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New Microsoft Dirty Tricks Revealed
Conrad Mazian writes "Robert X. Cringely has an article on the Technology Evangelist web site where he claims that Microsoft destroyed evidence in the Burst vs Microsoft case. Specifically Burst's lawyers had asked for certain emails, Microsoft claimed that they couldn't find the backup tapes the emails would be on, and while this was happening the tapes were in a vault at Microsoft — until they mysteriously disappeared. It's a fascinating story, and even names one person at Microsoft."
Oh, No! A corporation wrangles, delays, misplaces, obfuscates in the face of a lawsuit. Heaven's, what is the world coming to?
Microsoft must be the very first to EVER do this.
Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong fix.
Backup Exec.
Anyone who uses that trash deserves a corporate shakedown.
This is *real* journalism:
... the headline here said somehting about Microsoft's "NEW" dirty tricks? WTF?
- Nth hand unverified, information (My best friend's sister's boyfriend's brother's girlfriend heard from this guy who knows this kid who's going with a girl who saw Ferris pass out at 31 Flavors last night. I guess it's pretty serious. )
- this is about stuff along time ago.
- There is a lot suspect in what's being claimed in the article as well.
Well, as the tagline says:
"...In your answer, ignore facts. Just go with what feels true..."
'Microsoft server ate my hard disk.' The trump card in the ol' microsoft lawyer suitcase. All they have to do now is line up a liberal jury ...
These days when you are as large as microsoft is, it doesnt really matter if you break the law.
If you do, and actually get caught, you get some token fine and you chalk it up as a cost of doing business and move on.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Microsoft didn't loose the tapes, it's just that the backup server was being run by Vista!
The original generic sig.
As far as i am aware these aren't new allegations, i remember hearing about this back as far as 2 years ago at least. Some casual googling turns up documents from that time period.
There are lives at stake here!
Microsoft dirty tricks, part two
It's a fascinating story, and even names one person at Microsoft.
Oooh! It names someone at Microsoft. I'll tell you, but you gotta keep it a secret, okay? Bill Gates. Shhhh, don't tell anyone I told you...
This guy's the limit!
i believe that microsofts legal department is much much bigger then their horde of programmers. and there is probably a kb-article on microsoft.com about "unable to restore data from backuptape" or something like that.
MS should be the good guys here. Burst were suing them for patent infringement which we all know is an evil practice and should be resisted by all possible means.
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
Microsoft was saying that it couldn't find the tapes and that it would take millions of man-hours to search for them ...
And Microsoft wants to be number one in search?
Cringely posted the story in two parts, but the summary only links to the first. Second part here.
What's purple and commutes? An Abelian grape.
...destroy. Destruction of evidence, rights, the digital commons, a free market, etc.
Ballmer duck tape me to the wall, and told me "I'LL f**king kill you!" and threaten to throw a chair at me!
No sig for now.
"Burst lawyers caught a pattern of apparent destruction of e-mail evidence on the part of Microsoft."
The same repeating pattern: msft destroy's evidence, then msft accuses others of destroying evidence. Msft steals code, then accuses others of stealing code. Msft abuses the public by controlling the standards, then msft has a screaming hissy-fit accusing others of trying to control the standard. Msft lies to the public with astro-turfing, and hiring others to front for msft etc., then msft screams and crys and falsely accuses others of fronting for the competition. And so on, and so on.
.. at Microsoft unless there is a legitimate business reason for retention.
What you ppl don't want other ppl to realize is the bottom line here...Microsoft didn't loose the case...They were not guilty...in fact what's the fuss about...They rarely loose any cases....That proves that they are much much more innocent than you ppl blabber on about...
An even bigger issue is how Microsoft has lifted man kind...The PC would not exist without them...
Even if they did anything wrong the Bill & Milenda Gates Foundation makes up for it by an infenite amount.
This so called journalist just has a grudge against Bill Gates because he's so rich...just like you ppl...your just jealous about his money...grow up and get a life!!!
You smell like one of those people who is OK with the USA using torture...becauase at least we don't chop their heads off! Freakin' moral relativism.
Blar.
...in the least.
Relocating to San Francisco / Palo Alto... Hire me?
Read that article - those tapes were manually gathered complete backups that were moved by this contractor. He signed off on a specific number of tapes, and later it was discovered that the location held less tapes than it should have. The contractor and his company were held responsible.
The guy even mentions that this might be due to his companies error:
"Several months after all of the tapes were gathered, MS legal started asking for restores of any pst files captured, the tapes "mysteriously" went missing. Now because our team was a managed service vendor, we were held directly accountable and responsible for the loss. I can think of a lot of reasons that the tapes were removed by someone blue. It is also possible that someone on our team performing a standard purge of old media mistakenly pulled them and sent them to the shredder and even though the tapes were stored in a special section specifically marked "Do Not Touch" taped across them I find it highly unlikely."
Other than 'complete hearsay', this is speculation about a possible error on behalf of the contractor rather than a demonstration of Microsofts dirty tricks.
I think we need a corporate records retention law to help avoid these sorts of situations. Besides intentional destruction of evidence, many corporations intentionally destroy email as quickly as possible, to make it difficult for anyone to find any evidence of wrongdoing in future civil or criminal litigation.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
This was brought out by Plaintiff's opening statement in Comes. Check around 12/7 or 12/8 Because it was in opening statements, it's not evidence.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
why on earth ? can anyone confirm ?
Microsoft uses Dirty Tricks?!? Next you'll tell me that politicians lie and used car salesmen commit fraud!
/sarcasm
as long as a stockholder in your company has a Slashdot account. OJ should have hired Bill Gates to do the murders; then not only would he have hordes defending him, but there'd be an effort to convince the public that Nichole never existed in the first place.
The codename for the sucessor to vista?
(I know it's offtopic but it's funny so go ahead and nuke me)
Be gone from my sight or prepare to feel my flaming wraith!
Uh, Vista wasn't even available in beta form back then, so how does that work again?
The only way to kill an evil company appears to be to bankrupt it.
What on earth does it take to revoke a corporate charter these days?
Any one noticed one big problem in this post. All of Microsoft's email is stored in pst files? Wouldn't they be using a email system like Microsoft Exchange that stores all emails on the server? It does not make sense from a company standpoint to download all email to your desktop at work and not have it available anywhere.
What if this was the work of one individual?
A person who had her own agenda, wasn't in sync with the goals of our company?
Well, that usually works.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
Microsoft was saying that it couldn't find the tapes and that it would take millions of man-hours to search for them ...
Yes, it is best if they have a person search through the tape backup database to see where the tape is physically stored. It would take millions of hours. A computer could perform the database search in a couple seconds, but the query keeps crashing SQL Server ever since the Vista upgrade.
I just picked up an XBOX 360, this thing ROCKS! I had thought about getting a playstation 3 but the games suck and Sony is an evil corporation. THank god for Microsoft!
...check Sandy Berger's pants!!!
King of kings and Lord of lords
Enron is not gone because the reality that they actually had no money overtook their fiction, Enron is gone because they changed their name to CrossCountry Energy Corp. While most of their business activities stopped they were too well connected to just disappear.
http://www.enron.com/corp/pressroom/releases/2003http://www.igorinternational.com/press/bloomberg-
http://money.cnn.com/2002/02/22/news/enron_roundu
-rd
Wouldn't it hurt Microsoft's case to _not_ have the email backups? I mean Burst could claim anything they want to in an email purporting to come from Microsoft, and if MS didn't have the "original" then they couldn't dispute it.
Ergo, Burst has them by the short and curlies. You should keep copies of email specifically so that you can refer back to them in the event of a dispute.
Once I was a four stone apology. Now I am two separate gorillas.
Everybody knows that PJ took the tapes, and she's attempting to index them right now.
Sometimes boldness is in fashion. Sometimes only the brave will be bold.
Then they could take a page from the FBI playbook and manufacture a new set of tapes. >:-S
"Hitler wasn't so bad. Even Stalin had to kill people, sometimes."
This particular offense, not producing evidence on request, is just the thing to make a judge go ballistic. Courts see it as a direct attack against their authority. Lawyers will stall discovery, bury evidence in piles of other material, or fight discovery, but it's near unthinkable in their world to destroy evidence and the penalties are severe.
A court of law is asking you to divulge incriminating information.
Cancel or Allow?
Google...
Search Terms ==> apple backdate options (about 597,000 results)
Hypocrites!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
If I remember correctly, Burst started a court case against Microsoft for patent infringement a few years ago (one of those that we all love on Slashdot), and Microsoft paid them about $60 million in settlements. The court case looked very bad for Microsoft, not because there was any evidence of any wrongdoing, but because Microsoft had "lost" emails exactly for a critical time period, but not others just before or just after that time period. These are exactly the emails that this article is about.
To the courts, it doesn't make much difference whether you say "sorry, we lost these emails by accident" and say the truth, or you say "we destroyed these emails, take that!" and say the truth or not, or whether you say "sorry, we lost these emails" and are in fact hiding them. In each case, the emails are not there, and the courts will assume that whatever they might have contained was not good for you. So whether Microsoft really lost these emails or was just hiding them, it doesn't matter.
Similar, if you are taken to court because someone claims you downloaded music illegally, and you just happen to format your harddisk by accident, you are in deep shit. And it doesn't matter whether there was evidence on that harddisk or not.
You can name someone within a company as the perpetrator of a crime all you want-- we all know from experience that when someone does something as part of a corporation, it's virtually guaranteed that they will never face personal legal consequences for it. (And, similarly, no matter how bad a company is, there is no "corporate death penalty".)
Corporations have evolved into legal entities in which people can do illegal things. And get away with them.
With spending like this, exactly what are "conservatives" conserving?
They're also white and shiny. I want one!
My new blog
Regardless of your opinion about Microsoft, it seems like this is a case of stupidity of either Microsoft IT or their contractor, not malice. The last thing you want to do when you're being sued is destroy the documents subpoenaed during discovery. Having a corporate policy of deleting all emails regularly is one thing; expressing deleting a document that you know will be subpoenaed is quite another.
Microsoft's lawyers aren't stupid, though other parts of the company may be. If Microsoft were deleting incriminating documents that are subpoenaed, how does my signature exist? How could these documents be any more damaging than the others that did get released?
"Screw Sun, cross-platform will never work. Let's move on and steal the Java language." - Visual J++ Product Manager
Something to think about very carefully if you are a sysape and you are asked to 'lose' evidence. Especially if you know of an ongoing legal action.
Could you be sued? Thrown into jail for obstruction? Probably.
If anyone asks you to do this, or help out, just say 'no'. Then look for another employer because the one you are working for is both evil and stupid.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
Much of the same could be said of the old robber barrons, especially standard oil. They created a lot of jobs, provided a valuable product, and gave a lot of money to charities.
I suppose we should let those guys off the hook as well?
Fan-boy strawman arguement, I guess. This particular article has to do with msft. Nobody is letting apple off the hook, this article has nothing to do with apple, so we are discussing apple here.
Sounds rather typical to me. If you're somehow "fascinated" by this story you must have not worked in a corporation before.
||| I still can't believe Parkay's not butter.
Cool, so I can wait until that annoying git in the office down the hall formats his hard drive, then accuse him of downloading music illegally, and he's screwed :-)
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
Just ask the feds for a copy.
They have back up's of every email sent on the internet since 2001.
Am I supposed to talk about that oops I mean privacy laws are over rated. War on terror and all that.
The bill of rights is only for when we're not at war.
Can you remmember the last time we weren't at war? cold war, war on drugs, war on Iraq, war on terror, war on Taliban, war on Iraq again...
http://www.burst.com/new/newsevents/Burst.com%20Ap ple%20Answer%20and%20Counterclaim.pdf
They have a patent on buffering and streaming data faster than it can be played since 1990.
1. You couldn't stream that fast on most networks back then!!
2. Did they invent buffering? that's been around since the 70's at least maybe longer I'm not good with dates.
3. They list no protocol, method, innovation, file format or even a suggestion on how their supposed compression should be done.
So now they want money fom apple for itunes because it plays music while your downloading other media?
Who's next linux users. What about Real Media, they were streaming and buffering when wmp was a wave player.
I'd love to be an expert witness for apple, need someone with some fancy letters behind their name, I'm your man!!
This patent stuff has really reached a new low. It's gonna be awhile until the judges understand technology enough to throw these patents out on their face. I could patent the idea of downloading more than one file at a time and make a killing suing, who was it that thought of adding the resume feature to ftp clients?
Employees regularly "archive" their yearly, monthly mail on local machines or project servers (because they have more space). The corporate policy was to regularly delete any of these local archives. The fact that users don't is another matter. Why this policy is in place? Ask Ballmer.
The guy planted a bomb...all he has to do is send the torturers on a wild goose chase until the bomb goes off. You assume that the person values his own life over that of the cause. I submit that he values the cause over his own life. Just like a soldier willingly rushes into harm's way in the name of his government, believing what he is doing is right.
Blar.
You could use that same argument for Arthur Andersen during the Enron case.
The key question is very simple: what makes them KNOWINGLY risk this, or (put another way) what are they hiding that would be worse when discovered knowingly and willingly destroying potential evidence?
In both cases (Enron and Microsoft) I had a real problem with accepting things of this magnitude as 'accidents'. Too convenient, and too much a feeling of even more skeletons present in the mass burial closet than were discovered. In both cases the questionable events were sustained far longer than could be explained away by it being mere stupidity. Organisational stupidity comes in short bursts, not in week long sustained efforts.
So I don't buy the 'accident' claims, not even for a second.
Insert
Do some research on Cringley, the guy consistently is wrong. Not to say this didn't happen, maybe it did, but Cringley has the journalistic integrity of a fluke. If this showed up on the Wall Street Journal or NYTimes, maybe, but not with this bozo writing it. You readers just followed right along. Punch anyone??
Engineering is the art of compromise.