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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.
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..."
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!
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!
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.
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.
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.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
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?
"They generate a large fraction of the US GNP, "
They do? And assuming they do, is that a get out of jail free card?
If so, why?
"they make the software that has made computers cheap and ubiquitous for everybody on the planet,"
There were many others in that game too, till they were crushed.
And they have made a very pretty penny from it.
And it is not like it would not have happened anyway ( there is nothing all that special about Microsoft
in that regard )
"and Bill Gates personally funds one of the largest charities in the world."
Again, is this a get out of jail free card? Why do you bring it up?
Is it OK to destroy evidence because you donate money to a charity?
"Now, if I can only get one of their salespeople to call me back about a large new installation I'm getting ready to do..."
Good luck on that.
emt 377 emt 4
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.
I had a dog eat my home work once. Actualy is was more then once but i finaly figured out the problem. We used to put peanut butter in the dogs chew toys as a reward for doing something good like not tearing anything up when we left him along or comming when called.
Well, long story short, When I would eat a peanut butter sandwich while doing my homework the dog would seem interested in my backpack that night. When I left the zipper open or worse yet, it broke fro shoving too much stuff in it, the dog went in and ate the papers I was working on while eating the peanut butter sandwich.
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
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.
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.
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
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
Because, if that's true, then making Microsoft dissapear off the face of the earth would have a significant effect on the economy of the United States. That is, like it or not, more important to the US government than applying absolute justice to Microsoft is.
That doesn't mean the government can't levy huge fines, etc. They love taking money from people and entities that they have full control over, but if they kill the company, they don't get to take the money anymore
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