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:Not that I question Barrett's qualifications

[aaribaud]

But for a guy who is able to hack locked-down networks in four days and can track down criminals by following their online scent, he sure seems to be giving up quite easily when claiming that Microsoft's manuals are "totally unusable" after four days of use.

Well, to me a guy who is able to hack locked-down without documentation seems quite able to not need more than four days to ascertain whether some documentation for some code is useable or not according to what was asked from MS by the EU.

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

[ObsessiveMathsFreak]

Thing is, the computer technician actually got the sack because he was breaking the Data Protection Act my snooping.

Rightly so. He "helped" catch one pedophile, but so what? We all know that paticular suspect was under surveillance for quite some time anyway. And you're simply naive if you this this paticular tech only snooped once and just happened to stumble over one celebrities hidden cache. Dollars to doughnuts the tech regularly slurped customers hard discs for porn and the like.

To paraphrase:
It were better that Ten Suspected Pedophiles should escape, than that the Innocent Person should be subject to warrantless seizure.