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.'"

Comments

Re:resume?

[mtenhagen]

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

The guy who discovered Gary Glitter's paedo-fest..

[Channard]

.. 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.

Your link doesn't work.

[alexhs]

(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

Re:Your link doesn't work.

[wish bot]

It's not his fault.

Slashcode inserts spaces in long words to prevent page widening trolls. That's why it's always good to use 'a' tags and 'href=', rather than relying on Slashdot to autolink.

Worthless slimeballs

[caffeination]

European Commission regulators in Brussels chose Mr. Barrett from among Microsoft's own nominees

His testimony leads to threats of fines by the EU....

prompting Microsoft to attack Mr. Barrett's competence and to accuse him of colluding with its rivals

The EU publishes the previously secret terms of Mr. Barrett's mandate, arguing he is required to seek input from Microsoft rivals.

Not that I'd expect Microsoft to know about the secret terms, but the fact that their lawyers can do a u-turn on their own fucking nominee like that and retain credibility is incredible. I'm more inclined to trust an ex-hacker who says things like this:

"Although experts [in the U.K. courts] are usually employed on one side of a particular case, we are not 'on their side' once we are in court," he wrote. "We are there to see that justice is served."

To end, here is a list of companies who agree with Barrett about Microsoft's documentation:

• 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.

Re:The guy who discovered Gary Glitter's paedo-fes

[iainl]

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.

Re:Bill should hire new lawyers.

[eturro]

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.

Re:resume?

[gnufied]

It should be a Cracker at least............

What a wonderful morning!

[erroneus]

Okay, so I read the article.

* 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, ... and 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!

Re:resume?

[gutnor]

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.

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?tim e=2005-11-16+17%3A32%3A07'
if that's the same guy. Look indeed like a real "IT-CSI", worth respect!

Re:What does the EU want from microsoft?

[jonwil]

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)