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Former Hacker Irks Microsoft in EU Dispute
Carl Bialik from WSJ writes "The Wall Street Journal profiles Neil Barrett, 'a former computer hacker who once infiltrated the system controlling a telescope at a Hawaii laboratory' and is now an expert witness causing problems for Microsoft in its antitrust battle with the European Union. Barrett 'has helped put the British glam rocker Gary Glitter behind bars for pedophilia. And he also has helped prosecute a teenage hacker from Wales, who claimed to have stolen Bill Gates' credit-card number and sent the Microsoft founder a shipment of Viagra. [...] In the corporate world, Mr. Barrett once met a challenge to hack into a large multinational company's system in four days to win a security assignment. He stole the company's undisclosed new logo as a trophy, he wrote.'"
From the article:
Last year, Mr. Barrett studied the manual Microsoft produced for four days, tried to use it to write programs and, in December, pronounced it "totally unusable." "There is apparently no structure and no logic in the whole documentation," he wrote in his report
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.. was actually a technician working at UK computer chain 'PC World'. You could say that he's more responsible for Glitter's incarceration than this guy. Though I guess Glitter himself is most responsible. Thing is, the computer technician actually got the sack because he was breaking the Data Protection Act my snooping.
I read his profile, he's Dr Barret a computer security expert, not a hacker, I can't find anything relating to a hack in Hawaii:i +telescope
a rds/story/0,1456,717426,00.html
http://www.google.com/search?q=Neil+Barrett+hawai
He does seem to be a normal expert.
http://money.guardian.co.uk/creditanddebt/creditc
This looks like a Microsoft inspired misinformation campaign.
(you've put spaces where %20 were needed)
"neil barrett" site:microsoft.com Google search gives two (pdf) results, the one you were linking to is here
I have discovered a truly marvelous proof of killer sig, which this margin is too narrow to contain.
- Oracle
- IBM (this dumbass news site thinks they're still International Business Machines)
- Sun
- Novell>
Even if they can undermine belief in his competence, they can hardly do the same for companies like those.It's just a shame that all that this will lead to are chump-change fines that probably won't even equal the money made by all the lawyers - the real winners. I'll go as far as to say that the EU would have spent its money better on OpenOffice development.
IIRC, Mr Gadd brought his laptop in for repair for something mechanical (battery issue or something), and specifically told the technician not to look at the contents of the hard disk.
Third-rate glam rockers clearly do not make great study of basic human psychology, it seems. The technician proceeded to think 'hmm, I wonder why he's so worried about people looking at the OH MY GOD OH NOES AAARRRGH MY EYES MY EYES THE GOOGLES THEY DO NOTHING!'
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
According to someone in the same department at that branch, Gadd brought the laptop in partly because it wouldn't work with image files (the association between JPEGs and an image viewer program was lost).
So, in order to confirm that everything was fine again, he opened some random files to check everything was ok. Oops.
"I Know You Are But What Am I?"
They are not a major generator of jobs or revenue for any european state.
Oh yeah? From http://www.enn.ie/news.html?code=8883686/:
With about 1,700 employees, Microsoft operates three businesses in Ireland -- a European operations centre, a European product development centre, and its Ireland sales, marketing & services group. After its headquarters, the Irish facility is the company's second largest in the world, alongside an operation in Japan.
Microsoft spends around EUR350 million each year in the Irish economy, and the software behemoth accounts for about 6 percent of national exports.
It should be a Cracker at least............
Okay, so I read the article.
... and Blah blah
* Microsoft offered a list of people, including Neil Barrett whose opinion they would respect
* EU rejected most of them but accepted Mr. Barrett
* Mr. Barrett evaluates the Microsoft offer of compliance and deems it useless
* other [competing] professionals agree
* Microsoft changes its position regarding Mr. Barrett because of Barrett's opinion
Yay!
Just love it.
EU: Gimme a list of people you think could be unbiased when evaluating your offer of compliance.
MS: Blah blah, Blah blah, Neil Barrett, Blah blah,
EU: Our experts don't like your Blah blahs but Neil Barrett will do
EU: Neil? What do you think about MS's offering?
NB: Uh... it sucks. I talked to everyone I'm allowed to speak with about it and they couldn't make it work either.
EU: MS, your stuff sucks.
MS: Neil is the devil!
Specifically, what Microsoft seems to be impeaching is under Section 3 of the Trustee decision is Article 2:
Trustee is to provide ad hoc opinions to the Commission on issues pertaining to whether:
Section 3.b.i: the Interoperability Information that Microsoft is required to make available under Article 5(a) of the Decision is made available completely and accurately.
Microsoft claims 1) that Barrett is unqualified to make such a judgement based on his Trustee Report which they claim shows he knows very little about actual programming and less about industry documentation, and 2) that the valid claims that were reported by Competitors were based on an early version (August) that was subsequently cleaned up and redelivered (December) with most problems fixed.
Section 3.b.iv: the Interoperability Information made available pursuant to Article 5(a) of the Decision is kept updated on an ongoing basis and in a Timely Manner
Microsoft claims that this is exactly what they have done, yet the Trustee has not subsequently given "ad hoc opinion" to the Committee since the initial August evaluation.
Section 3.c: advise the Commission on whether substantiated complaints by third parties about Microsoft's compliance with Articles 4 to 6 of the Decision are well-founded from a technical point of view
Microsoft claims 1) that as above, Barrett is not qualified to make such a judgement, and that 2) Barrett's secret meetings with Microsoft's competitors does not allow Microsoft the right to defend themselves from accusations.
Section 3.3: (paraphrase) The Trustee must make available a means for third parties to make complaints related to Microsoft's compliance with Articles 4 to 6 and is required to keep the identities of those third parties secret from Microsoft. Non-confidential complaints ought to be forwarded to Microsoft for informal resolution of complaints.
Microsoft claims that this violates their right to defend themselves. By keeping secret "confidential complaints" from Microsoft, they are unable to prepare a proper defense.
I would still love to see those Trustee Reports.
At first I thought "Yeah, except that you don't hire a serial killer as Expert CSI and give him a suit and a medal instead of jail time", because I was confused by the title of "hacker" in the summary.
m e=2005-11-16+17%3A32%3A07'
But I can't find anything on this guy that would that say he actually did anything illegal in the past. He seems to be a real Hacker as in "Linus is a hacker".
All I found is this 'http://bcswiki.walmsleys.com/NeilBarrett/show?ti
if that's the same guy. Look indeed like a real "IT-CSI", worth respect!
From reading the legaleze in that PDF, it looks like the EU basicly wants microsoft to unbundle Windows Media Player (which it did by creating the Windows XP N edition) and to publish specs for the protocols used by windows machines to provide file sharing, printer sharing and user management.
:)
If the EU really wants to see the details of windows file sharing and such, they should go read the SAMBA source code, as far as I know SAMBA is a 100% working implementation of the protocols in question (correct me if I am wrong here)
Personally, I want to see the EU (or some other agency) force some real penalties on MS. Examples:
Ban MS from having secret contracts with OEMs and force them to have transparency in dealings with OEMs and restrictions on telling OEMs what they can and cant ship alongside windows (e.g. if microsoft says to an OEM "If you ship Firefox/OpenOffice/BeOs/Linux/" as well as shipping windows (either on the same PC or on different PCs in the lineup) you will have to pay more for windows, that would be a violation of this)
Force microsoft to disclose more of their "secret recipies" such as the office document formats (is there anything that can read an access MDB file without going through microsoft libraries?) or the NTFS file system or the MSN messenger protocols or the Windows Media audio and video formats (obviously an exemption would be given to allow them to keep the DRM parts of the format a secret
Force microsoft to publish more APIs that they are using but not disclosing to their competitors (including APIs in dlls related to internet explorer, windows media player, themeing etc). This should include some kind of way for people who find an API that isnt documented by microsoft to go to the "review board" monitoring the MS penalty and point out that microsoft is not in complience. (they documented a bunch of APIs as part of the US lawsuit but there are plenty of APIs that are still completly undocumented)
I can't be sure about 'Europe' as an entity, but here in the UK (and other member countries), monopolies are accepted for a time, and then regulated into competition.
The way it generally works is that some company springs up and sweeps the market. At some point it is generally considered a monopoly. At that point, someone/something brings some sort of law suit against the monopoly, at which time it's market dominance is assessed.
If it's market control is broad, that's okay, so long as it's not at the expense of competitors or potential competitors. In the case of MS, it's monopoly is at the expense of other players, because they're not allowed to join in unless they get into bed with MS - whilst they're separate companies, they're part of the monopoly.
Someone like Apple is much less likely to be considered a monopoly (although there's definitely room to argue they are). Whilst they lock the iPod to iTunes, there's no restriction on who can get onto iTunes, and the iPod plays other formats. In short, we consumers aren't limited to the iPod/iTunes combo, indeed, it could be argued quite the opposite, because unless you have an iPod, iTunes has a pretty small value proposition.
As for people choosing MS, a large part of this is of course because 'everyone else does'. That causes the $10 (or should I say 10euro) card manufacturers to ignore the minority that don't use MS, thus circularly extenuating the monopoly situation. Even though MS isn't stopping OEMs supporting minorities, the market is at 'critical mass' where it self-enforces the monopoly. The intention of regulation is to provide market/capitalist encouragement to OEMs to support minority vendors, allowing them to compete.
In the case of this documentation request, it's there so that the little guy in his shed can produce MS compatible products and sell them. It's not even that much about big companies doing the same thing, because they could arguably pay the money for the doco. The EU is aiming this at the little guy, because with enough of those, the market will self-regulate, without an over-bearing monopoly (even if IBM, Apple, Novell, Oracle etc all got in, it'd just be a pent-o-poly, so still not really self-regulating). Clearly, if that little guy can't make his products, either because there is no doco, or because he still needs (presumably paid for) help from the monopoly, then the EU doesn't like it because it hasn't achieved the original aims.
The bottom line is that if you're dominant in the market, you can't be actively freezing out other players, nor can you be forcing them to play along with you in order to compete with you. Both situations make you look like a monopoly, and so you'll get regulated.
The actual documentation as I understand it is the core protocols/APIs for connectivity between MS applications.
What they got was a limited copy of the connectivity source code with no explanation of the APIs referenced, and that's why it was deemed to be useless.
MS provides:
MS agent says "What do you mean you need documentation? It's right there, everything you need to know about making a connection!"
Yes but half of those will claim Irish descent if their great great great great great grand pappy once had a guiness. I can claim better Irish descent than most of them and I'm English (well 1/8 French, 1/8 Irish, 1/4 Welsh and 1/2 English i.e. a mongrel which is fairly typically for an inhabitant of these Islands).
In summary:
Taken from European Commission press release IP/04/382? reference=IP/04/382&format=HTML&aged=0&language=EN &guiLanguage=en
http://europa.eu.int/rapid/pressReleasesAction.do
In order to restore the conditions of fair competition, the Commission has imposed the following remedies:
To the extent that any of this interface information might be protected by intellectual property in the European Economic Area(6), Microsoft would be entitled to reasonable remuneration. The disclosure order concerns the interface documentation only, and not the Windows source code, as this is not necessary to achieve the development of interoperable products.
Microsoft retains the right to offer a version of its Windows client PC operating system product with WMP. However, Microsoft must refrain from using any commercial, technological or contractual terms that would have the effect of rendering the unbundled version of Windows less attractive or performing. In particular, it must not give PC manufacturers a discount conditional on their buying Windows together with WMP.
The Commission believes the remedies will bring the antitrust violations to an end, that they are proportionate, and that they establish clear principles for the future conduct of the company.
To ensure effective and timely compliance with this decision, the Commission will appoint a Monitoring Trustee, which will, inter alia, oversee that Microsoft's interface disclosures are complete and accurate, and that the two versions of Windows are equivalent in terms of performance.