Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
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.
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.
Only for patents with titles like "A Method Of Compressing ASCII Text Files By Flagging The 128 Most Common English Words With The Parity Bit"
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
An even bigger issue is how Microsoft has lifted man kind...The PC would not exist without them...
Nonsense, if Micro$oft never bought the CPM rip-off 86-DOS and renamed it "PC-DOS 1.0" Gary Kildall at Digital Research would have just marked CPM directly to IBM and today we'd all be running GEM XP.
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!
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?
The patents are generic and Burst pulled the same shit with Apple, claiming they infringed them as well.
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
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.
DOS was arguably the greatest step backwards in whole computer history.
Arguably.
Because after DOS there were Windows 1.0 - 5.x (which were a step back from Macintosh and Unix running X11) and Windows Vista (which is a step back from GNU/Linux running X11 and Beryl/Compiz).
Why is M$ living backwards in time?... =P
... or one of /.'s favored Posix o/s's that have gained popularity in the last decade or so.
Childish simplicity and idealism are the cornerstones of Slashdot.
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
Burst sued Microsoft for restraint of trade (bullying Intel and others into changing their minds and choosing not to license Burst code -- yes CODE), breach of contract (violating an NDA), anti-trust (essentially killing Burst's business through the intentional application of monopoly power), AND patent infringement. This case was far less a matter of Microsoft infringing Burst patents than it was Microsoft obtaining confidential access to, then STEALING Burst technology, which happened to be all those nifty improvements they added to Windows Media 8.
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.
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.
Google...
Search Terms ==> apple backdate options (about 597,000 results)
Hypocrites!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Because if the dude is serious at all, he knows, "Just hold out until Saturday at 7pm, and boom! All glory to Cobra Commander!" In a ticking time bomb situation, a terrorist who has the balls to murder a million people won't just pussy out because we pull out his fingernails or whatever. If we're asking him where the bomb will go off, he knows it hasn't gone off yet, so he just needs to send you off on a wild goose chase from now until it does.
Meanwhile, how do we know for sure that the military pulled the right guy off the street? It makes sense to have a trial to be sure about it. Once the trial is through, give him the electric chair. But don't go torturing people who you haven't proved are guilty and have nothing to gain from spilling the beans and everything to gain from making up some crap and waiting for the clock to hit zero hour.
However there is always a chance it'll work, particularly where the subject is weak-willed, as I beleive may be the case with many of the suicide bombers. Contradiction? You can force a weak-willed person to kill themselves, or to assent to nonsense. It's not difficult. The act of will isn't in carrying out the act: it's in resisting the brain-washer, or peer-pressure, or whatever - or in this case the failure to resist. You could argue that the chap isn't fully assenting, but I don't think that's true since violent, nasty, angry, hatefilled people are typical of the weak-willed. The strong man is weak-willed if he uses his strength against those who are weaker than he, instead of protecting and helping them. It's a nice paradox.
In any case court cases are all very well, but they are only to put to trial the ones who refuse to admit what they have done. But the whole point of my example is that the guy has admitted it. Granted that isn't going to happen often and granted there are a few crazies out there who admit to anything (perhaps even with the threat of torture) but it isn't possible to order society around crazies, not if you want a functioning society, that is. Or one that doesn't get itself nuked.
Nevertheless even if a guy won't admit to planting the bomb: if he does admit to being part of an organisation committed to planting bombs then that may be enough to justify his torture.
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.
Do you mean that as a positive statement about what is good about slashdot? I used the word 'simplistic'. Ie "Childish simplisticness", which are both derogatory words. But you use simplicity, which isn't. If you had said "childlike simplicity" I would have had to disagree.
Applying it to the innocent is bad, but even applying it to the guilty isn't that great -- So you cause so much pain that a guy will tell you anything to make you stop. That doesn't mean he'll tell you the truth. Kinda like bullying a kid until he says what you tell him to say. Doesn't mean he actually means it, or isn't just lying to get you to stop.
Pain lasts, kid. Its how you know you're alive. Sometimes I think this growing up thing is just pain management-TheMaxx
The main point though is that the guy deserves as much as he is willing to give, but torture under these conditions actually stops short of that. It's not even equivalent to an eye-for-an-eye.
I'm sure it was cheaper to pay the contractor to take that fall than to settle in the face of the damning evidence that was on those "lost" tapes.
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?
You made a typo there. Let me fix it for you:
Childish simplicity and idealism are the cornerstones of our society.
Ever since the rise of the great French philosophers - Rousseau, Voltaire and co. - an idea has existed that there is such a thing as a higher good. Rousseau depicted it as a Social Contract, while Voltaire depicted it as an accommodation between the selfish venality of human nature and the coincidence of our interests.
Ironically, the Enlightenment was fueled in no small part by the revolutionary fires ignited by the birth of the United States of America. Few nations that once embraced its ideals have since drifted so far.
Terry Pratchett has more recently depicted these 'higher truths' as Lies to Children, that is, simplistic concepts that allow us to coexist fruitfully and peacefully in our world. As Death says to his adoptive Daughter, "I challenge you to show me a single atom of Justice anywhere in this universe."
Denigrating idealism is a dangerous game. As with all philosophical concepts, idealism and the sense of a Higher Truth do not always serve in the particular, but taken as guidelines or principles of governance, they are critical to the survival of the species. We cast them aside at our own peril.
Crumb's Corollary: Never bring a knife to a bun fight.
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
Digital Research specifically DID sell CP/M-86. And it was marketed directly from inside IBM. You could buy PC-DOS or CP/M-86 in slipcovered cases direct from IBM. Both were optional, as you could also run the ROM BASIC which was similar to Apple or Commodore (nobody did.)
CP/M-86 had a fair run at it but failed in the marketplace.
GEM is another matter entirely. Apple consistently and aggressively litigated all GUI products for the PC and other non-Apple platforms off the market. We can blame Apple for 'driving the PC GUI market' (all the Windows competitors) out of business until a strong competitor (Microsoft) came along who they couldn't run out of business. Bill Gates should send Jobs a token gift every year for prepping the market for Windows the way his company did.
'UNIX running X11' in any 'non-laboratory theoretical' setting dates to about the same era as Windows 3. Which is the same era as DOS 5. 'DOS 1.0 to 5.x' was specifically NOT a 'step backward' from an X11 which was still evolving in parallel markets on parallel platforms. Macintosh of the DOS 3.x era was a crash-prone toy, not a whole lot better than Windows of the time. Macintosh of the DOS 1.x era didn't exist. Not at all.
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+
Mostly because back then, Dos was a lightweight enough operating system to run on a typical home/business computer of the era. Sure, it wasn't as advanced as other platforms, but when you have 640k of ram and a 4.77Mhz processor it's not like you're going to be running a full Unix system with X11.
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"?
Nonsense, if Micro$oft never bought the CPM rip-off 86-DOS and renamed it "PC-DOS 1.0" Gary Kildall at Digital Research would have just marked CPM directly to IBM and today we'd all be running GEM XP.
He did. IBM would sell you a PC with CP/M if you wanted it.
However, a bigger problem with your argument is that the underlying logic dictates you can't give anyone/anything credit for any achievement, since "if they hadn't done it, someone else would have".
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
Courts of law are not about punishing the guilty they are about protecting the public from the government and from thugs in uniform. A terrorist suspect is only a suspect because some one 'thinks' or 'decides' they should be one, there is no proof, if there was, that person would be arrested and sent to the courts where the validity of the evidence could be tested and to ensure some incompetent ass wipe didn't falsify the evidence or just outright lied to get promotion or even to hide their own incompetence (if you can't catch the guilty then convicting an innocent can still get you re-elected).
Consider the long term ramifications. Through out history, torturers where isolated from the rest of the community because any individual they can achieve job satisfaction and a personal sense of accomplishment from the infliction of pain, suffering and degradation upon others, is a dangerously deranged psychopathic individual and a threat to the community. Honestly, would you want a US military approved torturer living next door to you and having access to your family (a thug that listened to the agonised screams of human beings 8 hours a day with out a qualm whilst eating undisturbed meals, sleeping peacefully and collecting what they considered to be their well deserved pay check).
How many thousands of CIA trained torturers will the US government be releasing upon an unsuspecting public, torturers who no longer have the legal means by which to fulfil those urges they have became accustomed too. Check with any real law enforcement authority and they will tell you exactly what kind of long term threat those individuals who voluntarily participated in that kind of abhorrent behaviour really are.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
However the first half of what you wrote is, ultimately, just procedure. If the court case can be handled within half an hour the fellow still gets tortured. And justly.
As for the 2nd half of what you wrote : the man who judges is logically united to the man who administers the judgement. And so if there is no shame to being a judge then there can be no shame to being the instrument of justice. If the administration of that justice is not well ordered to the wellbeing of that instrument then a solution is required, but the fact remains that the man is tortured justly.
What I wonder is whether Socrates would have submitted to torture.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
I should have added pedantism as well.
Not to dismiss Hitler as a repugnant murderer. But the fact is that Stalin killed even more people.
Your ad could be here!
Thanks for that. But we/I still don't know what you meant in your original reply. How about giving an answer instead of being unpleasant.