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

resume?

[PrinceAshitaka]

This summary doesn't actually say anything of how he is causing problems for microsoft. It is just his hacking resume.

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

Re:resume?

[stiggle]

I'm not sure where you get the "backstabbing little shit" from..
As part of his job he is asked by the authorities to examine evidence they already hold - in the case of the Welsh hacker and Gary Glitter where the police already had the evidence.
As ANOTHER part of his job, he does systems penetration tests.

He doesn't do illegal stuff these days - it would completely destroy the reputation he has built up as a credible expert witness. Why bother illegally breaking into systems when people will pay you to break into their own?

According to your thinking, every CSI and other specialist investigator is a "backstabbing little shit" as they turn over all the info they find to the authorities (who also hand it over to the defense as required to do so if they are using it in a court).

Re:resume?

[gnufied]

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

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:Not that I question Barrett's qualifications

[CaptainZapp]

he sure seems to be giving up quite easily when claiming that Microsoft's manuals are "totally unusable" after four days of use.

Looking at Microsofts history and some of their stunts they pulled off I wouldn't put it beyond them to indeed produce unusable crap.

Re:Not that I question Barrett's qualifications

[Frogbert]

I have been programming for 20 years, I have created extensive systems using Cobol and C++. I am able to debug programs from large memory dumps over the phone. In my time I have come across loads of code in many different languages, and I have to say even though a peice of code may documented it doesn't make it readable, understandable or even usable. Especially when said documentation starts with "I don't know exactly why this was included, what it does, or how it does it but the system won't work without it" or simply "Sorry about this..."

Here's a link to a microsoft document about it. .

[dreez]

googling brought this up. http://download.microsoft.com/download/5/3/2/53239 546-efee-460c-a583-11c20cdea9ab/03-02-06Supplement ary Response SO final NC.pdf Basically it says 'he is in a anti-microsoft conspiracy', and 'he don't know how to program' Grtz Drz WARNING: no tag line. . .

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.

Re:Not that I question Barrett's qualifications

[miffo.swe]

The problem was that the documentation said different things at different places without specifying wich way was the correct way. A documentation should do that, else its pretty much useless. You could just as well just reverse engineer if the end result of using the documentatin is random.

Guess who's paying him?

[tpgp]

The really funny bit of the article:

by the commission, which has signed him to a five-year contract at an undisclosed salary that it requires Microsoft to pay.

*heh* I bet that drives Bill crazy....

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.

Bill should hire new lawyers.

[supersnail]

I was pleasntly surprised during the US anti-trust case that Microsofts legeal team was so inept. Microsoft surivived that because of politics.

Thier lawyers seem even better at p****ng off European judges. Only this time there is no President of Texas to ride to the rescue. They are not a major generator of jobs or revenue for any european state, and, they cannot legally contibute to any European polititions campaign fund. Thier only hope was a sound legal case and ass kissing, but, its too late for that now. I think this is just starting out and Microsoft will be paying anf paying for years to come.

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:Bill should hire new lawyers.

[the_womble]

And MS (like a lot of US multinationals) stuctures is European operations to generate as much of its profits as possible in Ireland (because Ireland has low corporate tax rates).

The results are:

1) Ireland gets a lot of tax revenue
2) Ireland does what its told to by MS and others

This is also why Ireland was behind the EU attempt to introduce software patents.

All that trouble to get independence from Britain ... and a few decades later they sell themselves to the US.

Re:Bill should hire new lawyers.

[greenrd]

No wonder Charlie McCreevy (Irish EU commissioner) is opposed to EU harmonisation of corporate taxation laws!

Re:Bill should hire new lawyers.

[Darkman, Walkin Dude]

Its true I didn't say it wasn't true, but by not saying what was unsaid I was saying what would be the truth if I had said the truth, if indeed I didn't say the truth in the first place. Faith and begorrah.

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.

A security consultant

[BadAnalogyGuy]

From what I've been reading from him and in articles quoting him, he seems to be a very outspoken security consultant. His analyses seem very even-handed. He is able to praise Microsoft's security efforts when they do well, but he is also able to criticize them when they do poorly. He doesn't take any sort of hard stance against anyone except criminal hackers, a stance which is very firm. His credentials seem to give him and his security business quite a bit of gravitas.

Does that qualify him to sit in judgement of something which he could arguably be considered uninformed or unqualified about?

Again, I don't think there's anything wrong with Barrett personally or politically, but is he really the best person to provide expert witness in this case? Wouldn't someone from, say, the Samba team be more qualified to judge whether Microsoft's internetworking protocol documentation was sufficiently made open?

Re:A security consultant

[caffeination]

I disagree. I think someone of his stature can at least be trusted in his opinion of the quality of documentation.

Following your idea through, that would mean that Microsoft deliberately nominated a non-specialist just so that if he said anything negative, they could attack his competence. How sick would that be? And how unsurprising?

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.

All well and good....

[The Fold]

but has he hacked the Gibson?

Hmm, this explains things

[smithwis]

Evil Microsoft aside. Let us suppose that this is the same level of documentation Microsoft's internal development teams get:

Could this be why Microsoft projects consistently run over deadlines and behind expectations? (At least in the first iteration.)

This isn't Microsoft trying to screw the competitor, but just a peek into the hole that Microsoft has dug themselves into. Afterall, Microsoft hires can't all be dull-witted-code-monkeys, but perhaps the existing codebase has become a steaming pile of sh*t.

Working with c# and attempting to do anything beyond the immediately supported seems to support this. (Try overriding an OnPaint event on a ListViewBox for instance)

True Occupation of a Hacker

[Anonymous Coward]

While looking for Occupations from the pre 1900's, i came across the following in the list.

HABERDASHER - Seller Of Men's Clothing
HACKER - A Maker Of Hoes
HACKNEY MAN - Renter Of Horses & Carriages
HANDWOMAN - Midwife Or Female Attendant

So the true definition of a 'Hacker', was a Maker of Hoes.

Re:Not that I question Barrett's qualifications

[miffo.swe]

This isnt a case where Microsoft can point at a random OSS project and yell "they suck too!".

If the sentence is hard then tough luck, dont break the law in the first place. Its a punishment and its supposed to sting. It doesnt matter one bit if its hard to document the protocols but its pretty strange they arent already documented.

Its not surprising that it takes for ever to do patches when nobody inside Microsoft seems to know how things should work. They have to test every single line they alter because they dont know how things are supposed to work.

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.

No, Bill should try traditional methods.

[Savage-Rabbit]

Thier lawyers seem even better at p****ng off European judges. Only this time there is no President of Texas to ride to the rescue. They are not a major generator of jobs or revenue for any european state, and, they cannot legally contibute to any European polititions campaign fund. Thier only hope was a sound legal case and ass kissing, but, its too late for that now. I think this is just starting out and Microsoft will be paying anf paying for years to come.

They should have used the tried and tested method of offering 'Sales commissions' and 'Consultancy fees' to key officials like Lockheed did to convince certain European leaders to spend obscene amounts of money on a mediocre combat aircraft called the Locheed F-104 Starfighter. Judges may have strange delusions of independence over here but our politicians can certainly be rented, leased or bought just like their US counterparts and politicians as we all know can 'persuade' judges to think of the 'greater picture' by dropping hints about career death.

Re:Not that I question Barrett's qualifications

[Rauser]

He can speak baud, of course.

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:Not that I question Barrett's qualifications

[xtracto]

This isnt a case where Microsoft can point at a random OSS project and yell "they suck too!".

Haha, nice that you touch that point about documentation, just take a look at the KDevelop documentation that "comes" with the IDE suite, now *that* is what I call an unusable worth nothing piece of crap:

From the KDEvelop Handbook:

The Problem Reporter
  (... to be written ...)
Code Completion
  (... to be written ...)
Creating New Files and Classes
  (... to be written ...)
Editing the Templates
  (... to be written ...)
Class Hierarchy
  (... to be written ...)
Elements of the User Interface
  (... to be written ...)
The Workarea
  (... to be written ...)
The KDevelop Titlebar
  (... to be written ...)
The KDevelop Statusbar
  (... to be written ...)
The menubar
  (... to be written ...)
The Toolbars
  (... to be written ...)
The Tree Tool Views
  (... to be written ...)
The Output Tool Views
  (... to be written ...)

This one is GREAT:
"Class Tools
  The class tool dialog is activated by right clicking on a class in the class view and choosing Class tool...."

Automake Projects
  (... to be written ...)
Custom Makefiles and Build Scripts
  (... to be written ...)
Compiler Options
  (... to be written ...)
Make Options
  (... to be written ...)
Chapter 11. Advanced Build Management
Multiple Build Configurations
  (... to be written ...)

And that is /only/ for the C++ section of Kdevelop... but most of the Linux or OpenSource documentation provided is a joke.

Seriously, I may sound as a troll here but, there is *no* way you can tell me that is better than even the documentation on Borland C++ IDE!!!

Go ahead, mod me down I have tons of karma to burn but this is one of the /thousands/ of details why some open source software just can not make it. And the people that closes their eyes and negate it will never get it...

The good thing...

[jesterpilot]

Ireland is but a small country in the EU. Other member states see how Ireland gets revenue from taxes not paid in countries where the actual business was done. They will not think 'hey, that's fair, let them have that money, now let's listen what they have to say'. Other, more important member states will see the economic benefits from MS as stealing, not only from their own IT-business but also directly from their own treasure chest. And they are France, Germany and Italy, not Ireland. By evading taxes, MS might turn out to be penny wise, pound foolish.

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)

Hello?!? MSDN

[LinuxPoultergist]

Anyone who has ever had the misfortune to read MSDN documentation can see that Barrett speaks the truth.

Re:What does the EU want from microsoft?

[jonwil]

Forcing behavorial changes on microsoft is better than just punishment. Even if they were forced to pay huge globs of money to the EU in fines, its not going to stop them from continuing their monopolistic business practices that keep competitors out.
The only way to way to resolve the situation is to force behavorial changes. That means blocking monopolistic business practices (all the things microsoft does to OEMs because they are a monopoly and the OEMs have to do what MS says for example). That means forcing microsoft to open those things which it is using to maintain its monopoly like Windows Media Player file formats, MSN Messenger protocol, office document formats etc.
That means real change (A complete breakup of microsoft might be the only way to solve this for good)