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Microsoft Proposes RSS Extension
An anonymous reader writes "Microsoft Chief Technical Officer Ray Ozzie said this week that his company is working on a new extension to RSS that would help users with different contact and calendar software and services synchronize each other's information." From the article: "If this sounds familiar to those using IBM's Lotus Notes, it should. SSE was conceived after Microsoft's recently recruited chief technology officer Ray Ozzie brainstormed with members of the Exchange, Outlook, MSN, Windows Mobile and Messenger Communicator product teams shortly after he joined."
Embrace and Extend!!
Microsoft's motto is embrace and extend.
It embraces like a boa constrictor, and then extends like a medieval torture rack.
Microsoft, sit down, and let's hear from someone else.
What are you eating? isItVeg?.
Personally I think this is an example of a good technology (RSS) that Microsoft is trying to co-opt by coming out with something marginally "better" -- mostly just more complex -- so they can attain some elements of control over it.
Oh and one other thing - they're basing it on the ideas underlying Exchange and Lotus Notes? I can't wait to see this one.
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If this software/service follows the same trends as the rest of their products, Microsoft will once again be punted by somebody who takes the same concept one step further. Futher more, Microsoft will some how find a way to make this peice of software so insecure that sombody from India will be able to edit your RSS files. Then Microsoft will claim blasphemy and be yelled at by screaming Linux geeks.
Erego; pointless.
google.slashdot
and by "someone else" you mean someone with the digg username xoip which happens to be your slashdot username? Not only did he beat slashdot but he also stole your nickname.
gasp! that dastardly fellow!
Any bets this extension to RSS will be like what they did to Kerberos? It will be incompatible will existing RSS implementations. Any details will have to be reverse engineered or require immense community pressure to have disclosed.
And sombody better cross reference this to Microsoft's patent filings.
Bill: "Basically, RSS is a technology we have little marketshare in and we'd like to alter to give us a chance to catch up. Eventually, of course, we will monopolise the technology bastardizing it until only our RSS reader, Internet Extreme Explorer, is the only tool that will correctly read it. What? Not a good idea? I thought it was fresh!"
Microsoft's "new" RSS format will be XML based, it will turn out in six months that they have filed a patent on it, they will offer a RAND license, they'll submit it as an ECMA standard, and they'll proclaim that it's open. Microsoft will recruit Apple and Oracle to sign up for "free" licenses of their "standard" and proudly announce their adoption of it.
And then Microsoft will try to create FUD (through strategically placed speakers) within the open source community whether it is really possible for open source software to implement their "open" standard. They'll do this in an effort to scare away commercial users from adopting open source software based on the "open standard".
That way, they'll try to achieve the appearance and widespread adoption of an "open" standard while still interfering with its open source implementation.
Why use RSS for that when vCard and iCalendar specs already cover that and are implemented by many groupware suites out there. The RFCs cover from HTTP transport of calendar and contact data as well as other MIME enclosures... And it's a simple and elegant format, it's not XML based but it works! Why reinvent the well this time? more info on vCard and iCalendar at http://www.imc.org/pdi/
-- Por mais que eu ande no vale das trevas e da morte, meu PowerMac G4 Não Travará!!!
"But didn't Lotus Notes suck?"
:)
Yeah..but....look where they are now.
RSS is a form of RDF, and so this idea of an "extension" is a little both misleading and confusing.
Part of the point of RDF is that you can embed lots of vocabularies in a single document. You can say, for example, that a RSS publisher has an attribute FoaF document, or even arbitrary FoaF properies. Or you could use an RDF version of vCard, or RDF iCal...
That's all been part of the Semantic Web for a long time.
It seems that instead of the standards, the proposal is for yet another complete extension from Microsoft.
I think RDF needs help getting the full adoption it needs, but based on what Microsoft has done to other standards (Kerberos, SPF, HTML, etc.) I don't think that this will end up being the right approach to fix any problems RSS has.
We all thought JPG, PNG, and MP3 were safe file types, but that turned out to not be the case when you used a vulnerable standard viewer. Adding more stuff introduces more risk. We have to ask is the added usability worth the mild risk?
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
Or to coin a phrase, bastandardizations.
It's not offtopic, dumbass. It's orthogonal.
The vulnerabilities that you are referring to are called "Buffer Overflow Attacks", and it has nothing to do with the format. The problem lies with the viewers. Even TXTs can have buffer overflow attacks injected to them, though no TXT viewer is known to be supceptible yet.
Dear Microsoft,
No.
Signed,
Everyone On The Internet
Didn't they work on an open JEDEC standard, only to turn around and patent it before finalization? Perhaps Microsoft will have an RSS patent ere long?
Why not join in and support the effort?
Based on upvotes, Ageism is the only "-ism" Slashdotters care about and think isn't SJW
Sounds like Microsoft is trying to re-invent GroupDAV, which is an open standard developed for precisely this purpose. Microsoft just has to be a childish brat and do things its own way.
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Microsoft is releasing this spec under a Creative Commons license. So perhaps it's not evil, or at least they're doing a better job of hiding the evil part!
You have to realize that Microsoft attracts the best and the brightest. That's not the best and the brightest programmers, but the best and the brightest managers, and the best and the brightest lawyers. Even if the programmers come out with the digital version of sliced bread, the managers will do what they do best and departmentalize the task, impose deadlines, and micro-manage. The Accountants will decide how to best make a profit off of this work. And the lawyers will implement it to ensure that there is nothing free or open about it.
It's not just Microsoft, it's business. The sad fact is that Microsoft is even better at business than it is at programming.
>I can't wait to see this one.
You don't have to wait, it is already published. Instead of just spouting off, go read the spec and judge it on its technical merits, instead of adding another needless me too "MS sucks so this must suck" post.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/xml/rss/sse/
Then come back and give a reasoned opinion about the flaws in the proposed extension.
May I point out that when IE extended the abilities of the WWW, we ended up with worms and exploits up the wazoo.
XMLHttpRequest was one of those extensions and it's given us Gmail and other "AJAX" interfaces. Not all extension is bad; if it was how the heck would the industry progress?
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
Microsoft's RSS Checklist:
1) Embrace
2) Extend
3) Extinguish