Dvorak Sees MS Conspiracy Against BitTorrent

kilgortrout writes "Dvorak has an interesting editorial up, where he links the recent stories of alleged 'security problems' and 'spyware problems' bittorent has been having with the recent MS announcement of research into a file sharing app called 'Avalanche'. concluding it's all part of an orchestrated MS disinformation campaign against BitTorrent." From the article: "The problem is that no big company controls it, and Microsoft, asleep at the wheel, let it slip too long to do much about it. So now I suspect Microsoft is playing dirty to discredit the thing. There is no other explanation for the recent series of coincidental stories and events." Especially interesting in light of Bram Cohen's take on the situation.

Comments

Ummm

[DeathFlame]

"...There is no other explanation for the recent series of coincidental stories and events."

Unless they were a... *gasp* coincidence.

Why would bittorrent be the P2P app that scares MS? What about Napster, or Kazza? Those were around years ago. This makes no sense to me.

Re:Ummm

[LiquidCoooled]

Because napster and kazaa are locked in the network.

Bittorrent is anywhere, I can post a torrent link here and have 1000s of people all getting the latest and greatest(!?) version of Windows.

Also, don't forget, its now becoming routine for people to download nice cd/dvd sized ISO files :)

They didn't care when it took hundreds of hours per disk.

But can you get pornography from Avalanche?

[CyricZ]

If you can't get videos of boobies and cocks and vaginas and poontangs and sluts and bondagery using Avalanche, then it will never be used. End of story!

Re:But can you get pornography from Avalanche?

[hab136]

If small to medium size companies can see a measurable decrease in bandwidth used then it will get used.

Indeed, Blizzard uses Bittorrent to distribute patches for World of Warcraft.

Re:Sheer Brilliance

[Golias]

We need a "John Dvorak" category on Slashdot, so all "stories" related to his latest rants can be filtered out.

Microsoft can MAKE Avalanch happen

[TedTschopp]

It's actually rather easy.

Step 1. Include support in IIS (via Patch)
Step 2. Include support for it in IE (via Patch)
Step 3. DONE!

A Dvorak flood?

[FunWithHeadlines]

OK, what is this, Dvorak month? We used to get Jon Katz articles, but that made sense as he was part of /. for a while. More recently we get Cringley articles, and that's OK as he sometimes writes quite well and makes interesting suggestions. But are we now in for a slew of Dvorak articles?

I hope not. I read Dvorak from 1984 onward when he was in his PC Magazine glory. Fun times, stupid boldfacing of seemingly random characters and all. But man, has this guy gone downhill. Now he seems to be throwing darts at a board labled, "Insult Apple," "Insult Linux," "Insult Random Somebody," and then sit back and wait for the hits. Posting links to /. is to just fall into his lazy scheme.

Let's not make this a regular feature, that's all I'm asking. I know where to find Mr. Dvorak's words, and I know enough not to wander there.

I agree

[Von Rex]

I would be happy to never see his name again. I've yet to read a Dvorak article on anything that had any value.

answering your own question

[dirk]

There is no other explanation for the recent series of coincidental stories and events.
Except that maybe it is all just coincidence, just like he says. Not everything is a conspiracy, sometimes things just happen.

Somebody must care what he says!

[CyricZ]

Somebody must care, otherwise he wouldn't get paid to write his articles, editorials and columns.

Forced into using DRM

[argoff]

I don't think it's a conspiracy, but I do think that there is a HUGE ammount of pressure to corall the IT industry to use a DRM model vs a free flow of information model for the future of the information age. These two models are completely incompatable.

Of course, on the same note, it's in our best interest to put a large amount of effort into relying on free information and non proprietary technology as much as possible.

Spyware and virii

[PotatoHead]

are two of the very best things to happen to Microsoft in this regard.

If you are running a win32 variant, you basically need patches on almost a daily basis. The closed nature of the software demands you get these patches from Microsoft. (Which must have one hell of a bandwidth bill and could actually use a BT like technology for cost reasons alone.)

There is nothing like having a distribution channel your customers (read cattle) must make use of. Works just like our own government does. Attach something they don't really want or need to a spending bill (or totally important security patch) and you are off to the races!

Of course they can make it happen. The bigger question is will they get it right?

obvious?

[Spy der Mann]

so he has shifted from total-crackpot mode to state-the-painfully-obvious mode.

If you haven't noticed, the outsiders (a.k.a
Joe-Users, common people, ignorant sheep, etc) didn't believe Microsoft was insecure - at least until the most recent exploits.

They think that Microsoft is Good, and also that machines are just good because they have "Intel Inside".

They do NOT know about Microsoft's monopolic practices (and I'm not talking about embedding IE inside Windows), the FUD of SCO vs Linux, the danger of software patents, etc. etc.

But I remember one thing from my old days of computer user. My dad bought PC Magazine and used to read John C. Dvorak's columns. Who were written for common people, not for unix über-geeks.

Sure, his statements might be obvious to us. But not for the outside world. And I'm glad that he tells this stuff so common people can find out.

(Now if only he spoke against software patents...)

Re:Why does MS care?

[scottsk]

They are very smart. They do not want to control content (songs, movies, etc), because that's a race to the bottom on price, they want to control the DRM lock-in technology (which is licensed for a flat fee). They have almost cornered the market for DRM-controlled online 99-cent songs through WMP. They're adding DRM to Office and Windows to control files. So why not put DRM locks on P2P files? This seems like a very natural next step, providing a way for content owners lock all their files with MS's DRM lock-in mechanism.

All the Dvorak bashing aside...

[Psionicist]

... I think this is a good article. It describes what everyone here think is "painfully obvious" in an interesting way (everone loves a conspiracy!) regular computer users will understand, the crowd that reads CNET, IDG etc.

Why is this important? This article will now be referenced on all the major news sites, and will work as counter-FUD. That's the good thing with sensationalist guys like Dvorak. He writes interesting and scandalous things (from a journalist point of view) and sometimes he actually get it right.

Re:BitTorrent IS the dominant protocol on the Net

[Hank Chinaski]

the point is that he compares bt to tcp/ip. which is kind of a skewed comparison.

No explanation?

[jayhawk88]

There is no other explanation for the recent series of coincidental stories and events.

Except for "coincidence".

Re: Sheer Brilliance

[Alwin Henseler]

I've heard it mentioned ocassionally, but don't know what this 'goatse' thing is all about.

Anyone got a link, so I can look into the matter?

Re:This is Microsoft RESEARCH!

[Bert690]

I looked at the powerpoint presentation and the paper itself, and no, I would not call the work BS. The powerpoint presentation shows some graphs based on the outcome of their simulations, which are well documented in their paper. The BitTorrent model used in their simulations might be flawed (as Bram has accused), which indeed brings some of their claims into question, but it certainly doesn't invalidate them. Models used in simulations are necessarily simplified. The fact that their experiments are well documented allows anyone to repeat them, possibly with corrections to their BitTorrent model, in order to confirm or contradict their findings. This is the sign of good research.

I suggest you read the paper -- it's a nice idea, even if it has not yet been perfectly evaluated.

People around here seem to share Dvorak's gross misunderstanding of what research papers are all about. They are NOT product announcements!

Re:This is Microsoft RESEARCH!

[william_w_bush]

Wow, this is a group of words that i never expected to see together:

MSR is to Microsoft what Bell Labs was to AT&T, PARC was to Xerox and TJ Watson Research Center is to IBM.

I'm not trying to flame, but do you have any fucking clue what parc (mac/windows gui&mice+more), Bell Labs(Big bang research, phones, unix, so much more), ibm research (hard drives, memory, halography, ad nauseum) do?

Oh and lets look at MSR: ...
uhh, they uhh, they made this cool calender with address book i saw on cnet once in 2000, i don't think it's been released. oh and something with making phones work with computers. also they told us once that computers are badly organized and they had a better way to make everything work.

hmmm.

no seriously, MSR is less than a fucking joke, and tend to stay away from any research that could actually make any kind of difference in the world. The closest i've seen is some papers showing how new algorithms would make searching or file storage better with nothing to actually back it up. You don't do real research when you have a monopoly, innovation undermines your monopoly because it causes change, which is always perceived to be bad for you.

Oh yeah, most of those companies gave their work away to the community as part of their research program. MSR gives their shit to billg to stick in his super-digital house and show off how cool it is to reporters, but never let it into the real world, kinda like the ark in Raiders.

MS Research, talk about a contradiction in terms.

He's ingenius! Er, disingenuous, that is

[aiken_d]

There is no other explanation for the recent series of coincidental stories and events

Pshaw. He may or may not be right about the MS conspiracy, but this kind of blantant intellecutal dishonesty makes me take his point with a huge grain of salt, since right there he demonstrates that he either doesn't understand things as much as he pretends, or that he's chosen not to relate as much as he understands. Either way, minus points.

There are plenty of other explanations for the "recent series of coincidental stories and events":

1. It could be a coincidence. Duh.
2. The press has occaisionally been known (this may come as a surprise to you) to follow itself around and get sucked into "trendy" stories, even if they're not at all newsworthy. School shootings, mothers killing kids, celebrity whatever. You'd have to live under a rock not to notice this phenomenon.
3. There could be a conspiracy by someone other than Microsoft. If I were looking around for a villain who was covertly planting stories to disparage a major P2P application, I can think of some more likely candidates. Two of 'em, in fact, and they share a couple letters of their acronym.

There you go. Three easy, plausible alternatives. "No other explanation," indeed.

Cheers

Re:It killed a company I worked for.

[drew]

hmm... the way i remember my internet histroy, as soon as everyone realized that nobody wanted it, everybody stopped talking about push.

MSR does some wonderfull language research.

[zensonic]

MSR has some good ppl working an cambridge on computer language research and type systems!

C# and .net are not stupid ideas you know!

But do not take my word for it, go see for yourself: http://research.microsoft.com/ppt/