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EU Sleuths Think Microsoft Sabotaged Windows
Adam Zweimiller writes "The Inquirer is reporting that in it's ongoing battle with Microsoft, the European Commission is investigating the possibility that the Vole has sneakily sabotaged the Media Player-free versions of Windows it is obliged to ship to the EU. A report (subscription required) in today's Wall Street Journal suggests Microsoft has fiddled with the registry in its stripped-down Windows offerings and the result is that video clips embedded into Microsoft Word documents don't run properly, for example."
Maybe that is what the EU is trying to do. I'm sure they will feel really bad that an American company is no longer selling their products in the EU countries. The EU is becoming as xenophobic as China.
Not since Marie-Antoinette played milkmaid has looking simple and honest been so fake and complicated.
Hmm, maybe Microsoft was right. Maybe consumers do want a fully featured OS that can do whatever they want with a minimal amount of effort.
:)
Maybe their product wasn't designed to be anticompetative but a complete solution in the best interests of the consumer, incorporating as much functionality as they could...
Or maybe they are just evil.
To get video clips thorugh corporata mail servers that strip out video files but let word through. People send images and audio embedded in Word files for the same reason.
Darn consipacy theorists. When will people learn that stupidity is more often the culprit than conspiracy. Given the multitude of bugs in all of the software Microsoft writes, there's bound to be one or more whose cirumstances coincidentally look like a conspiracy than just a plain old fashioned bug.
It seems to me it's the reasone they embedded MP and IE into Windows.
And why on Earth would anyone want to embed video clips into MS Word documents? Just because it's possible?
Microsoft loves to do things like this. "Well, you asked us to remove it, and that's what happened!" We savvy people, of course, realize that if Microsoft left the registry screwed in some way during their unbundling process, they would have had to purposely ignoring fixing it since I assume Microsoft knows their own registry enough to fix it (many IT admins have become expert in fixing the damn thing themselves). Leaving it purposely fucked in order to say "See?" wouldn't be complying with the Commission's order. It seems the EU isn't bending over and taking these cute little games the way the U.S. did when dealing with Microsoft.
Maybe consider doing what we in the USA should have done,that is put a limit for XP installations on OEM computers and copies at the store . Make it like only 50% of the market to repair the os market from ILLEGAL monopoly practices.
This would cause software makers to adjust their thinking and make software for linux or other operating systems.
The Dep.of Justice did nothing to fix a wrong.
Ok, I've been reading news in The Inquirer for some time now, and they keep referring to Microsoft as Vole, and employees as SpokesVoles, etc. Would someone please provide an explanation.
All Media Player, the program, really is is a shell that calls the video and audio playback systems. You don't need to use that shell, you can use another. Media Player Classic is a good example of a non-MS shell that does the same thing. Unlike VLC, which actually does it's own decoding, MPC just places calls to the same systems as Media Player. IT is just a different interface (one that's like the MS media players prior to V7) that some of us like better.
You are free to delete the executables for media player or IE or any of the other things like that. However that's not really removing them, the guts still exist and Windows still uses them. To really remove it, like MS's competitors seem to want, would require stripping the guts as well. Those are what really do the work of the program.
That's why the things MS claims are a part of Windows and are necessary are, after a fashion. They aren't necessary for everything, but other things depend on them. Like the help system breaks if IE goes away. Why? Well help files are HTML based, and call IE, or rather the MSHTML engine that it uses, to render.
Same thing applies to Linux as well. X isn't required, as in you have to have it to have a working system, but if you want a system with, say, KDE it is. You can't say "I want KDE, but I don't want X." Sorry, but KDE uses X, you either install it or you shove off.
The difference is that Linux has chosen to be very, very losely defined and modular. The only thing that acutally is Linux is the kernel. The rest is all optional. There are some conventions, like that almost all graphics ride on top of X, but those are just that, conventions. However you have to have all lower level dependencies for a program, you can't just remove them and replace them with something different, but incompatible and expect things to work.
Windows is different and is like MacOS or Solaris in that it is more richly and tightly defined. The OS isn't just a kernel, it's a kernel, GUI, several APIs, a number of programs, services, etc, etc. That, of course, removes felxability but provides unity. You don't have to concern yourself with the presence or absence of certian things as they are a part of the OS.
Ah, it's too bad we don't get special +5 insightful moderation points to give away now and again. You've summed up my (and many of my coworkers) feelings about Real perfectly.
:)
(Though I might setup an isolated system someplace and get a few Franklins before I shut it off and incinerate it
"What do you despise? By this are you truly known." --Princess Irulan, Manual of Muad'Dib
/)
Microsoft has been ordered to remove Media Player, and it seems they've removed a bit more than they should have, that is all.
That sir, is crap.
They were ordered to remove Media Player. It should be obvious that this means the program in it's entirety, including both the front and back ends. Anything less would not be conforming to the great EU's vision of a worthless^H^H^H^Hwhile operating system.
"Get WMP out of Windows! Now! Oh, but leave in all the DLLs which do the real work so we can still benefit from your impressive integration."
Yeah, right.
"What do you despise? By this are you truly known." --Princess Irulan, Manual of Muad'Dib
/)
... on development libraries like the Windows Media Player SDK. When MSFT was ordered to remove Windows Media Player (WMP), I bet they went ahead and removed the associated SDK redistributable components and activex controls, not just the Media Player client. This of course has an effect on the registry as well, since it stores certain settings in the registry. I bet Real just removed the Media Player client, and not everything else that is a part of WMP.
MS Office uses the ActiveX component that is a part of WMP to embed media content in documents (Link). This ActiveX component, due to certain design constraints, can't be shipped seperately from the WMP client (link).
The fact that they removed this stuff does indeed mean that MS Office no longer plays media content properly. I find it funny that the EU is complaining about this, as they got exactly what they wanted!
Perhaps in the future, MSFT will expose a framework that allows third party media player development libraries to plug into the desktop environment, allowing other applications to use whatever libraries are currently configured to play media. Kind of similar to how they've exposed anti-virus hooks for AV vendors to plug into.
But for the EU to ask them to rewrite how this all works, and to rewrite all of their software (ie. Office) to work with it overnight, I think it's asking a little too much. Even of MSFT.
I'm still wondering why MS got away with that. If I were the judge, and I noticed that one of the parties in the case were actually forging evidence, I would rain fire and brimstone on them! Surely at least the relevant parties could be held in contempt of the court (whatever the actual legal term is)? It seems to me that only punishment MS got for forging evidence, was that they had to apologize and promise not to do it again.
Any lawyers around here? What exactly is the punishment in the US legal system for forging evidence? Why MS got away with it?
Lesbian Nazi Hookers Abducted by UFOs and Forced Into Weight Loss Programs - -all next week on Town Talk.
I'm sure I posted this same rant to /. in the past (go ahead mark me redundant :) - but the last time I had RealPlayer installed on a Windows PC it cost me over $60. I had an ISDN router that auto-dialed, and even though I was careful to disable all the "visible" RealPlayer spyware settings, it STILL decided to send packets home every 5 minutes (I believe my call timeout was 3 minutes). Never again (unless I get a check for $60 in the mail from Mr. Glaser, I suppose...)
Check out this and this.
The UK has lower unemployment, proportionately higher exports, proportionally *far* lower imports, is an energy exporter and has *no* external debt. I have to say looking at those figures I feel we're in a far better financial position as a whole.
Those income figures are not right. All other reports say that the average for the uk is £22,000. For example here
One way to embed video clips into Office documents is to embed the Media Player ActiveX control. Of course, without Media Player there is no Media Player ActiveX control and so documents using this technique won't load correctly without Media Player.
I've not used Word in years, but I'm going to assume that there's also a second way which involves embedding the video just as video data, without any particular container. Now, I'd expect those to play back through DirectShow (the API Media Player uses to play video) not Media Player itself, and so it should go on working just like any game which uses DirectShow for movie playback should go on working, and Winamp (which plays back most filetypes through DirectShow) should go on working.
Therefore there should be no dependence on any particular player frontend, but you'll still only be able to play movies which have a registered DirectShow codec. Since DirectShow is the standard Windows API for video playback, this is sensible. That a bunch of video format owners (Real, Quicktime) don't distribute DirectShow codecs is their fault, not Microsoft's. Of course, if Office applications really don't have a way to embed video directly without using a specific player ActiveX control then I would describe the developers as incompetant rather than claim sabotage.
I suppose a final possibility is that Microsoft heard "Remove Media Player!" and went and stripped out DirectShow. That would be malicious in my mind since DirectShow is the standard API for video playback in Windows and so its removal would break loads of applications. It was the Media Player application that was to be removed, not the APIs it uses. By that logic, the Win32 API should be removed as well as it's clearly part of Media Player!
Real didn't remove WMP, they only deleted the thin WMP client (75KB) which wraps the WMP subsystem. They left the rest of WMP installed. They also removed any references to the WMP client from the start menu. If MS copied what Real did, I bet you the someone would tell the EU that WMP was still installed, and the EU would complain. The EU is acting hypocritical and ignorant.
I seem to remember a rumor that a certain operating system company rewrote sections of their operating system back in the '80s to prevent a competing spreadsheet from working. What was the saying attributed to the manager at the time? Oh, yes: "The program's not done, 'til Lotus won't run".
:)
But that was just a rumor, of course.
Farewell! It's been a fine buncha years!
Well if RedHat had a monopoly on Operating Systems they'd be right to do so. IIRC anti-trust laws in Europe say that you cannot use a monopoly to attempt to gain a monopoly in another area - so they can't for example use a monopoly on their OS to gain a monopoly on media players, or web browsers.
When this trial in the EU started I thought it was pointless too - people want a media player with their OS, but recently I've realised that it was the correct thing to do - I don't know about the rest of Europe or the US, but here in the UK a lot of online media stores have sprung up, and guess who's DRM they use? Microsoft's, Microsoft's , Microsoft's and Microsoft's.
And why do they use MS's DRM?
" We recommend Microsoft Windows Media Player for this, as it generally comes pre-loaded on new PCs"
"The Windows Media Player has been shipped with Windows-based PCs since 1997".
If this isn't using one monopoly to push another, I don't know what is.
Linux Wireless Hardware in the UK
If I read the correct articles from EUROPA (portal site of the EU) and understood them correctly, then I don't think forbidding OEM's from installing other media players was the problem. According to those articles from EUROPA's "Antitrust cases" section, the problem was merely the "tying" of WMP to its "dominant" OS.
The articles I read were only press releases, but I'm hoping they would not have excluded an important fact like forbidding OEMs from installing rival media players. They only mentioned WMP's supposedly unfair advantage of being "tied" to MS's dominant OS. If there was testimony from OEMs about MS forbidding them from installing rival media players, then I'd appreciate a link from anybody who can provide one. I haven't really been following the EU case.
I think the March 2004 press release "Commission concludes on Microsoft investigation, imposes conduct remedies and a fine" gave the best summary:
TO START
PRESS ANY KEY
Where's the 'ANY' key? I see Esk, Kitarl, and Pig-Up...
If Windows Media was tightly coupled to the OS then removing it might break other software not tightly coupled to it, but the code base of which uses those tightly coupled bindings within the US. Word seems to fit perfectly into this sort of scenario.
Alternatively it may be that there were mistakes made in the process of removing all references to Windows Media due to issues with the design of Windows. Again no need for a conspiracy theory, just an issue with implementation.
I am not a Microsoft apologist, but people sometimes need to slow down before assuming that a conspiracy is operating and examine the facts and the possible explanations.
Firstly, WMP is the front end and the skins and stuff (i.e. what is behind the "windows media player" icon)
Secondly, it is the DirectShow/ActiveMovie/etc stuff that lets applications use WMP codecs (e.g. Rollercoaster Tycoon 3 uses it for WMA music).
And thirdly, it is a set of codecs that come with windows for playing WMA, WMV, ASF and whatever else microsoft includes with windows.
The question is, which of the 3 bits is microsoft removing in this "cut down" version. I suspect all 3 bits are being removed (which breaks the embedded videos)
However, if you just remove the first bit (the UI) and leave the codecs and DirectShow components there, it wont break embedded stuff but WMP will be gone. (look at the program XPLite to see just what can be removed from Windows XP without breaking stuff, that includes an option to remove just the Windows Media Player frontend without removing the backend components that works just great)
Bah! I can use nLite and remove all I want. Windows runs fine without IE (just wont auto update), and it runs fine without WMP. Infact, I can remove just about everything and get an install that's 350 megs and only used 50MB of ram running. But, whats the point to removing WMP and remarketing it? Why would I buy a crippled copy of XP for the same price as the full version? Pointless "feel good" political tactics. Slay the big Microsoft Dragon, woohoo.......
Or... MS-Office could come bundled with the Media Player ActiveX controls and codecs. It's not unheard of for software to come with dependencies it needs right on the install disk. For example, countless software come with DirectX - and will prompt you to install/upgrade it during installation.
As another example, Microsoft Visual Studio comes with a whole CD with just Windows components that need to be installed or upgraded before you can even run the install on disk 1.
I am sure Microsoft was fully aware of that option, but I think they were more interested in causing a problem so that they can "prove" that Media Player is indeed a required component of Windows.
If the issue is EU law that dictates that a monopoly cannot use it's advantage to gain another monopoly, don't you think that MS Office is going to be a factor?
MS uses its monopoly position to exact other monopolies. For example, Java, office apps, web browser, media player, DRM. Several of these new monopolies are then used to exact other monopolies (i.e. WMP on DRM).
I don't think it's innappropriate to say that MS has intentially tied programs that are not, or were not, considered part of an OS to the Windows OS in order to gain a monopoly in the different application markets. It would also then be appropriate for someone to tell them that it is not good enough that they filtered out the application and left their OS broken.
They intentially exploited a monopoly situation to gain other monopolies. Part of this was intentially leaving their operating system breakable by removing the applications so that they can insist the apps are tied. The apps are only tied because they chose to do so in order to exploit their monopoly position. It is reasonable, then, to demand that MS fix whatever they did to break their operating system on removing one of these tied, monopoly-exploiting, apps.
Wrong.
Media player is two pieces. There's the player application, and there's WMP.OCX.
WMP.OCX is the ActiveX control that's used to play the multimedia content.
If the stripped media version removed WMP.OCX (which is what I believe the EU asked), then removing WMP WILL affect windows ability to handle embedded media content.
It is a consent issue, I don't give a hang about the definition of the neogism. The defining characteristic of spyware in my view is that the provider does not intend to respect the machine owner's control over their machine.
Real has certainly collected information on users without adequate notice in the past so the narrower spyware definition is also appropriate.
Real criticizing Microsoft on business ethics is like Hedi Fleiss calling Maddona a slut.
Looking for an Information Security student project suggestion?
Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/
Then maybe admins should rethink their policies.
It makes absolutely no fucking sense to be able to include a video or an executable in what's supposed to be a printable text document.
That's what Microsoft did. Apps are apps and OS is OS, and coupling one to the other has been recognized as bad design since the 1960s or earlier. Yet MS purposefully chose to do bad engineering because it looked like a good marketing strategy.
Here's something interesting I've noticed about MS apps. And believe me, I hate MS, so it really pisses me off:
They're better.
Oh, don't get me wrong; the security is crap, and you don't have the beautiful straightforward control like you do in *nix or BSD.
BUT, their applications are faster. Much faster.
Modularity comes at a cost, and that cost is response time. On a certain machine, OpenOffice will take around 30 seconds or so to load up; on the same machine, Office opens up nearly instantly.
This is also pretty much true of Internet Explorer and other Windows applications.
The response time of items like wizards, dialog boxes, etc., is pretty much always faster than their "better programmed" more modular counterparts.
If you look at a user using an application, all they care about is getting things done. They don't care about whether or not the OS is separate from the application. They don't care if Media Player is installed or not. In fact, I'm betting that one of the first things that 50% of the more tech-savvy users of these Media Player-free systems are going to do is download Media Player.
Again, I hate to admit it -- in the same way that I hate to acknowledge that there are many things about the US that are fucked up, because I live here -- but basically the OpenSource community makes supremely excellent server software and OSs, but only average desktop software. Microsoft makes very good desktop software, with fast-as-heck response times.
I think that, in all seriousness, it's getting to the point where distinguishing between what is an application and what is the OS no longer makes 100% sense. I *like* being able to view thumbnails of images in a directory folder, and to click on a link and see a 30s smaller preview of a movie file. All that would be much more difficult if the OS was made separate from the OS.
As far as the Help system is concerned, how would *you* suggest that it be set up? That Microsoft develop another application that uses code that's practically identical to the code used by Internet Explorer? Isn't it good programming to share code rather than duplicate it? And, if so, wouldn't it make sense for IE and the Help System to use the same codebase?
I'm just sayin'.
Karma: Chevy Kavalierma.
But you forgot the Microsoft Defense: "Your honor, we're too incompetent to write modular software. Take one piece out and the whole house of cards comes crashing down."
You seem to forget. They did offer to remove iexplore.exe from the OS for the antitrust trial - the judge threw a hissy fit, and claimed he wanted everything removed. Every DLL, the works.
If you're willing to waste time reading slashdot, you might want to enlighten yourself and read the court trial documents as well. They're very interesting.
Coming soon - pyrogyra
Real will never be purposely installed on any of my machines.
...unless of course we consider what your true motives really are.
I would think if you have been anywhere near a computer and the internet in the last 3 years, you would know that Real contain(s/ed?) spyware. and reports back on the user's listening/viewing habbits.
As the founding member of the tin foil hat division of the lunatic fringe, I am well aware of the issues regarding Real, and assume everyone else is too.
For this reason, I am totally aghast at my favorite consiracy/smoking gun web sites, using it as their primary medium for media distribution.
Art Bell/Prison Planet/Jeff Rense - just why hell would you ever, pick this piece of malware to distribute your message.
http://www.rense.com/
Nurse! I'm ready for my Soma now!
Microsoft wouldn't be bankrupted by buying me a pony either. That doesn't mean they're obligated to.
If they were convicted of shooting your pony out from under you, perhaps a court would make that part of the remedy.