taint.org: Justin Mason’s Weblog

• Va. Supreme Court Strikes Down State’s Anti-Spam Law : argh! IMO the judge has confused misleading forged headers with anonymous speech
  (tags: anonymity legal law jeremy-jaynes spam anti-spam virginia)

• Watch out for that Dropbox Public Folder : Joe has a good point: ‘you hereby grant all other Dropbox users a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free, sublicensable, perpetual and irrevocable right and license to use and exploit Your Files in your public folder.’ wtf
  (tags: dropbox ip backup legal terms-and-conditions legalese)

• Microsoft Open Source inside Google Chrome : namely the Windows Template Library, now distributed under the (OSI-approved) Microsoft Public License. strange days (via reddit)
  (tags: microsoft open-source osi google chrome wtl windows)

• Irishmen buy up island of England : ‘an Irish consortium has emerged as the buyer of the island of England in The World development, a man-made scheme off the coast of Dubai.’ hahaha!
  (tags: funny ireland england dubai unintended-consequences property the-world)

Tags: anonymity, anti-spam, backup, chrome, dropbox, dubai, england, funny, google, ip, ireland, jeremy-jaynes, law, legal, legalese, microsoft, open-source, osi, property, spam, terms-and-conditions, the-world, unintended-consequences, virginia, windows, wtl

Del.icio.us 2.0 goes live yay! I’ve been waiting for this for yonks

10 years of Boards.ie massive ~50GB RDF/XML dump, for open crunching, to generate interesting “SIOC Semantic Web” apps

Postmaster.comcast.net how to get mail delivered successfully to Comcast, the usual stuff

Why we’ll never replace SMTP ‘The reason that e-mail is uniquely useful is that you can exchange mail with people you don’t already know. The reason that spam exists is that you can exchange mail with people you don’t already know.’ +1

“Bikes-for-Billboards” scheme exposes major planning flaws ‘what was initially hailed as “free bikes” has become one of the biggest planning controversies to hit Dublin in years.’ No shit. 70% of sites are on the Northside, rather than the richer Southside; and each bike will cost over EUR300k in ad revenue!

Rob Enderle’s page on Wikipedia detailing this analyst’s hilariously wrong pro-SCO, anti-Apple/Linux predictions over the years. John Gruber: ‘the only way it would be worthwhile for reporters to [quote him] would be if they were willing to describe him as “almost always utterly wrong”‘

Tags: ads, advertising, analysts, anti-spam, apple, bikes, billboards, blogging, boards.ie, comcast, cycling, del.icio.us, dublin, email, enderle-group, funny, fussp, guidelines, history, internet, ireland, isps, jc-decaux, john-gruber, Links, linux, mail, microsoft, oh-dear, planning, postmaster, releases, rob-enderle, scandals, sco, semantic-web, sioc, smtp, spam, tech, urban, via:archiseek, wikipedia

According to this Wired story, Google reckons spammers are giving up on spam:

a remarkable trend is underfoot, according to Brad Taylor, a staff software engineer at Google: The number of spam attempts — that is, the number of junk messages sent out by spammers — is flat, and may even be declining for the first time in years.

Actually, this is a wilful misunderstanding of what the Googler in question really said, which was that ‘attempts to spam Gmail users have been leveling off over the last year and more recently, even declining slightly’. In other words, they didn’t make an observation about the state of the spam problem on an internet-wide basis — just about the “local” situation as it pertains to Gmail. Bad reporting there, Wired.

But, in passing…

David Berlind at ZDNet recently blogged a rather grumpy response to InfoWorld coverage of CEAS 2007. He raised a very important point:

If I could say something to the author of that story, it would be that so long as any anti-spam solution is not deployed universally throughout the Internet’s e-mail system (in other words, so long as some anti-spam tech is not a standard), that anti-spam solution actually makes the spam problem worse. You read that right. Worse. Proprietary anti-spam solutions make the global spam problem worse. They are digging us deeper into the hole that the Internet is already in because everyone who makes those solutions is under the false belief that “s/he who is finally successful at filtering out all spam while allowing the legitimate mail in wins.”

Google’s blog post is a case in point: ‘we’re keeping more spam out of your inbox than ever before, so more and more, you can use Gmail for things you enjoy without even realizing that the spam filter is there most of the time.’

That’s great — but it doesn’t help anyone except Gmail. It’s a myopic view of the spam problem, and David’s point stands.

(I disagree with his later conclusion that the only way forward is for Google, MS, AOL and Yahoo! to get together and ‘commit to jointly supporting the same technical solutions’ — when the usual BigCos get together, they tend to focus on their own priorities. Take what happened back in 2005 with nofollow for blog-spam — while it helped the search giants with their own overriding priority, which was to tweak their algorithms to filter out the spam on the search results page, it did nothing to slow the spam flood itself, which has continued unabated.)

We need more open-source, and open-data, anti-spam work.

Tags: anti-spam, aol, ceas, david-berlind, filtering, google, microsoft, nofollow, spam, wired, yahoo

I haven’t paid a whole lot of attention to the BBC’s “iPlayer” project, since, as a non-UK resident, I’m not allowed to use it anyway. But this interview at Groklaw with Mark Taylor, President of the UK Open Source Consortium, was really quite eye-opening. Here’s some choice snippets.

On the management team’s Microsoft links:

The iPlayer is not what it claimed to be, it is built top-to-bottom on a Microsoft-only stack. The BBC management team who are responsible for the iPlayer are a checklist of senior employees from Microsoft who were involved with Windows Media. A gentleman called Erik Huggers who’s responsible for the iPlayer project in the BBC, his immediately previous job was director at Microsoft for Europe, Middle East & Africa responsible for Windows Media. He presided over the division of Windows Media when it was the subject of the European Commission’s antitrust case. He was the senior director responsible. He’s now shown up responsible for the iPlayer project.

On their attempts to bullshit the BBC Trust on the cross-platform issue:

In the consultations that the BBC Trust made, there were 10,000 responses from the public. And the overwhelming majority of them, over 80% — which is an unheard-of figure in these kind of things — said, we don’t like the platform. We don’t like it being single-platform. So it’s a big issue. And the BBC Trust said to us, “Why the vehemence? Why have people reacted this way?” And I explained the ‘Auntie’ analogy. It’s people don’t expect that from the BBC. It’s got this huge history of integrity, doing the right thing, standing up to bullies. (laughter) They’ve done this for a very long time. And people find that it’s surprising. And they said, “Yeah, but,” you know, the BBC guys said, “Well, trust us. This is going to be cross-platform.” And we said, “Well, how? It’s completely single-platform.” They say that, but we haven’t been able to find anyone who’s been able to explain how they’re going to achieve that at the moment, even though they’re entirely locked into one single platform.

(aside: MS did this at one point with Internet Explorer — remember, there was some mystery team in Germany that supposedly had IE ported to Solaris, hence it therefore qualified as ‘cross-platform’.)

On the architecture of the product:

Q: it’s a Verisign Kontiki architecture, it’s peer-to-peer, and in fact one of the more worrying aspects is that you have no control over your node. It loads at boot time under Windows, the BBC can use as much of your bandwidth as they please (laughter), in fact I think OFCOM … made some kind of estimate as to how many hundreds of millions of pounds that would cost everyone [...]. There is a hidden directory called “My Deliveries” which pre-caches large preview files, it phones home to the Microsoft DRM servers of course, it logs all the iPlayer activity and errors with identifiers in an unencrypted file. Now, does this assessment agree with what you’ve looked at?

Mark Taylor: Yes.

Q: What are the privacy implications for an implementation like this?

Mark Taylor: Well, just briefly going back to the assessment thing, yes it does log precisely RSS and stuff like that and more importantly, anyone technically informed who’s had a look at it — even more importantly, the user’s assessment as well and — frankly horrified if you go and spend some time in the BBC iPlayer forums, it’s eye-opening to see the sheer horror of the users, some of them technically not — you know, relatively early-stage users — but when it gets explained to them by some of the longer-using users of it, it’s concentrated misery. (laughter)

[...]

it’s a remarkable thing with them as well, there’s a lot of pain going on in the user forums, and some of the main technical support questions in there are “how do I remove Kontiki from my computer?” See, it’s not just while iPlayer is running that Kontiki is going, it’s booted up. When the machine boots up, it runs in the background, and it’s eating people’s bandwidth all the time. (laughter) In the UK we still have massive amounts of people who’ve got bandwidth capping from their ISPs and we’ve got poor users on the online forums saying, “Well, my internet connection has just finished, my ISP tells me I’ve used up all of my bandwidth.”

Q: It uses up their quota, but they can’t throttle it, they can’t reduce it –

Mark Taylor: No, they can’t throttle it. [...] It’s malware as well as spyware.

And to top this off, there’s a (frankly insane) budget of UKP 130,000,000 to build this — that’s $266,000,000 — for something that could be built better by just hiring the guys behind UKNova and simply negotiating with the rights-holders directly.

Holy crap. Talk about a technical disaster masquerading as a solution to a business problem…

Tags: bbc, bbc-trust, beeb, drm, iplayer, linux, microsoft, open-source, pain

Dear Recruiters,

If you’re going to (a) scrape my CV page from my website, then (b) spam me, unsolicited, offering to represent me for jobs I don’t want in places I don’t live, in explicit contravention of the terms of use [*] of that document – here’s a tip.

Don’t compound the problem by asking me to resend the document in bloody Microsoft Word format. FFS.

([*]: Those terms were, of course, added in an attempt to stem the tide of recruiter spam. Thanks to Colm MacCarthaigh for the idea…)

Tags: clueless, cv, jobprofile.com, jobs, microsoft, recruiters, resume

Happy BillG-Scheduled Spam Solved Day!

“Two years from now, spam will be solved,” Microsoft’s Bill Gates said [at the 2004 World Economic Forum in Switzerland].

So is it? Weeeeell…..

To “solve” the problem for consumers in the short run doesn’t require eliminating spam entirely, said Ryan Hamlin, the general manager who oversees [Microsoft]’s anti-spam programs. Rather, he said, the idea is to contain it to the point that its impact on in-boxes is minor.

In that way, Hamlin said, Gates’ prediction has come true for people using the right tactics and advanced filtering technology.

Ha. I am reminded of ‘weapons of mass destruction-related program activities’.

As one slashdotter says, ‘when you fail, try try again; or conversely, change the requirements and make it look like a success, which is exactly what BG has done.’

It’s not washing, though, unsurprisingly. The poll on the same page, asks ‘do you agree with Microsoft’s contention that the spam problem has been “solved”?’ Right now, with 1169 votes, it has 7.2% (in other words, the MS employees) agreeing, and a whopping 92.8% not going for it.

Tags: anti-spam, billg, dark-is-the-new-standard, end-of-spam-day, funny, microsoft, spam

Windows Live Local, with its isometric, Sim City, “bird’s eye” view, is quite nice.

However, what gets me is — do MS do this deliberately? I’m referring, of course, to the way it’s broken on Firefox 1.5, requiring you to drag twice to get it scrolling around the viewport, and the jumpy, clunky UI on that browser.

Pretty lame — and lazy, too. By now, it’s essential for a new fancy website to work under Firefox; even if only 20% of your users will be using it, a good proportion of those are the bleeding-edge, ‘taste-maker’ types who’ll be blogging about it, writing reviews for newspapers and news sites, and generally generating buzz for you, and thereby attracting the other 80%.

I’m told it works great in IE, but there’s no way I’m starting Windows and opening up that app. If I want to be infected by 700 different malwares within seconds, I’ll ask. ;)

On top of that, coverage seems spotty — Ireland is AWOL, of course.

As a result, my one line summary would have to be: idea = cool, dataset = probably cool, execution = half-assed and crappy. I’m looking forward to Google doing a much better job with their implementation of the Sim City viewpoint.

Tags: google, mapping, microsoft, panopticon, simcity, web

Spam: Matthew Wilson at Boomer Consulting has been having a field day — it looks like some smart google hacking has thrown up some doozies of places that should have fixed this by now:

• webmasterworld.com
• google.com
• microsoft.com

and my favourites:

• house.gov
• Library of Congress

Of course, all of these are immaterial to SpamAssassin — we catch spammers using them anyway. But still, a surprising number of these out there.

Tags: boomer, com, consulting, day, field, google, gov, house, microsoft, spam, webmasterworld

Open Source: on the 18th March the Irish Times published a commercial supplement for Microsoft. Naturally, given that it was paid advertising, there were lots of MS plugs — but in the mix there was also a couple of more worrying articles: one by Tom Kitt, government ‘Minister for the Information Society’, noting

Microsoft has been one of the most innovative companies in the world and has a long track record over several decades of creating new product markets. The EU has to be open to allowing such innovation in Europe. Ireland will continue to argue at EU level, based on the solid evidence of our successful economy, that the Community must look at its rules on innovation and intellectual property rights to ensure they encourage risk taking in Europe and growth in the IT industry in the EU and around the globe.

And another with Cathal Friel, credited as ‘chairman of the Irish Software Association‘. Quoting the article text:

(Friel) also noted that Open Source software - which is developed by large communities of programmers and distributed for free or at low cost - is also going to have an effect on the software market. While Friel believes Open Source itself has a limited business model - ‘at the end of the day, there’s nothing but services to sell’ - it is nonetheless becoming more pervasive and is ‘a fact of life’ for more traditional software companies. He believes the Open Source movement is actually stifling innovation, because fewer programmers will develop software without the financial incentive of success.

MS observers will note that both Kitt and Friel’s statements mirror the MS ‘party line’ — either the lads were well-briefed, or they just put their names to a story written by MS PR.

Well, there’s been an interesting follow-up. Éibhear Ó hAnluain put pen to paper about Cathal Friel’s statements, and received an interesting reply:

I received a ‘phone call from Kathryn Raleigh, Director of the ISA, in reponse to my letter. As I was unable to take notes at the time, what follows is a memory of the conversation. She told me that the ISA would like to apologise to me for any offense that I took from the comments. She said that the first the ISA heard of the comments was after the piece was published and the Mr. Friel was not speaking with the ISA’s authority. She told me that the ISA had indeed conducted some sort of analysis of the market regarding licensing and the ‘proprietary’ versus Free Software competition, and that the ISA’s position on the matter is not to have a position. She gave me the impression that Mr. Friel has been told that he was out of line. She asked me to convey the ISA’s regrets to my colleagues.

Well now, that’s interesting!

I find it very encouraging to see that the ISA don’t take the position noted in Friel’s article, anyway. In my opinion, this is wise – alienating free software and open-source-using companies doesn’t seem likely to be a good idea, given that many of today’s SMEs use open source extensively ‘behind the scenes’ in production, if not directly in the products they sell.

There’s also the matter of Google’s recent major entry into the Irish software industry, with its new offices in Barrow St. in Dublin. MS are no longer the only major multinational player on the Irish scene to whom open source’s success, or failure, is a key factor in their business plans. Google use free software extremely extensively internally, are members of several major free software bodies including the FSF, and have released quite a few interesting pieces of open source software themselves.

Tags: cathal, friel, innovation, irish, march, microsoft, open, software, source, times

Patents: So the Conference of Presidents has ratified the JURI decision to throw out the flawed software patents directive text. Phew! That’s a lot more pressure on the European Commission. Charlie McCreevy could still carry on his attempt to steamroller European democracy on this one, but it looks likely that he wouldn’t get away with it now — possibly facing sanctions as a result.

Found in a Slashdot comment — an amazing quote from Michel Rocard (former French Prime Minister, now European Deputy), recounting a meeting with Microsoft representatives on the software-patent issue:

“We never could (speak) a common language with the companies representatives we met - in particular those from Microsoft. Speaking about (the free circulation of ideas), free access to knowledge, was like speaking chinese to them. In their way of thinking, everything that is not usable for immediate profit ceases to be an engine of growth. They don’t seem to be able to understand that an invention which is a pure spirit creation (sic) can’t be patented. It’s simply terrifying. Many of us, at the Parliament, agree to say that they never have know such a pressure and such a verbal violence during their parliamentary work. It is a huge case.”

In addition, he takes aim at the Irish Presidency’s tactics:

“To adopt it formally, there is an expeditious procedure — the (A-item) at the Council of Ministers, where the it is adopted without discussion. The Irish and Dutch presidencies attempted this tactic three times, twice at meetings of the (Fisheries Council)! This is simply scandalous.”

Blimey, he’s really pissed off. Great! Go Rocard! ;)

See here for the original interview (in French), and here for a bad Babelfish translation.

In happier news — take a look at some pictures from the presentation of 30,000 verified signatures (and flowers!) from people around the world, thanking the Polish Government for their repeated stands against the flawed directive in December.

Tags: conference, council, decision, directive, european, microsoft, patents, phew, pressure, software, text

Patents: Børsen: Bill Gates threatened to kill 800 Danish jobs if Denmark opposed software patent directive:

Danish financial newspaper Børsen reports that Microsoft founder Bill Gates threatened the Danish government in connection with software patents. According to the article, Gates told Rasmussen and two Danish ministers in November that he would kill all 800 jobs in Navision, a Danish company acquired by Microsoft in 2002, unless the EU were to quickly decide to legalize software patents through a directive. Denmark is a country with only 5 million inhabitants and a relatively small high-tech sector to which the loss of 800 jobs would have significant implications.

Lovely — a blunt blackmail attempt. The article goes on:

It would not be the first threat of its kind. A group of large corporations including Philips is reported to have previously threatened European governments to outsource all of their European software development jobs to low-wage countries unless the EU were to allow patents on software through the directive that is currently being worked on.

In January, leading Polish daily Gazeta Wyborcza reported on a letter addressed by the Polish subsidiaries of Siemens, Nokia, Philips, Ericsson and Alcatel to Poland’s prime minister Marek Belka … it is said to have indicated that the respective companies would reconsider making investments in Poland if the Polish government upheld its resistance to the legalization of software patents in the EU.

Again, note the FUD-busting on this point. I notice that Florian Mueller of NoSoftwarePatents.comhas a a good one-liner response along the same lines — ‘The country in which you develop a technology has nothing to do with where you can take out patents.’ He goes on:

If they move jobs to Asia, they won’t get a single additional patent, neither in Asia nor in Europe. If you warn politicians of consequences that are directly related to a legislative issue, that’s acceptable. If you threaten with causing damage that has no factual connection whatsoever, then it’s blackmail. Plain and simple.

Tags: article, brsen, country, directive, government, microsoft, newspaper, patent, patents, philips, software

Patents: Newsweek: Factory of the Future?:

The dino’s ferociously bared teeth hint at elements of Intellectual Ventures’ bold business plan. Myhrvold and his partner, former Microsoft chief software architect Edward Jung, have created the quintessential company for the 21st century. It doesn’t actually make anything … Only patent attorneys populate the quiet hallways. …

Sources familiar with Myhrvold’s strategy say that he has raised $350 million from some of the largest companies in high tech: Microsoft, Intel, Sony, Nokia and Apple. Google and eBay also recently invested. With this large bankroll, the company is out buying existing patents in droves. (Myhrvold won’t comment on these activities, but sources say he has already purchased about 1,000 patents.) The strategy is to set up a sort of patent marketplace. Patent owners get money upfront for the dusty ideas sitting on their shelves, the investors get the rights to use the ideas without being sued and Myhrvold gets to rent those same ideas to other companies that need them to continue creating products. …

“We’re concerned that these giant pools of patent rights are going to prevent entrepreneurs from entering markets, as opposed to being used to promote innovation,” says one worried Silicon Valley venture capitalist.

Now that’s scary…

Tags: business, company, factory, future, intellectual, microsoft, myhrvold, newsweek, patent, patents, strategy

Patents: The varchars.com scraped RSS feeds now include new patent grants and applications by certain companies! Interesting, although given that most developers are advised not to look, not advisable ;)

However, I glanced at the MS one — and immediately spotted this gem: US Patent 6,775,781, filed by Microsoft, is a patent on the concept of ‘a process configured to run under an administrative privilege level’ which, based on authorization information ‘in a data store’, may perform actions at administrative privilege on behalf of a ‘user process’.

This, and the patent claims, perfectly describe the operation of sudo, fundamentally as it’s operated since running on a 4.1BSD VAX-11/750 in 1980.

20 years head start on a patent application — surely that must qualify as prior art ;)

Tags: authorization, com, concept, gem, level, microsoft, patent, patents, privilege, process, rss

Apache: Not content with distributing GPL’d software, Microsoft are now taking another step into the open-source world by shipping Apache-licensed code.

Not quite as big a deal as the GPL — but still, another interesting milestone.

Tags: apache, apache-licensed, code, content, deal, gpl, microsoft, milestone, software, step, world

Web: Back in 2002, it occurred to someone to check the Google search results for ‘http’, to figure out what the most popular sites were.

Looks like it’s changed — here’s the top five results from a Google search for ‘http’ now:

• 1: Microsoft
• 2: AltaVista (!!)
• 3: Yahoo!
• 4: My Excite
• 5: Google

My guess: older links are getting good PageRank, using whatever new tweaked algorithm they’re using. But AltaVista beating Google? ;)

Tags: altavista, excite, google, http, looks, microsoft, pagerank, search, someone, web, yahoo

Photos: the view out to sea from Seal Beach, just south of LA. (duh. thanks Ben, I’d b0rked the link earlier.)

Patents: via the FFII Kwiki, here’s 2087 Microsoft USPTO software patents viewed roughly by subject matter. The ‘Web’ selection is particularly interesting.

Terror: The Atlantic: All you need is love — how the terrorists stopped terrorism. Amazing — marry them off!

Tourism: Pictures from Bangkok’s new ‘Sky Bar’ — open-air dining, 63 floors up, with no walls apart from 1.5-metre-high glass.

Tags: ben, duh, ffii, kwiki, link, microsoft, patents, photos, sea, uspto, view

Compare this recent statement from Minister Mary Hanafin, Minister of State with Responsibility for the Information Society, and this extract from ‘Why Microsoft Wins’ advertorial written by a Microsoft product manager, Sunday Business Post, 2004-05-02:

• ‘It is important, of course, to differentiate between the open standards and open source software.’
• ‘One must be clear about the difference between `open source software’ and `open standards’ software.’

ILUG have already written an article in response to this pretty obvious prompting of a government minister by a commercial interest.

(thanks to ompaul at lwn.net for pointing that out.)

Tags: extract, information, microsoft, responsibility, society, software, source, state, statement, wins

Europe: Given the Irish EU Presidency’s recent passing of the IP Enforcement Directive and the second attempt to get the Software Patents directive through using the EU Council of Ministers, is it really appropriate for Microsoft to “contribute” to the Irish EU Presidency?

MS reportedly see software patents as a very important part of their strategy to deal with open source, as they noted way back in 1998 in the leaked Halloween I document.

MS is reportedly applying for 10 new patents a day (or is it per week? eWeek can’t decide. anyway.)

It’s pretty clear that MS want to ‘de-commoditize’ open standards, using software patents; they said so in the Halloween doc. Their XML Word-processing patent, which claims to patent the use of two open standards (XML and XSD) in a word-processing file format, is a great example of locking up an open standard as a patented, proprietary format.

As a result, they’d have a vested interest in helping the EU Presidency to decide that software patents should be legalised in the EU. A more conspiracy-minded type than myself might read something into their ‘contributions’ accordingly ;)

Now, it could be all touchy-feely niceness from MS. This eWeek article quotes David Kaefer, Microsoft’s director of business development for intellectual property:

According to … Kaefer, “We’ll make our IP available to all comers, open-source or not.” Kaefer added that Microsoft isn’t focused on what garage-shop developers are doing …

Sounds lovely, except it didn’t happen in this case, where MS threatened an open-source developer with patent litigation:

Today I received a polite phone call from a fellow at Microsoft who works in the Windows Media group. He informed me that Microsoft has intellectual property rights on the ASF format and told me that, although I had reverse engineered it, the implementation was still illegal since it infringed on Microsoft patents. … At his request, and much to my own sadness, I have removed support for ASF in VirtualDub 1.3d, since I cannot risk a legal confrontation.

Tags: directive, europe, format, halloween, irish, microsoft, patent, presidency, software, word-processing, xml

Names: Popbitch sez ‘Microsoft are just about to launch their new Windows Server 2003. The project manager who oversaw its development? Todd Wanke.’

Sure enough, it’s true. But that’s not all he did — he was also involved with the Windows 2000 Customer Love Team. No smutty jokes please, I’m being perfectly serious here…

Tags: customer, development, love, manager, microsoft, names, popbitch, project, server, sez, windows

Spam: the Caller-ID specs are now up on www.microsoft.com. Note patent license.

Tags: caller, com, license, microsoft, patent, spam, www

Media: ever wondered why SCO is being targetted by the MyDoom virus?

Wonder no more. Apparently, according to William Campbell of BUA Training in this hilariously off-the-wall interview with RTE’s Morning Ireland radio show, it’s because of the Browser Wars and ‘Open System Software’. He goes on to explain:

‘if you go to a website, such as openoffice.org, you can download a free copy of what is the competitor for Microsoft Office, an equivalent of Microsoft Word, and equivalent of Microsoft Excel, which probably most of you have on their computers.’ ‘These competitors, they don’t really exists as companies, although there are some companies such as Open Office.org and eh, Star Office and lynux, but em, Microsoft has put all the commercial competition out of business, or they bought them up or whatever.’

Complete transcript here.

Sounds like Morning Ireland needs some new ‘computer experts’ ;)

Tags: equivalent, media, microsoft, morning, mydoom, office, open, org, sco, virus, wonder

GNU: Let’s all be very nice and friendly for our latest convert to the GPL club, Microsoft. Hi, MS!

Tags: club, gnu, gpl, microsoft

Anthems: The Chechen Nation Anthem. This has got to be the scariest anthem I’ve ever heard, what with the she-wolves whelping and what not.

Spam: MAPILab.com: Microsoft Outlook 2003 Spam Filter: Under the hood. Exhaustive!

Wired News: U.K. Plans to Extradite Spammers. Can’t see how this’ll work, given that spamming just isn’t seen by prosecutors as a high-cost crime. (Found via SpammerHunters.com).

Food: Blooper proves bum deal for Sharwoods (Guardian): ‘When Sharwoods launched its latest product range earlier this month, it promised the ‘deliciously rich’ sauces based on a traditional northern Indian method of cooking would ‘change the way consumers make curry’. What it failed to foresee was that ‘bundh’ in Punjabi has an altogether less savoury meaning

• the nearest English translation being, to put it bluntly, ‘arse’.’

(Thanks Lean!)

Plus, a bonus: a brief history of advertising mistranslations, some doubtless ULs.

Patents: MS Office 2003 XML Reference Schema Patent License (via patents at aful dot org):

Microsoft may have patents and/or patent applications that are necessary for you to license in order to make, sell, or distribute software programs that read or write files that comply with the Microsoft specifications for the Office Schemas.

Tags: anthem, anthems, chechen, com, microsoft, nation, office, patent, scariest, sharwoods, spam

Linux: MS loses to Linux in Thailand Struggle (LinuxInsider):

The people’s PC project, formally known as the ICT PC Project, revolutionized the Thai PC market, and its effect is being felt around the region. The Ministry of ICT aims to sell 700,000 PCs and 300,000 notebooks in the first year of the project. To make the PCs affordable, the government has insisted that computer makers offer the machines at fire-sale prices — $250 for PCs and $400 for notebooks, including the software.

The government did invite Microsoft to participate in the project, but the company initially refused to lower its prices. Microsoft has a long-standing policy of charging the same prices throughout the world, which could help explain the widespread piracy in developing markets like Thailand, where the average annual income is about $7,000. Charging Thai consumers nearly $600 for Windows/Office is the equivalent of charging U.S. consumers $3,000.

… Microsoft’s newly appointed regional general manager, Andrew McBean, no doubt having consulted Redmond, offered to supply the ICT PC Program with the Windows/Office package for a mere $37 — a price cut of 85 percent.

Looks like the Linux-based machines are popular, too:

The rock-bottom prices — and easy financing terms — generated enormous interest in the ICT PCs. An estimated 35,000 people showed up at a Bangkok convention center where the machines were launched. Some people even camped overnight to sign up for the program. By August of this year, Thai consumers had snapped up 300,000 ICT PCs.

Tags: government, ict, linux, microsoft, office, project, struggle, thai, windows, year

Music: This is great. Microsoft’s general manager for the Windows Digital Media division, Dave Fester, on iTunes for Windows:

If you use Apple’s music store along with ITunes, you don’t have the ability of using the over 40 different Windows Media-compatible portable music devices. When I’m paying for music, I want to know that I have choices today and in the future.

Oh, the schadenfreude. (I wonder how many MP3-compatible portable music devices there are?)

Tags: apple, digital, division, itunes, manager, media, microsoft, music, store, windows

Bits: BarbieOS, a cutdown version of Debian from Mattel. Really. ‘BarbieOS 1.0 is the result of almost a year’s worth of marketing research into what pre-adolescent girls want in a mobile Linux solution aimed at being a desktop replacement.’ (via Ben)

Great site — also has US.BLAST.D Worm Wreaks Havoc on US Post Office, Mail Delivery Halted (’Until a patch can be created by Microsoft and deployed by the MCSEs who maintain the nation’s critical infrastructure, President Bush has urged all Americans to lock in a safe or a drawer all of their pens, pencils, stamps, white paper and envelopes so that they cannot be exploited by the virus and used to write out more copies of itself.’

– and An Open Letter from RIAA President Hillary Rosen to Music Pirates Everywhere (’Currently an RIAA-backed online service known as Pressplay allows users to subscribe for $18.95 a month to a small library of popular works and listen to them via half-quality audio streams if they have broadband connections. Users may download 10 songs a month to burn to CDs if they wish. Pressplay exclusively supports the Windows Media Audio format, and therefore each song benefits from active scripting support, expiration dates, copy protection and proven Microsoft security. With embedded scripts, each song can also enhance the user experience by opening web pages featuring more music they might like to buy. After only 8 months online and a strategic partnership with AOL, Pressplay currently boasts more than 100 subscribers and is growing every day.’)

Spam: Bayesian comment filter for Movable Type, nifty. Pity it’s still using the Paul Graham method, which is not so hot. (thx Antoin!)

Tags: barbieos, bits, cutdown, debian, microsoft, month, music, online, pressplay, song, version

Whoa: ‘This spring, Microsoft dropped the price of Windows CE and completely opened its embedded operating system to developers, allowing them for the first time to not only view and modify CE, but also sell products that incorporated the customized code.’

Really? So WinCE developers can modify and then rebuild and sell WinCE with code changes? That’s a big deal. It’s kind of unavoidable, though. That close to the metal is virtually impossible without source IMO.

Tags: code, deal, microsoft, price, spring, system, time, whoa, wince, windows

‘Let There Be Spam!’:

COMMITTEE TAKES CUE FROM MICROSOFT, KILLS NATION’S TOUGHEST ANTI-SPAM PROPOSAL

SACRAMENTO - Urged on by Microsoft, the Assembly Business & Professions Committee today unceremoniously killed SB 12 (Bowen), a measure to create the country’s toughest anti-spam law by requiring advertisers to get permission from computer users before sending them unsolicited ads …

‘Does anyone other than the eight members of this committee who either voted ‘no’ or took a walk on the bill really believe Microsoft has any interest in getting rid of spam?,’ wondered California State Senator Debra Bowen (D-Redondo Beach), the author of SB 12, following the bill’s defeat. ‘Trusting Microsoft to protect computer users from spam is like putting telemarketers in charge of the do-not-call list. Microsoft uses a megaphone to tell everyone how much it hates spam at the same time it’s working overtime to kill truly tough anti-spam laws. Why? Microsoft doesn’t want to ban spam, it wants to decide what’s ‘legitimate’ or ‘acceptable’ unsolicited commercial advertising so it can turn around and license those e-mail messages and charge those advertisers a fee to wheel their spam into your e-mail inbox without your permission.’

wow ;) She’s not pulling any punches there…

Tags: bill, committee, computer, cue, from, kills, microsoft, permission, spam, takes

Maciej, Jeremy and Dave have all been blogging about this: Microsoft have unleashed MSNBOT, a new web crawler (judging by the robots.txt string, written in COBOL) which heralds their new search service which will topple Google.

My thoughts: dream on, guys.

What makes Google cool? Fast, accurate searches, and no ads. OK, MSN could do fast searching; that’s doable, it’s just a technical matter.

But what does the latter require? IMO, it takes very strong technical leadership, willing to resist any and every business unit that fancies dropping some cruddy ads on the front page; it’s a cultural issue. This is especially tricky where ads (and money) are involved. Now go take a look at MSN.com. See what I mean? I rest my case.

Tags: cobol, crawler, google, microsoft, msn, msnbot, search, string, txt, web

Ah, some good old-fashioned sleazy MS stuff:

Chris O’Rourke, a Microsoft employee, described attending LinuxWorld, a trade fair in California, where he ‘purported to be an independent computer consultant’ working with several public school districts, according to an e-mail message he sent on Aug. 20, 2002. ‘In general, people bought this without question,’ Mr. O’Rourke wrote. ‘Hook, line and sinker.’

He said his goal was to glean intelligence about the competition. His guise, Mr. O’Rourke said, ‘got folks to open up and talk.’ Mr. O’Rourke did not respond to a fax and voice mail message seeking comment.

Hilarious — if you can’t beat ‘em, send in the clowns. Via the NYT.

Tags: aug, computer, consultant, employee, linuxworld, message, microsoft, school, stuff, trade

Reg: Hotmail files anti-spam lawsuit. ‘Microsoft has targeted spammers with a lawsuit aimed at bulk mailers who harvest email addresses of Hotmail subscribers in order to bombard them with junk. … In the suit, Microsoft alleges that unnamed bulk mailers used tools to randomly generate email addresses prior to testing this list out to see which accounts were active. Essentially this is a form of dictionary attack, which Microsoft argues violates federal laws including the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. Trespass is also involved in the attacks, the software giant argues.’ Go Hotmail!

Also noteworthy: Out-Law.com: The Spammers Are Watching You: ‘Eight out of ten spam e-mails contain covert tracking codes which allow the senders to record and log recipients’ e-mail addresses as soon as they open the message.’ well, duh, that’s why SpamAssassin has a WEB_BUGS rule. Unfortunately, eight out of ten legit HTML newsletter mails also contain web bugs, too. :(

Tags: bombard, bulk, email, hotmail, junk, lawsuit, microsoft, order, suit, web

it looks like the the latest internet worm is making the rounds, and this one’s a biggie. It’s been dubbed ‘SQLSlammer’, since it hammers on the Microsoft SQL ports, attempting to exploit yet another commonly-unpatched 7-month-old MS vulnerability. The best bit: it uses UDP broadcasts to do this, so the traffic load is massive compared to previous worms, so there’s lots and lots of backbone hosage as a result. Coverage:

• BBC: worm
  • shuts down South Korean internet
  .

Quick fix: update those router filters to deny all traffic, both UDP and TCP, on port 1434. (you shouldn’t need to update the firewall filters of course, because nobody’s stupid enough to allow access to open-internet MS SQL traffic, right? ;)

Tags: biggie,