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DOJ To Oversee Windows 7 Development
MrKaos writes "Windows 7 is already being reviewed by U.S. government technical appointees. Under the terms of Microsoft's November 2001 Justice Department settlement, and final court judgment issued about a year later, a government-sanctioned 'Technical Committee' has been formed to oversee Windows development. The TC is responsible for ensuring that Microsoft complies with the terms of the final judgment, investigating complaints about Microsoft abuses and regularly reporting on the company's compliance."
Vista has issues without external help, so I'd hate to see what DOJ intervention is going to do other than make it even worse. I am not a big Microsoft fan, but please let them at least try to develop a decent OS without an external committee. Let them succeed or fail on their own merits. If the DOJ wants to intervene anywhere, at least do it in vetting the results or paying attention to contracts.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
Is it just the conspiracy theorist in me that finds this scary as to what could be added into Windows 7? Super-secret backroom deals that the DoD / DoJ can covertly spy on the unwitting populace?
With this much oversight, any development will slow to a crawl. If anything gets released at all, it will be a rehash of products they already make.
Insert Windows Vista joke here.
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
they check for illegal cooperation between a OS powerhouse (Microsoft) and a music/movies powerhouse (RIAA/MPAA)
Anyone who remembers that era knows that Microsoft's competitors got into marketplace trouble by sucking even worse than Microsoft. Netscape gave Microsoft the browser market because Communicator was a steaming pile of dog shit compared to IE4 and IE5. Java didn't take off because Sun didn't focus anywhere near enough effort early on into getting a fast interpreter (JIT should have been in version 1.0) and Sun didn't help things by treating Swing like a curiosity for the first few years of its existence. Need I go on?
With Windows Vista, the DOJ should have laid off. It was a total debacle for Microsoft and signaled that they are in decline. If there is anyone who merits a look for anti-competitive, restrictive behavior it's Apple. I say this as someone who still happens to enjoy a nearly 100% Apple ecosystem in his house (iPod, MacBook Pro, AppleTV...)
We can hate Microsoft but as a libertarian, I find this development scary. Getting the federal government involved in the design and manufacture of a product is unwarranted and is akin to precrime. The US Government should leave Microsoft's development of Windows 7 alone. If it turns out to have anti-competitive effects, then the government can punish Microsoft for it. Everyone may say that would be too little, too late, but preemptive strikes are un-American. (And besides, we can always break MS up if it keeps pushing out monopolistic products.)
A NYC lawyer blogs. http://www.chuangblog.com/
Power. They want it and don't want to share. The shareholders didn't fight, they couldn't even if they wanted to. All the VP's and CXO's would have had half the position they had previously.
It has been statistically shown that helmets increase the risk of head injury.
You seriously think that there isn't a U.S. made operating system that hasn't yet been back-doored by the NSA and / or CIA as a result of a back-room deal somewhere? I mean, I'm even a US citizen and I'm not so naive as to believe that they aren't all pretty well universally compromised, and there's no need to "phone home" on a regular basis so as to be caught out that easily - there are ways, and then there are ways. If you think that there is anything in a Windows installation that somehow makes your secure int he face of the Feds, you're sorely mistaken - your only hope is third-party tools which are very possibly just as compromised. Need evidence? Examine the cd-kit given out to Law Enforcement to enable them to access Windows Computers more easily by bypassing encryption and password security features.
I have it on good authority that there's only one OS on the market that remains safe from NSA/CIA/DOD/DOJ back-dooring at this moment, and that is mainly a result of it not being a natively U.S. produced distro.
"Inveniemus Viam Aut Faciemus" 'We will find a way... Or we will make one!' --Hannibal of Carthage
Why would you need to back-door Windows when it's so easy to break into without it? As for your LE CD kit, yeah there's tons of tools like that you can get as a civilian for free. Windows (including Vista) is trivially easy to hack if you have physical access, it's only marginally (and debatebly) less so if you don't.
Are agnostics skeptical of unicorns too?
"Netscape gave Microsoft the browser market because Communicator was a steaming pile of dog shit compared to IE4 and IE5"
.. Clone their client technology early and often (full embrace strategy)"
.. explicit sabotaging of any protocol extensions we make"
.. while infesting all other computing devices with it's programming language"
.. But Sun don't get invited to the party .. :)
.. er partners. Is there a differece .. :)
"I think we should have to do even more cloning of Netscape
"In worst case scenario, Netscape will
"Java didn't take off because Sun didn't focus anywhere near enough effort early on into getting a fast interpreter"
"it becomes clear to me that the Java OS will try to conquer the embedded marketplace
"We also talked about slowing down and coordinating modifications to the Java language - I proposed a "Java Language Council" made up of key tools vendors - MS, Borland, Symantec"
"With Windows Vista, the DOJ should have laid off. It was a total debacle for Microsoft and signaled that they are in decline"
The DOJ never did squat to reign in Microsoft. Vista isn't a problem for Microsoft as they have decided their key strategy is getting control of the Internet, through litigation threats and re-innovating the protocols. Billy boy is always ten steps ahead his partners
"If there is anyone who merits a look for anti-competitive, restrictive behavior it's Apple"
How many times has Apple been in court as often as Microsoft and for doing the same things.
davecb5620@gmail.com
Really? Do you REALLY find Libertarians scary? I mean, in the sense that they want to change the status quo, they are scary... I'll go along with you on that. But Libertarians just want to bring us back to the ideals of the founding fathers of the country. Do you think that US independence was a bad idea too? Honestly?
True, and it was the Clinton era justice department that went after Microsoft. The trial just lasted well into the Bush admini1stration. But do not confuse the Republican In Name Only's (RINO's, Aka Senator John McCain (Rino) Az, Senator Norm Coleman (Rino) MN, Senator Olympia Snowe (Rino) ME and many many others including President G.W. Bush), with conservatives or conservatism.
Are you SURE you know what the founding fathers wanted? I sure as hell don't, since it was 200+ years ago, and I'm not psychic. I do know, though, that they never read Ayn Rand, which seems to be the basis of most libertarian thoughts. We interpret history (and thus historical intentions) through the window of the present, and our intentions. Thus claiming you know their true intentions seems impossible, unless you can strip away all of the onus of the intervening history and your own psychology.
I know our founding fathers, though, read Locke and Mills, both of whom would be somewhat at odds with modern libertarian ideals, since they supported a more communal version of "rights" than most libertarians do today, as opposed to the base individualism that haunts the modern libertarian ideal. I doubt that many people from before the modern age would ever actually identify unmitigated individual greed as the basis of a political or social system.
That said, libertarians don't personally scare me, even if I am at odds with their ideals (mostly on the economic front), libertarians getting their way scares me. As does any narrow political ideology. Our system works best with a high degree of contention, and argument.
Personally I find the economic ideals of most libertarians to be naive, and based on personal greed rather than any actually rational basis. A truly free market would be a very bad thing for most of us. I do buy some of the social, and legal, ideals of the libertarian ideal though. But... my idea that government should exist only to maximize the good of the people under it is antithetical to much of the libertarian ideal, which seems to say "government should exist only to maximize my good".
Being that this veers dangerously off topic, let me add, this DoJ thing rather scares me, even if I understand that it isn't a "spook" thing. If the DoJ wanted to peek at the product AFTER it was developed (publicly and transparently), and only limited in the scope of the antitrust issue, I would be slightly less paranoid about this.
A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government. -edward abbey
The problem with Katrina wasn't Katrina itself, it was the idiots who built levees that allowed a city to exist below the natural water level in a zone where hurricanes happen from time to time.
The problem with MS-Windows is the legislation that allows copyrights for binary executable files. Check the US Constitution: "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries". Which part of "Writings" they didn't understand? Where is it mentioned the exclusive Right to codes compiled from Writings?
If the US Constitution were fully respected, programmers should have to publish their source code in order to get copyright protection.
Call me a cynic, but I just don't think people would care even if something like this was discovered. Our government can now hold us (yes you or me, anyone, get it through your head voters!) indefinitely without charge or accountability and the population accepts this. Windows, meanwhile, can decide whether or not we are even allowed to use the files on our computer, and what we can do with them. Some schemes actively delete stuff from our hard drives. I would have reached the end of my tether with both the OS and the Government years ago, yet Bush got voted in for a second term, and people are still buying Windows Vista even as they discuss how crap it is in comparison to XP. What is the mystical point at which the common man decides that enough is enough? Surely it's been and gone by now?
"If you want a vision of the future, Winston, imagine a boot stamping on a human face forever." - George Orwell, 1984
have the DOJ gone after IBM (the IT powerhouse of the 80s)? Because last time i checked you had to do something illegal before they could sue your ass.
Not true at all
Anyone, or any legal entity such as a corporation can be sued at any time for any reason. I am not accusing Google of doing anything more than gaining predominant market share, like Intel, for example, and getting sued for it.
As for the utility of antitrust suits, here's an interesting view.
After I saw an NT beta at COMDEX in the 90s, I speculated that Microsoft would be sued for antitrust by the end of the decade. I thought NT would be successful enough to get the competitors bent out of shape, and sure enough, that is what happened. Don't forget how much Unix cost back then. A low cost 32 bit OS was a disaster for Unix vendors. The huge mistake Microsoft made was to not settle with the DoJ.
Google is not likely to make the same mistake, but ultimately it will come down to which competitors or other interests have better lobbyists than Google, and how politically popular it will be to sue them. On that score, Google is more vulnerable, since they are doing so much tracking of what might be considered personal information. <tinfoilhat>Now imagine there is a future Nixonian US president, one who decides that forcing Google to give up some personal information might be very useful. That would be a good to time for that president to tell his or her AG to threaten Google. The "plumbers" will think: "it got us inside Microsoft, right?</tinfoilhat>
Imagine how much harder physics would be if electrons had feelings! -Feynman, maybe
http://paranoidlinux.org/