03.17.09
Posted in Deception, Windows at 5:28 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: The BBC not only broke the law but also paid cybercriminals and re-raised the issue of self censorship (Windows never blamed)
RATHER than admit that it had done something erroneous, the BBC insisted on defending what it tactlessly embarked on, despite the fact that was a violation of the law. The BBC acts as though it didn’t know the law or as if it’s above the law. Now it turns out, based on The Register, that the BBC not only infiltrated people’s PC but it also fed/paid crackers (malicious, obviously, as the word implies) in this process, which helps not at all. Here is the latest episode in this one peculiar saga.
BBC Click used the botnet of 22,000 machine to send spam to webmail addresses it established and launch a denial of service attack against a test website by security firm PrevX which advised on the investigation. It then changed the wallpaper on compromised machines with a message of its own, advising affected users to clean up.
The BBC reckons its actions were legal, but specialist technology lawyers contacted by El Reg disagreed. Struan Robertson, editor of out-law.com and legal director at solicitors Pinsent Masons, said that the BBC’s actions were likely to have breached the unlawful access provision of the Computer Misuse Act, the UK’s anti-hacking law. He added that there was no public interest defense against CMA offences.
Isn’t it awfully hypocritical that when Gary McKinnon whimsically changes the wallpapers on some inscure Windows PC, then he faces extradiction and very long jail time, but when the BBC does it, then it’s ‘just’ education? This is probably the same old (and familiar) situation where if a small group commits acts of aggression then it’s labeled something like “terrorism”, but when a big developed nation does the very same thing, then it’s a war for “democracy” and “peace”. It’s scale that is inversely proportional to the severity of known crimes.
There are two issues here that we highlighted before. First — worth debating is the illegality of practice; the second is the fact that the BBC — much to its partner’s delight (Microsoft) — hardly bothers to mention that this is a Windows problem. Well, we already know how Microsoft 'manages' journalists and censors those who say that Windows is not secure (new example).
The BBC pretty much continues to deny its mistakes about Windows. One of its few (or only) FOSS-oriented columnists did attribute the problems to Windows in yesterday’s article, albeit not under a particularly informative headline (“Holes in the machine”).
Conficker spreads through a security vulnerability in the Windows Server Service that allows a carefully written program to persuade the attacked computer to run malicious code instead of the Microsoft-written software.
Once installed it turns off Windows Automatic Update and stops you using the Windows Security Centre. It disables a range of internal services that could be used by anti-malware programs, blocks access to a number of anti-virus websites and even resets and deletes system restore points so you can’t go back to an uninfected installation of your operating system.
Why is Windows not being blamed as often as it deserves to? What’s often found in the mainstream media suffers from a great level of self censorship. Well, self censorship is the situation in which a person abstains from saying certain things that might get him/her in trouble (and thus put the job at risk). It’s a subject that was covered before. And speaking of which, with the burden of words and liability, there are also atrocious moves in Italy to gag bloggers, to an extent.
An Italian MEP, Catiuscia Marini, has warned that net neutrality is proving to be a problem in the Telecoms Package trialogue discussions. She mentions the issue in a letter sent in response to concerned emails from thousands of Italian citizens about the threat to net neutrality in the Telecoms Package.
“As promised,” says Tacone, “at the end of th[is] article you’ll find a little snippet on the next Italian net-censorship act. It’s perhaps a little bit superficial, but there’s really not much to be explained it’s just the yet-another arrogant-ignorant-populist attempt to shut down free speech and preserve existing content monopolists.”
This is another lever of imposed discipline where writers are terrorised further. It’s intended to combat dissidence. There is plenty for politicians to worry about when a centralised, controlled press is going away and smaller publishers are returning after suppression of them almost a century ago.
In light of some recent developments, Mike Masnick explains why disappearance of old media is a good thing and we also find that the ‘client press’ of Microsoft, namely the Seattle P-I (there are more), will shut its doors later this week.
Seattle P-I to publish last edition Tuesday
The Seattle Post-Intelligencer will roll off the presses for the last time Tuesday.
This is also covered here, it was more or less expected and this is bad news to Microsoft, which will be less capable of controlling the press. When you control the press, you control what people think. You control consensus and therefore control what people are allowed to say and get away with. No more; not as much anyway. █
Never self censorship in Boycott Novell
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Posted in Asia, GNU/Linux, Microsoft, Windows at 3:46 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Political parties in the country embrace FOSS, but Microsoft carries on with EDGI, gifts, and dumping of software
BEFORE we begin this long post, here is a must-read background story to those who are not aware of Microsoft's abuses against the Indian people. This is part of Microsoft’s EDGI in India [1, 2].
Moreover, as we shall see later, Microsoft is assisted by corruptible professors. We already know that Microsoft is bribing professors to merely mention Microsoft software while at the same time bullying professors who do not agree with Microsoft’s agenda. This happens even in India (we are still seeing such stories) where it appears to have bribed many local charities (for advancement of agenda).
How low can one stoop? Well, having somehow sneaked a Windows mail server (as in Exchange Server) into the prime minister’s office, it turns out that it led to tremendous trouble. As with any platform that’s a petri dish to crackers, the prime minister’s office too had its server infected by viruses for several months.
E-mail system of the Prime Minister’s Office was under the grip of a computer virus for three months last year forcing officials to replace the software.
The technical glitch plagued the e-mail communication system of the PMO, which was based on the Microsoft Outlook Express, from February to April in 2008.
Although the extent of damage was uncertain, the PMO said that most of the e-mails addressed to it were not received.
This article from the Times of India wrongly calls it a “computer virus”. It’s really a Windows virus. Computers don’t have viruses. They are commodity hardware.
The good news (the fallout) is that as a result of this incident the prime minister’s office — or PMO — will be moving to GNU/Linux.
Just read it this morning in TOI at page 7. PM Office has migrated to Linux based mailing solution. Its a great achievent for the Open Source Community in India.
Here goes the complete report
BUGGED Virus gripped PMO’s email for 3 months New Delhi: Email system of the Prime Minister’s Office was under the grip of a computer virus for three months last year forcing officials to replace the software. The technical glitch plagued the email communication system of the PMO, which was based on the Microsoft Outlook Express, from February to April in 2008.
But this is just a prelude to more good news.
“This article from the Times of India wrongly calls it a “computer virus”. It’s really a Windows virus.”Someone from Red Hat has just told us that “major Indian political parties support open source and open standards.” Here is the relevant page and the vision of The Bharatiya Janata Party [PDF]. According to the person who sent this to us, this document “makes extensive reference to open source as an integral part of their IT plans. This was unveiled on Saturday, 14th March, 2009, by LK Advani who is their candidate for prime minister, if the BJP comes to power.
“The CPI(M), another major national party has been a long time supporter of free and open source software:
- We advocate usage of free software at all levels
- CPI(M) for free and open source software
“Even in the Congress, the other major national party in India, Prithviraj Chavan who is currently a minister in the Prime Minister’s Office had advocated the use of open source in India in a TV interview which was conducted immediately after your party came to power in 2004.
“What this means is that there is a broad consensus emerging around open source and open standards in a market that consists of a billion plus people. The next five years are going to be very, very interesting!”
LinuxToday has a report about this too. In short:
Indian prime minister-in-waiting and Opposition leader Lal Krishna Advani of the BJP has come out with a stand that is seen to strongly favour Free Software and Open Source, released here today. While politicians are known to be lavish with pre-poll promises, Open Source campaigners were upbeat over the development.
Even Glyn Moody has just covered it.
Microsoft Fights Back with “Addiction” Ware
“They’ll get sort of addicted, and then we’ll somehow figure out how to collect sometime in the next decade.”
–Bill Gates
A few days ago we found out that an entity called IDG Ventures, which is not related to another IDG that’s in Microsoft’s pocket [1, 2, 3, 4, 5], is helping Microsoft “addict” children and startups.
IDG Ventures, Microsoft India partners to aid startups
Bangalore: In a bid to provide to aid the technology startups, IDG Ventures India and Microsoft India partnered to give access to Microsoft suite and funding of up to Rs.25 crore by IDG Ventures. Under the program Early Stage Funding Program, Microsoft will offer suite at no upfront cost under the company’s BizSpark program and IDG Ventures will invest up to Rs.100 crore in startups.
This was also covered in LiveMint.
Another person from India (not affiliated with any company) has sent us information about more of the plot which Microsoft organised to fight back against Free software adoption across the country.
“They organize something called bootcamp. The software molester is trying to molest education now. In that boot camp they train (brainwash) students [and] provide them costly food and hotel suits (as bribe) […] [...] pre-grease tomorrow’s gov and business leaders. Lots of groups try to be good to tomorrow’s leaders, but the Microsoft case doesn’t inspire confidence in me.
“I got a lot of pictorial evidence about how Microsoft is cheating engineering college students,” wrote our source. Here are the pictures that he sent us.
[Picture removed at the request of the author]
Camp organised by Microsoft India
[Picture removed at the request of the author]
Guys and girls at this Microsoft camp
[Picture removed at the request of the author]
Part of the Microsoft-sponsored tour
[Picture removed at the request of the author]
Microsoft-sponsored tour
[Picture removed at the request of the author]
Microsoft-sponsored tour
[Picture removed at the request of the author]
The luxury hotel where Microsoft put these students
[Picture removed at the request of the author]
The train whose costs Microsoft covered
Here are the crude remarks sent later to accompany these photos:
Microsoft Bootcamp details
Microsoft runs something called “Microsoft campus club” in most of the famous engineering colleges in India (not only from Tamilnadu, there are participants from other states too ). The students of corresponding colleges are chosen to take care of this club, Microsoft calls these students as “Microsoft student partners” (shortly MSP).
They use these students to teach (brainwash/addict) other students with Microsoft’s technologies like Dot net, etc.
- These students mostly act as a ambassador of Microsoft in colleges
- They motivate students to take part in competitions like http://www.goalivechallenge.com/ (Web design contest by Microsoft, the only technology allowed is ASP.NET and Silverlight)
- They distribute free copies of Windows, if the academic institution has a academic alliance license (colleges have to pay 2laks to get this license… just heard from someone, not sure)
- Setting up Microsoft ELMS (details below)
- Recruiting the next MSP
About bootcamp: (Recently in Hyderabad, Andra pradesh)
It’s a camp for these MSP’s
Microsoft pleases/bribes the MSP’s by providing them free copies of their DVDs, t-shirts, lots of small gifts… they take them to tour (like picnic 
see picture)
They make the students to stay in luxury hotels (see pictures) and a lot more.
The main objective of this club is to get them addicted, get the education system in their control.
It’s too bad… see how many students are getting cheated.
[...]
I haven’t included any pictures that could show individual MSP’s face for their privacy
This informant “wonders why they are doing this in India [and] also wonders if it only happens in India.” But another readers of ours, who studies in the United States says that “there are professors at my school that push Silverlight [...] these are older professors [...] they use the excuse that it’s what employers want these days (Silverlight, Adobe Flex, etc [...] I don’t know if I told you but they teach VB.NET at this place too. [...] I have a friend that’s convinced that ASP.NET is the way to go [and] considers other stuff “toys” [...] they also teach C# [...] information science majors must take a year of VB.NET based programming.”
“They wrote cheques for $200 to people who just dropped names of Microsoft products publicly.”Look back at the beginning of this post where we referred to solid proof that Microsoft had bribed professors even just to mention Microsoft software. They wrote cheques for $200 to people who just dropped names of Microsoft products publicly. It seems to be similar in parts of Europe.
Going back to India, it ought to be added that they also exploit schools for their “addiction” that’s directed squarely at students. We have this leaked letter about Microsoft ELMS, which is how Microsoft achieves a lot of the above.
Again it’s worth stressing: For those who think it’s an India-only issue, well… it’s not. Just looking a few days back at the news, we find similar stunts happening in Thailand. It’s worth remembering dirty tricks that Microsoft was pulling in Thailand because there are some large adoptions/deployments there of OpenOffice.org. Let’s not forget the OOXML irregularities in Thailand and Microsoft’s EDGI over there [1, 2]. Well, right now Thailand is being further manipulated by a Microsoft top executive who visits the prime minister. Microsoft is trying to extend an “e-Learning project” by another 5 years.
The commitments discussed with the prime minister included a five-year extension of the Partner e-Learning project, a re-training project involving 2 million unemployed workers in Thailand, and a three-year joint research and development project with the National Electronics and Computer Technology Centre (Nectec).
All these sudden “extensions” are very reminiscent of what we find in Finland. Informed citizens must not let them get away with it. █
“As a supplicant to government, you cannot afford to bulls’t! Government reserves that right for itself.”
–Famous quote, Anonymous
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Posted in Free/Libre Software, Microsoft at 2:53 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Microsoft’s Latest Smear Campaigns Against FOSS Proponents
Summary: National Microsoft CEO attacks critic, contacts boss too (part of a pattern)
IF you write critically about Microsoft, then Microsoft may be ‘kind’ enough to contact your boss and try to get you in trouble (maybe even fired). We know this from a couple of new victims, whose names and nationalities we keep off the record so as to not aggravate it further.
“One person suspects that Vivek Kundra may be the latest case of high-level retribution.”The first story story is that a national manager of Microsoft has threatened, personally, a critic of the company’s policies and attacked the person through the employer. We have actually heard a similar story from 2 people in the past week, but not in both cases was a Microsoft manager (local CEO) directly involved.
Having written critically about Microsoft, writes one person to us, “this got me in a world of shit… but it was worth it. Or I hope it was. It remains to be seen.
“The CEO of Microsoft [country name omitted] called me up on [...] and had a very long talk with me about how naughty I was. The first fifteen minutes he was all, “this is lies!” .. then he slowly changed the tone to “you shouldn’t underestimate what good we’ve done” [...] and then, at the end of it, I managed to pin him to the wall, and he kind of backed off after that.
“And then [he] called my boss.”
Remember Peter Quinn? One person suspects that Vivek Kundra may be the latest case of high-level retribution. “This looks like it might be worse retribution than what happened to Peter Quinn,” wrote a reader to us one hour ago. But in this particular case, no proof exists.
Anyway, this would be typical Microsoft behaviour. For details, see for example:
More examples (external links):
There is another incident we had reported to us, but the details are too sensitive and would lead to a risk of exposure.
What is Microsoft so scared of? Well surely, as one reader explains, “here’s some old news, but maybe worth bringing up again. Deploying FOSS, would be the functional equivalent of a major double-digit billion dollar economic stimulus plan:
“In the case of Fedora, it would be the equivalent of $ 11 billion USD,” says the reader. This is a lot of money and Microsoft is set to lose the most. But for Microsoft to turn to personal attacks against critics is utterly disgusting. And it’s part of a long, ongoing pattern. █
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(I screwed the network configuration few times and then I got tired and decided that maybe some other time). 
