But you do this all the time, because you know that the folks who wrote your browser managed to not fuck up a jpeg decoder -- no matter what's in that file, the worst it can make you do is get in trouble with your boss.
I can think of at least one way a JPEG can get you in bigger trouble than that. >_>
Mmm, because a disease-racked, starving underclass is the perfect foundation for a stable and prosperous democratic society.
Obviously it's not ideal, but we have a fifteen TRILLION dollar deficit. There need to be sacrifices made, either by cutting spending, increasing taxes, or both.
But if we at least fund the military, the desperatly hungry, plague-ridden rabble with no jobs and no future will at least be well-trained in modern urban combat and the overthrow of oppressive (or just annoying) regimes.
There are three giant money-sucking programs that need drastic cuts if we want to do anything about the budget: Medicare/Medicaid, Social Security, and Defense.
The few million dollars these sites cost to run is a drop in the bucket compared to those three programs.
As for the "mother's operation" scenario: I doubt Google cares whether someone was trying to pay for their mother's operation or their own drug habit. Nor should they! If I were Google, I would not want infringing content on my store, no matter what the reason. I would feel no qualms about banning someone who tried selling Angry Birds because they needed to pay their mom's medical bills..
Your whole argument makes no sense. How would punishing infringement ever encourage people to infringe more? How would it "punish the partially or potentially developers much more than the wholesale infringers?" You make a lot of blanket statements, but say absolutely nothing to back them up.
Google's best move is to get rid of as much infringing content as possible. You could make the case that if an aspect of a game (or even the main subject of the game) is infringing, then Google should be judicious in assessing the situation. For games that are straight-up copies, however — as in, if the game is a straight-up pirated version that's been uploaded as the infringer's original work — then an auto-ban is not at all out of the question.
And FYI, the reason this is different from Google Video, YouTube, Google Docs, etc, is that here people are making money from infringement. It's a whole different ballgame.
Imagine a developer with legit games too who just posted that infringing game because his mother needs an operation.
That's not an excuse. Like others have said, if you rob a bank to pay for your mother's operation, you still go to jail.
Imagine two co-developers have falling out, one registers their new game first, reports the second's game as infringing, and gets the second account banned. Imagine a developer reposts another's game because he owns part but got cheated by the official developer. etc.
Not the right way to get the other developer to respect your IP rights. Complain to Google and get the game taken down, don't just submit it again.
Second, you don't want to scare away infringing users who might become legitimate non-infringing users and improve the Android market place.
Yes you do. "Cheating to test the waters" is a cop-out. Some of us write legitimate software to test the waters.
Third, Google can actually process future infringement claims more efficiently if infringers continue using the same accounts.
"Clear conjecture?" Surely you jest. Unless you've made an enormous breakthrough in networking technology, all existing network interfaces can only handle a finite amount of information at once.
AT&T said it made the move because a small percentage of customers has been using a disproportionate amount of data, causing congestion in certain points of the network and interfering with other people's access.
Wow, that sure sounds like they're denying that congestion is an issue!
As for U-verse, it's not primarily an on-demand service—its competitors are cable television providers, whom AT&T has no power to cap, not services like Hulu and Netflix.
If only there were some sort of "cap" to prevent and/or discourage people from overusing bandwidth and taxing the network...
To be clear, I would rather they improve the infrastructure than impose any sort of limits, but I would be perfectly happy if they would plainly state their (currently invisible) caps. If I pay for an unlimited amount of something, I expect to be given an unlimited amount of it. If I pay for 150GB, I expect to be given 150GB.
Bullshit. They've been promising that for a decade. Comcrap and Cox, the same.
It's still fucking vaporware there same as everywhere else.
So the monitoring tool that accompanies a not-yet-rolled-out service hasn't yet been rolled out? That's almost crazy enough to make perfect sense!
Just because it hasn't yet been released doesn't mean you get to slap a vaporware label on it.
Now you just proved you're a fucking braindead tool.
Uh huh. So they're not capping their U-Verse TV, but it's not on-demand. It's competing with things like actual digital cable, which is unaffected by the caps, so... the caps themselves don't provide an incentive to use that over a competing service.
If you measure max capacity x number of seconds in the month, perhaps.
If you underuse one second, though, you cannot make up for it by going "extra fast" later. Bandwidth is a MOMENTARY capacity, not something that can be stored for later use.
Once you get this simple fact to store correctly in your warped, defective brain, you will start to understand why "bandwidth caps" are meaningless to usage and serve no rational purpose.
Uh, at any given time there is a finite amount of bandwidth. Obviously you can't have a reserve of it, but that doesn't mean there's an infinite amount.
Now, how could bandwidth caps possibly affect usage? Maybe by incentivizing people to more conservative with their Internet usage? If Bob AT&T Subscriber sees that he can only use X amount of data, he'll use the Internet more conservatively. You're kidding yourself if you think that nobody will make the decision to conserve during peak hours.
Option 3: make the providers start obeying truth-in-advertising laws and actually fucking invest in network capacity again rather than pushing dishonest "up to X speed" plans where the users never see even a third of it.
Truth-in-advertising like... actually telling people the cap, rather than saying they give you "unlimited" whatever and then cutting you off when you hit an invisible cap?
Investing in infrastructure is all well and good, but just throwing hardware at the problem is not a scalable solution. You'll end up with a situation where the massive number of users makes it prohibitively expensive. Come up with a real way to reduce network congestion, or stop acting like a spoiled child. You're not fucking entitled to unlimited Internet access for a flat fee.
Maybe they STILL advertise it as unlimited because they STILL haven't rolled out the caps.
In the upcoming weeks, AT&T customers are going to start receiving notices that their broadband services are going to have a monthly cap, starting in May.
It's not the magnitude of the cap. It's that bandwidth - which is a momentary capacity, not a "month cycle" capacity - is being charged that way.
This ain't electricity or water, where there is a certain central pool quantity to draw from. It's on or off.
What would the solution to this be? A variable cap that changes based on how busy the network is?
Add to this the fact that NONE of these dishonest fuckers in these companies give you a good way to track "usage", and it gets worse.
FTFA:
Customers will be able to check their usage with an online tool, and get notifications when they reach 65 percent, 90 percent and 100 percent of their monthly rates.
So they're absolutely providing a way to check usage. The jury's out on whether or not it's a "good" way, but seeing as you haven't used it you are in no way capable of making that judgement.
Add in the fact that they are all doing this not to "manage slowdowns" but instead to try to push people back into buying "on demand TV" and "premium cable TV packages with rental DVR" and it's clear: this is not what they say it is. This is pure greed on their part.
Now you're just making things up. It doesn't mention that anywhere in the article.
There is a finite amount of bandwidth. The options that have been presented to solve this problem are traffic shaping and capping, so please either throw your towel in with one of those or propose another idea.
How is this bad for the consumer? It seems to me that this is better than the old business model of "promise consumers unlimited broadband service, and then shape traffic when we need to manage the network because we can't actually provide it." That's the whole reason traffic shaping is bad: ISPs are messing around with my traffic in order to improve performance for other customers, when according to their plans and advertising they should have the capacity for me to do whatever I want without needing to degrade my performance.
Bandwidth has a finite capacity. To deal with that, ISPs have introduced traffic shaping and caps. You can disagree with one or the other, but if you're complaining about both it sounds like you just feel entitled to everything.
The First Amendment doesn't say anything remotely like "all voices must be equally loud". That's what Net Neutrality does.
Uh, what? I don't really get your analogy with volume. Just as the First Amendment prevents the government from stopping or hindering someone from saying something (legal), net neutrality prevents ISPs from blocking or throttling traffic.
The First Amendment simply says that the federal government won't get involved in regulating speech....Which pretty much shoots down Net Neutrality right there, come to think of it.
You need to re-read the Constitution, and the definition of net neutrality. Net neutrality has nothing to do with regulating speech.
You'll never get an example of what exactly net neutrality is supposed to solve, because there haven't been any examples.
Ha! Hahahaha. Surely you jest, bonch. Not only can examples be found in abundance, but there's a nice fat juicy one in TFA—and straight from the president of an ISP, no less!
DeReggi told lawmakers he may want to block services like Netflix because they take up too much bandwidth for WiMax-based broadband.
That is it in a nutshell.
Also, let's rid ourselves of this false notion that "ISPs run their own private networks." Who paid for these networks? The government. Who owns the land under these cables and towers? The government. It is a specious claim to say that the ISPs' networks are "their own."
That's what happened in my high school — the school IT people would store the administrator password on sticky notes. Inevitably one fell off in the hallway, and my friends and I found it, and decided to pull a few pranks.
The administration and IT people got really pissed and changed the password. Which, of course, we found a few days later sitting on a sticky note in the hall...
It's really more sad than funny, actually, because not only did the IT people use the same administrator password everywhere, our school actually served as the ISP/host for a lot of municipal services around our county, including the police department.
You are free to create a WebM codec as much as you are free to write a Linux derivative. not so with H.264.
I am "free" to implement either codec, no one can stop me. The issue is that with H.264 if I plan to distribute that implementation I must pay license fees to the patent holders.
Both codecs are free in different ways. WebM is gratis; free as in beer; it costs no money to implement and distribute, but not to contribute to. H.264 is libre; free as in speech; you must pay to distribute an implementation, but anyone can contribute to the spec.
Like I said, I think the ability to contribute the codec vastly outweighs the ability to implement it for free.
Even if MPEG-LA turns out to be full of hot air, between H.264 and WebM, we're choosing between the lesser of two evils.
H.264 is "open" (it has gone through a standardization process, and anyone can contribute) but patent-encumbered (anyone providing an implementation must pay license fees.
WebM is "closed" (the spec is solely under Google's control) but (hopefully) patent-unencumbered (anyone can implement it for free).
Between the two, I would go with H.264 because I think openness is more valuable than patent-unencumbered-ness, but that's just me. Either way, we have to give something up.
Google specifically stated that they saw the effects in many queries, including more common ones.
There you go! Case closed, guys. Bing's stealing search results, Google said it.
Citation needed much?
Bing's toolbar is tracking users' browsing and clicking habits. If those users are spending a lot of time on Google.com, it makes sense that Google's results could have a small influence on Bing's.
Oh, and before you say "they shouldn't be tracking users' browsing habits on Google searches"—should they maintain a blacklist of every search engine on the web, or is only Google special enough to warrant that type of exemption?
i.e. Bing steals google results when they don't have anything.
Bzzt! It's not like when the Google engineers searched for the honeypot terms on Bing, Bing thought "oh snap, I got nothing. Time to use Google's results!"
Bing is just using users' browsing habits to determine search results. Because Google used a honeypot, the only information Bing had on those particular searches was the browsing habits of the Google engineers. That's why it looked like Google's results—Google was careful to make sure that there could be no other information available for Bing to return any other results.
The toolbar records searches, not general traffic, and If they wanted to track Bing results only they could have done what Google does: change Bing.com itself to do the tracking (and it would work even without the toolbar!). The only reason to copy the toolbar searches is to rip other search engines off.
Except that logic falls apart once you realize that Google's search results don't just come from Google's spider. They also factor in the links you click on Google.com, the AdWords links you find around the web, your geographic location, your browsing habits with the Google toolbar, the contents of your mail in Gmail... I'm sure there are hundreds of other factors.
Bing's toolbar records browsing habits and user clicks. It doesn't care what site the user is on. The fact that they didn't explicitly disable that tracking on Google.com doesn't mean they're ripping Google searches off.
Why would you mention "opting-in" without saying what they "opted in" for. The crucial thing here, was that there was no warning that opting in for sending data to Microsoft might lead to that data being used on their search engine. Again, this claim is more interesting in what it shows about Microsoft than Google.
The grandparent meant "opting in" to click tracking on the Bing toolbar. This applies just as much to Google as it does to Microsoft - it's ridiculous to claim otherwise. Google tracks your clicks and your browsing habits, and has never tried to claim otherwise. What do you think that onclick function on every single search result on Google searches is doing?
So the fact that Google doesn't know the details of the inside of Microsoft's system is their fault now?
You can use that to claim anything. Yahoo: "Hey, we made a search on Google.com and its top result was the same as ours! They must be copying our results! Why is every other search result different? Hey, it's not our fault we don't know the details of the inside of Google's system!"
What's worse is that there is a very clear and simple explanation for this. Microsoft knows that what it is doing is wrong. The copying is even more blatant than that (e.g. they copy clicks mostly from Google, partly from Wikipedia and other key sources and not at all from random pages round the web). Instead of making a fairer algorithm themselves they have spent effort on cloaking their copying. They only randomly introduce results and only after a random delay from the point where the results are clicked on. This is not designed to improve results by weighing up different factors (remember there aren't any other factors in these particular results).
Ah, here's the real meaty part. Let me call out one particular line.
they copy clicks mostly from Google, partly from Wikipedia and other key sources and not at all from random pages round the web
Citation needed much? I would love to see any—any—information about where the track click data (other than clearly Google).
It astonishes me that you realize how Microsoft was able to index these sites, and you still think they're at fault. They are tracking their users' click data—something the users implicitly opted into by installing the toolbar, just as you implicitly opt into Google parsing your emails by using Gmail, or Google tracking your clicks by using Google search, etc. The reason they were so high up is that the clicks were the only factor in their ranking—you said it yourself!
So now the question: what did Microsoft do wrong? They're simply taking the browsing habits of their users and using it to improve their searches. In this case, the only data available was the honeypot Google set up, so it ended up at the top. That's it, plain and simple.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, McDonalds *has* been sued because parents buy their kids McPoison. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/2502431.stm
Thankfully, it ended up getting thrown out, but still...
But you do this all the time, because you know that the folks who wrote your browser managed to not fuck up a jpeg decoder -- no matter what's in that file, the worst it can make you do is get in trouble with your boss.
I can think of at least one way a JPEG can get you in bigger trouble than that. >_>
Mmm, because a disease-racked, starving underclass is the perfect foundation for a stable and prosperous democratic society.
Obviously it's not ideal, but we have a fifteen TRILLION dollar deficit. There need to be sacrifices made, either by cutting spending, increasing taxes, or both.
But if we at least fund the military, the desperatly hungry, plague-ridden rabble with no jobs and no future will at least be well-trained in modern urban combat and the overthrow of oppressive (or just annoying) regimes.
I was advocating CUTTING the defense budget.
There are three giant money-sucking programs that need drastic cuts if we want to do anything about the budget: Medicare/Medicaid, Social Security, and Defense.
The few million dollars these sites cost to run is a drop in the bucket compared to those three programs.
As for the "mother's operation" scenario: I doubt Google cares whether someone was trying to pay for their mother's operation or their own drug habit. Nor should they! If I were Google, I would not want infringing content on my store, no matter what the reason. I would feel no qualms about banning someone who tried selling Angry Birds because they needed to pay their mom's medical bills..
Your whole argument makes no sense. How would punishing infringement ever encourage people to infringe more? How would it "punish the partially or potentially developers much more than the wholesale infringers?" You make a lot of blanket statements, but say absolutely nothing to back them up.
Google's best move is to get rid of as much infringing content as possible. You could make the case that if an aspect of a game (or even the main subject of the game) is infringing, then Google should be judicious in assessing the situation. For games that are straight-up copies, however — as in, if the game is a straight-up pirated version that's been uploaded as the infringer's original work — then an auto-ban is not at all out of the question.
And FYI, the reason this is different from Google Video, YouTube, Google Docs, etc, is that here people are making money from infringement. It's a whole different ballgame.
Imagine a developer with legit games too who just posted that infringing game because his mother needs an operation.
That's not an excuse. Like others have said, if you rob a bank to pay for your mother's operation, you still go to jail.
Imagine two co-developers have falling out, one registers their new game first, reports the second's game as infringing, and gets the second account banned. Imagine a developer reposts another's game because he owns part but got cheated by the official developer. etc.
Not the right way to get the other developer to respect your IP rights. Complain to Google and get the game taken down, don't just submit it again.
Second, you don't want to scare away infringing users who might become legitimate non-infringing users and improve the Android market place.
Yes you do. "Cheating to test the waters" is a cop-out. Some of us write legitimate software to test the waters.
Third, Google can actually process future infringement claims more efficiently if infringers continue using the same accounts.
That makes no sense at all.
What were you saying about morons?
Yes, a criminal court would care about exactly those points.
No.
"Clear conjecture?" Surely you jest. Unless you've made an enormous breakthrough in networking technology, all existing network interfaces can only handle a finite amount of information at once.
From the Wall Street Journal:
AT&T said it made the move because a small percentage of customers has been using a disproportionate amount of data, causing congestion in certain points of the network and interfering with other people's access.
Wow, that sure sounds like they're denying that congestion is an issue!
As for U-verse, it's not primarily an on-demand service—its competitors are cable television providers, whom AT&T has no power to cap, not services like Hulu and Netflix.
[citation needed]
If only there were some sort of "cap" to prevent and/or discourage people from overusing bandwidth and taxing the network...
To be clear, I would rather they improve the infrastructure than impose any sort of limits, but I would be perfectly happy if they would plainly state their (currently invisible) caps. If I pay for an unlimited amount of something, I expect to be given an unlimited amount of it. If I pay for 150GB, I expect to be given 150GB.
I fail to see the problem here.
Bullshit. They've been promising that for a decade. Comcrap and Cox, the same. It's still fucking vaporware there same as everywhere else.
So the monitoring tool that accompanies a not-yet-rolled-out service hasn't yet been rolled out? That's almost crazy enough to make perfect sense!
Just because it hasn't yet been released doesn't mean you get to slap a vaporware label on it.
Now you just proved you're a fucking braindead tool.
Uh huh. So they're not capping their U-Verse TV, but it's not on-demand. It's competing with things like actual digital cable, which is unaffected by the caps, so... the caps themselves don't provide an incentive to use that over a competing service.
If you measure max capacity x number of seconds in the month, perhaps. If you underuse one second, though, you cannot make up for it by going "extra fast" later. Bandwidth is a MOMENTARY capacity, not something that can be stored for later use. Once you get this simple fact to store correctly in your warped, defective brain, you will start to understand why "bandwidth caps" are meaningless to usage and serve no rational purpose.
Uh, at any given time there is a finite amount of bandwidth. Obviously you can't have a reserve of it, but that doesn't mean there's an infinite amount.
Now, how could bandwidth caps possibly affect usage? Maybe by incentivizing people to more conservative with their Internet usage? If Bob AT&T Subscriber sees that he can only use X amount of data, he'll use the Internet more conservatively. You're kidding yourself if you think that nobody will make the decision to conserve during peak hours.
Option 3: make the providers start obeying truth-in-advertising laws and actually fucking invest in network capacity again rather than pushing dishonest "up to X speed" plans where the users never see even a third of it.
Truth-in-advertising like... actually telling people the cap, rather than saying they give you "unlimited" whatever and then cutting you off when you hit an invisible cap?
Investing in infrastructure is all well and good, but just throwing hardware at the problem is not a scalable solution. You'll end up with a situation where the massive number of users makes it prohibitively expensive. Come up with a real way to reduce network congestion, or stop acting like a spoiled child. You're not fucking entitled to unlimited Internet access for a flat fee.
In the upcoming weeks, AT&T customers are going to start receiving notices that their broadband services are going to have a monthly cap, starting in May.
Sorry, buddy.
It's not the magnitude of the cap. It's that bandwidth - which is a momentary capacity, not a "month cycle" capacity - is being charged that way. This ain't electricity or water, where there is a certain central pool quantity to draw from. It's on or off.
What would the solution to this be? A variable cap that changes based on how busy the network is?
Add to this the fact that NONE of these dishonest fuckers in these companies give you a good way to track "usage", and it gets worse.
FTFA:
Customers will be able to check their usage with an online tool, and get notifications when they reach 65 percent, 90 percent and 100 percent of their monthly rates.
So they're absolutely providing a way to check usage. The jury's out on whether or not it's a "good" way, but seeing as you haven't used it you are in no way capable of making that judgement.
Add in the fact that they are all doing this not to "manage slowdowns" but instead to try to push people back into buying "on demand TV" and "premium cable TV packages with rental DVR" and it's clear: this is not what they say it is. This is pure greed on their part.
Now you're just making things up. It doesn't mention that anywhere in the article.
There is a finite amount of bandwidth. The options that have been presented to solve this problem are traffic shaping and capping, so please either throw your towel in with one of those or propose another idea.
How is this bad for the consumer? It seems to me that this is better than the old business model of "promise consumers unlimited broadband service, and then shape traffic when we need to manage the network because we can't actually provide it." That's the whole reason traffic shaping is bad: ISPs are messing around with my traffic in order to improve performance for other customers, when according to their plans and advertising they should have the capacity for me to do whatever I want without needing to degrade my performance.
Bandwidth has a finite capacity. To deal with that, ISPs have introduced traffic shaping and caps. You can disagree with one or the other, but if you're complaining about both it sounds like you just feel entitled to everything.
The First Amendment doesn't say anything remotely like "all voices must be equally loud". That's what Net Neutrality does.
Uh, what? I don't really get your analogy with volume. Just as the First Amendment prevents the government from stopping or hindering someone from saying something (legal), net neutrality prevents ISPs from blocking or throttling traffic.
The First Amendment simply says that the federal government won't get involved in regulating speech. ...Which pretty much shoots down Net Neutrality right there, come to think of it.
You need to re-read the Constitution, and the definition of net neutrality. Net neutrality has nothing to do with regulating speech.
You'll never get an example of what exactly net neutrality is supposed to solve, because there haven't been any examples.
Ha! Hahahaha. Surely you jest, bonch. Not only can examples be found in abundance, but there's a nice fat juicy one in TFA—and straight from the president of an ISP, no less!
DeReggi told lawmakers he may want to block services like Netflix because they take up too much bandwidth for WiMax-based broadband.
That is it in a nutshell.
Also, let's rid ourselves of this false notion that "ISPs run their own private networks." Who paid for these networks? The government. Who owns the land under these cables and towers? The government. It is a specious claim to say that the ISPs' networks are "their own."
DeReggi told lawmakers he may want to block services like Netflix because they take up too much bandwidth for WiMax-based broadband.
I think that about sums it up.
That's what happened in my high school — the school IT people would store the administrator password on sticky notes. Inevitably one fell off in the hallway, and my friends and I found it, and decided to pull a few pranks.
The administration and IT people got really pissed and changed the password. Which, of course, we found a few days later sitting on a sticky note in the hall...
It's really more sad than funny, actually, because not only did the IT people use the same administrator password everywhere, our school actually served as the ISP/host for a lot of municipal services around our county, including the police department.
You are free to create a WebM codec as much as you are free to write a Linux derivative. not so with H.264.
I am "free" to implement either codec, no one can stop me. The issue is that with H.264 if I plan to distribute that implementation I must pay license fees to the patent holders.
Both codecs are free in different ways. WebM is gratis; free as in beer; it costs no money to implement and distribute, but not to contribute to. H.264 is libre; free as in speech; you must pay to distribute an implementation, but anyone can contribute to the spec.
Like I said, I think the ability to contribute the codec vastly outweighs the ability to implement it for free.
Even if MPEG-LA turns out to be full of hot air, between H.264 and WebM, we're choosing between the lesser of two evils.
Between the two, I would go with H.264 because I think openness is more valuable than patent-unencumbered-ness, but that's just me. Either way, we have to give something up.
Didn't read the story did you? NaziMohammed.com is good to go. Mohammed.Nazi may be a bust though.
Didn't read the story, did you? NaziMohammed.com and Mohammed.Nazi may both be busts.
From the article:
In fact, the NTIA is asking for the power to object to any proposed Internet address for any reason.
That is a power not limited to TLD proposals.
There you go! Case closed, guys. Bing's stealing search results, Google said it.
Citation needed much?
Bing's toolbar is tracking users' browsing and clicking habits. If those users are spending a lot of time on Google.com, it makes sense that Google's results could have a small influence on Bing's.
Oh, and before you say "they shouldn't be tracking users' browsing habits on Google searches"—should they maintain a blacklist of every search engine on the web, or is only Google special enough to warrant that type of exemption?
Bzzt! It's not like when the Google engineers searched for the honeypot terms on Bing, Bing thought "oh snap, I got nothing. Time to use Google's results!"
Bing is just using users' browsing habits to determine search results. Because Google used a honeypot, the only information Bing had on those particular searches was the browsing habits of the Google engineers. That's why it looked like Google's results—Google was careful to make sure that there could be no other information available for Bing to return any other results.
Except that logic falls apart once you realize that Google's search results don't just come from Google's spider. They also factor in the links you click on Google.com, the AdWords links you find around the web, your geographic location, your browsing habits with the Google toolbar, the contents of your mail in Gmail... I'm sure there are hundreds of other factors.
Bing's toolbar records browsing habits and user clicks. It doesn't care what site the user is on. The fact that they didn't explicitly disable that tracking on Google.com doesn't mean they're ripping Google searches off.
The grandparent meant "opting in" to click tracking on the Bing toolbar. This applies just as much to Google as it does to Microsoft - it's ridiculous to claim otherwise. Google tracks your clicks and your browsing habits, and has never tried to claim otherwise. What do you think that onclick function on every single search result on Google searches is doing?
You can use that to claim anything. Yahoo: "Hey, we made a search on Google.com and its top result was the same as ours! They must be copying our results! Why is every other search result different? Hey, it's not our fault we don't know the details of the inside of Google's system!"
Ah, here's the real meaty part. Let me call out one particular line.
Citation needed much? I would love to see any—any—information about where the track click data (other than clearly Google).
It astonishes me that you realize how Microsoft was able to index these sites, and you still think they're at fault. They are tracking their users' click data—something the users implicitly opted into by installing the toolbar, just as you implicitly opt into Google parsing your emails by using Gmail, or Google tracking your clicks by using Google search, etc. The reason they were so high up is that the clicks were the only factor in their ranking—you said it yourself!
So now the question: what did Microsoft do wrong? They're simply taking the browsing habits of their users and using it to improve their searches. In this case, the only data available was the honeypot Google set up, so it ended up at the top. That's it, plain and simple.