mozilla/Opera. But at least it won't affect the better part of the internet users.
No sig
Yes. This is getting common. Offensive remarks aimed at non conservatives are left alone. Neocon unfriendly observations/facts/links get mod-abused out of existence. I don't know where it's coming from.
Oops, I spoke my mind. That's a thoughtcrime here these days.
"A witty saying proves nothing." ~Voltaire
"d'Oh!" ~Homer
Here's what I got out of the article:
The Clinton DOJ trailed to(rightfully) nail Microsoft in an antitrust case.
The Bush DOJ was not interested in nailing Mircrosoft in an antitrust case.
My opinionated speculative unfound but probably correct conclusion - Microsoft bought its way out through campaign donations supporting Bush.
I'm about sick and tired of the argument that Microsoft locks in customers by including IE with Windows installations. The fact is that there is choice in today's market. If you want to point the finger, point it at the end user who is to damn lazy to install a new browser. Also, point the finger at web developers who create web sites that will only work properly with IE. If Microsoft put code in their OS that prevented the user from installing or using a browser other than IE, I could see where that would cause concern. The fact is that they don't. I realize that many people on here will not like my views, and that's fine. I know there are plenty of things that Microsoft does/has done that aren't exactly ethical business practices. But the browser argument is old. In fact, just about every single extra application (notepad, media player, etc.) that Microsoft includes with their OS can be found from other software vendors or for free. The only people Microsoft is locking in are the computer manufacturers and other hardware companies. John Doe has more choice these days then ever before.
I hate MS as much at the next guy, excluding work where I have no choice I've moved to solely Apple and Linux, and even gotten all my friends/family to get Firefox. Implying that web pages not working in any browser but IE, however, is not entirely true. The fault lies in the hands of web developers who were too lazy/short sighted to see beyond IE compatibilities. While MS did only enflame this problem by making pages that shouldn't work actually work in IE, if these sites had been properly coded to begin with, they would have still worked in IE and also in every other browser.
in bed.
It was not an article, it was an OP-ED peice. Which means it is this one guy's opinion. What makes his opinion so interesting (as opposed to yours or mine) is the fact that he was involved in the Anti-Trust trial and until today he was unable to voice his opinion on this subject.
As for his mentioning security flaws 5 times to your single mention of Firefox/Opera problems, it appears the balance between here and reality is maintained. Generally speaking, flaws in IE tend to appear 5 times (if not more) frequently than Firefox or Opera ones.
Voting them all out of office, now that's change I can believe in.
I wouldn't even mention this if Chin would have left the politics out of it...
I am disappointed by the Bush administration's handling of the case but the fact is that the case would have _never_ happened if the first Clinton DOJ investigation hadn't ended in the consent decree.
What does having a Slashdot name have to do with anything? I've been coming here for 3 years and got one today. Elitist.
So, unfortunately, a company that was more interested in creating a product for its consumers is now forced to play the political game - and forced to pay the thugs...I mean our politicians money so they are not sued as much by the gov't.
In this case, MS is the good guy.
I mod down so you can mod up. Your welcome.
While it's fine to include one, it's NOT fine to integrate it to the point where you CAN'T GET RID OF IT.
That's what everyone's problem is in this case. Tell you what, you remove Internet Explorer from your machine, and replace it with Firefox. Then come back and tell us how you did it. You will be the next internet God.
Windows and Internet Explorer software products actually consist of legal rights and technological capabilities, not lines of code
Uh huh. And an RIAA product contains not waveform data, but rather the capability to produce pleasing auditory sensations in a subset of the population.
There are no security problems inherent in this integration.
Yes there are. Not buffer overflows or scripting, those are red herrings, but flaws inherent in Microsoft's "innovation". Buffer overflows are an obvious straw man, we both know they have nothing to do with integration. Scripting sounds like a good excuse (and Microsoft tries to push that as the problem), but there are many inherently safe languages - languages that provide no mechanism to perform unsafe operations within the language - and some are used to implement scripting in other browsers.
The security problems inherent in browser integration are due to what are best described as "cross zone attacks". Yes, sometimes they involve scripting, but not always... there are cross-zone attacks that have no scripting component.
Cross zone attacks are due to two things.
First, the HTML control is not inherently secure. It is used for both displaying insecure pages and secure ones, so it contains mechanisms to perform unsafe operations to the page being displayed. I have not been able to find another browser where this is true: even if the browser provides a mechanism to embed it in another application, the embedded browser is still safely sandboxed.
Second, the application that's calling the HTML control to display a page is not given the direct and immediate responsibility for controlling access to resources. It's actually quite hard to keep the HTML control from "breaking out" of its embedded window, and it determines the access rights of the page it's displaying based on the "zone" it's in. If the page is in the "trusted" zone, then that page has the same rights as a local user to do anything that's expressible in it.
These two problems are inherent in Microsoft's approach to embedding the browser in the desktop. They could have embedded an HTML rendering engine with no Internet access or embedding, and left embedding to the calling program. They could have provided an embeddable browser that remained in a sandbox. They could have provided a callback mechanism for the calling application to grant access or provide resources, with ActiveX meta-controls and internet access as separate modules. There's lots ofthings they could have done, but they didn't.
Instead they dumped IE into an embeddable object, gave that object the ability to launch trusting applications, and came up with an unworkable "security zones" model that's turned into layers upon layers of kludges that try to reconstruct whether the original application was giving it a local page (like a Windows Explorer window or the Control Panel) or a remote one, and restrict it (or not restrict it) as appropriate... and of course, sometimes it wasn't appropriate.
This was obvious to me over seven years ago. I banned IE and Outlook here at work, because I expected this was going to cause problems. And when Melissa and later email viruses hit, I was able to make the ban last until they outsourced desktop support.
Funny thing... after they did that, the rare and exceptional scares from viruses and worms and spyware became common. And, yes, the outsourced support people WERE keeping our antivirus up to date... but they required the use of Internet Explorer for their website.
All it takes is one script kiddie hell bent on destroying systems like the old days and windows could dissapear overnight. Just think if some of the latest worms or the new ones about to be released actually had a destructive payload. I don't know about your boss but when I get to work in the morning and 1000 plus windows clients won't boot cause a worm got them you can bet we will be migrating to linux just as fast as we can once we get things at least working again.
The new jpg exploit looks like a good mechanism, what do you think ?
Got Code?
I agree with the mod.
I beleive they dont have a monopoly, to be honest. There is so much choice in terms of x86 operating systems that it's bizarre that anyone could claim they have a monopoly.
Yet another yahoo that does not know the definition of monopoly. How can you expect to have any sort of enlightening discussion when you don't even understand the basic terms?
Here's the deal -- to be a monopoly does not require that a company be "mono," the definition as used by the majority of economists and the FTC is that controlling about 90% of a market is sufficient to make that company's position a monopoly because that level of market control is effectively the same as 100% market control. Since MS Windows still sells with more than 90% of the desktop machines in the USA and continues to run on more than 90% of pre-existing desktop machines, MS CLEARLY has a monopoly on the desktop.
If that is still not enough, realize that MCI existed as a telecom carrier over a decade before AT&T was ruled to be a monopoly, MCI is to Apple as AT&T is to MS.
Thus concludes another test of the emergency monopoly definition system.
If this had been a real monopoly, you would broken up into a bunch of baby bells. Ding! Ding! Ding.
In my humble opinion, I think the Feds pushed the wrong solution in the US v. Microsoft case.
Why didn't the Feds push for separating sales of the operating system from the hardware? By pricing the operating system as a separate cost item it would have actually enhanced competition for the operating system market on x86-compatible PC's, and it would have encouraged the FreeBSD and Linux crowd to develop their operating systems much faster because there would be a truly healthy competition of what operating system you want install on your computer.
It's very FreeRepublican of you to slime Clinton by implying that the prosecution was caused by *not getting a campaign contribution*.
I am saying that MS had not political protection. How many other monopoly cases can you remember? Right. You think there arent any out there? Right. Political contributions talk. What is fact is that Clinton and Gore both personally soliticted donations from Microsoft. I know because I asked Al Gore myself as a student hosting a debate that was carried live on C-SPAN.
AFTER THE JUSTICE DEPARTMENT ALREADY WON.
The DOJ lost. They lost the only important phase: the penalty phase. Their attempt to break up MS was defeated at every opportunity. They had no real choice but to settle.
Gates is on his way to owning every video and audio recording device on the planet, as well as nearly all the PC's.
Probably false. MS has a tiny market share in both video and audio recording devices. And that isnt going to change.
It's laughable that Freepers accuse the DOJ of making MS into a lobbying powerhouse because of their terrible persecution by evil liberals.
I didnt say that. I said plainly that the DOJ would not have taken MS to court if MS had have made political contributions as requested.
They bought their way out of it and helped install a business fascist into the presidency who dropped all the charged and then executed the DOJ. And that, my friend, is the real crime.
Bush campaigned openly on the promise of settling the MS case. Again, I know, because I personally asked then Gov. Bush this during a televised QA held at my college>
They bought their way out of it and helped install a business fascist into the presidency who dropped all the charged and then executed the DOJ. And that, my friend, is the real crime.
Yes, and despite MSs market share in OS'es they are losing market share in the browser market.
Face it. You paranoid and overdramatic.
"You don't give your enemy a place to hide and regroup. That's why we went into Afganistan."
Yes, that was obviously a visionary and practically effective policy wasn't it. I do think however that it was undermined somewhat by the subsequent invasion of Iraq.
Cynical types may think that after this excellent corrective measure Afghanistan is now a no go area governed by local warlords fighting for control of the burgeoning heroin trade whilst the on-going situation in Iraq is drawing much larger numbers of impressionable young men into the world of terrorism and intimidation and that the world in general is now much more likely to suffer from terrorist activities.
Even more cynical types might surmise that as the US Government came to terms with 9/11 and realised there was little they could practically do in public to "right the wrong" decided instead to put on a display which everyone could understand with an invasion of Afghanistan involving lot's of precision weaponry, terrorists lurking in caves and illegal combatants during the course of which they realised there was a good chance they'd get away with more the same in Iraq.
Luckily I am not a cynical person. Go USA, Kick That Terrorism To The Kerb !
If websites stopped serving pages to Internet Explorer, users would be forced to install another browser. Or, for example, if IE is detected add an extra large banner promoting a Mozilla based browser. Instead of 'Best Viewed with Internet Explorer', it would be 'Worst Viewed'
that reminds me of something else I was thinking of...
Websites and other internet services should start denying services to 'bad' net citizens, a sort of global blacklist.
Say everytime a monitor machine recieves a spam email, a ddos attack, worm propageation attept, etc; it sends a note to one of the blacklist servers. The blacklist server won't instantly list for one bad action, but would require multiple monitors to report a problem with an IP address.
every once in a while ISPs, Servers, Service Providers (think perhaps Battle.net, Steam, web-comics, free e-mail providers, along with free/cheap hosting providers) would download the current list, and start providing blank/warning pages to any requests from those addresses. Corporate internet connections could just outright block any packets at the firewall.
8 bad IP adresses in a C block, blocks the whole c block.
The Monitor servers would have to be authenticated and somewhat secret, otherwise false reports could be used to deny service to a target or the IP addresses excluded from future worm versions and the Blacklist distribution security would still be an issue (if served normally, it would be a DDOS target, if 'push' delivered, it could be spoofed without good authentication.) I'm thinking of a USENET style list distribution method. a listing would also expire fairly quickly.
The distiction with this being, that it's cross service. You send bad e-mails, your web browsing is blocked. You run an open proxy, you can't send e-mail. You have a worm?, you can't play Counterstrike. You run a Starcraft cheat? you can't instant message.
The exclusions would have to be customizable, you wouldn't want to block someone with a worm from downloading a virus remover, or otherwise seeking assistance, but they don't need to play an online game before fixing it.
First, learn to use correct English. Your post is a minefield.
Second, corporate law cases are boring and normally garner little if any press. Just because you haven't heard of other antitrust actions doesn't mean they haven't happened. Clinton's DOJ apparently brought more antitrust actions than the previous 4 presidents combined, or something along those lines. Actions analogous to the one against MSFT are rare because few if any industries see the same level of dominance by one firm that MSFT has over the home computing industry. MSFT's actions were also extreme -- they knew they were breaking the law when they did it, took that into account, and decided they didn't care. It was better business for them to risk prosecution and the accompanying costs than to play by the rules. This in and of itself should have been sufficient for the break-up ruling.
Third, it's wrong for you to imply that there is something untoward about Clinton and Gore asking for campaign contributions from MSFT. Clinton and Gore are (were) politicians. Politicians in the U.S. are in the business of getting reelected, which in this country means asking other people for money. If your business were asking people or companies for money, would you maybe ask the richest company on the planet? Yeah, I think you would.
What does having a Slashdot name have to do with anything? I've been coming here for 3 years and got one today. Elitist.
From the looks of the string of moderations so far, you're doing a bang-up job, too. :) Posted AC (I hope) to avoid catching bad moderation cooties.
which ultimately means MS can't include IE in the operating system
My copy of Mac OS X includes both Safari and IE.
My copy of Mac OS 9 includes Netscape and IE.
If Apple can manage to figure out how to provide a choice of web browsers without excluding IE *or* excluding an HTML rendering engine that other applications can use, why do you imagine that Microsoft can't do the same?
This is no different from mandating that the GUI be usable by disabled users, or any other requirement. Arguing that software is somehow special and should be immune to regulation is like arguing that the government has no right to mandate safety guards on power tools or standard electrical connectors in the house. There are people who will happily argue these things, that the market can be allowed to manage things like safety equipment, minimum wage, pollution, all the way down to wheelchair ramps and the color of traffic lights. In practice that doesn't seem to work.