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: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!

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?

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.

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.

Hello?!? MSDN

[LinuxPoultergist]

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