07.16.09

Microsoft + Ecosystem Block ODF, OpenOffice.org, Firefox

Posted in Free/Libre Software, Microsoft, Office Suites, Open XML, OpenDocument, OpenOffice at 6:27 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Summary: A look at new reports that show a consistent worrisome behaviour

BNET has this article which is titled “How Microsoft Ratted Itself Out Of Office.”

Microsoft dodged a bullet in Massachusetts, but realized that if its Office productivity suite wasn’t adopted as a de jure standard, rather than merely a de facto monopoly, it would eventually lose customers who were mandated by law to use only standards-based applications. That’s why it fought tooth and nail to convince ISO to adopt OOXML as a standard — even if that meant publishing its entire specification.

In order to ‘convince’ ISO (Microsoft did a lot more than “convincing”) Microsoft and its ecosystem embarked on one of the biggest IT scandals of this decade. Some press in India is trying to change the story right now. It says:

Single standard is supported by the open document format (ODF) brigade that includes IBM, Red Hat and Sun Microsystems in India while multiple standards are supported by Microsoft, Tata Consultancy Services, Infosys and industry bodies like Manufacturers’ Association of Information Technology and Nasscom.

This is some very ugly spin with weasel words like “brigade”, a small list of vendors on ODF’s side and then a larger list of small vendors (Microsoft partners) that are claimed to support “multiple standard” as if it’s better to have a proprietary format (assisted by abuse to push it down ISO’s throat) and a fork of ODF [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7].

Microsoft employees carry on preaching their hostility towards fair competition or real standards like ODF and Rob Weir drew attention to this report about “ODF mobile combat robot” (not related to OpenDocument) only to receive a lukewarm response from ODF skeptics. In Twitter, Microsoft employees and their partners of course mocked it (and Rob Weir) because they hate ODF. Thy see it as a nuisance which they must cope with.

The reality of the matter is that OpenDocument is gaining as we last showed moments ago. jOpenDocument appears on the scene now as well.

jOpenDocument is a free library for developers looking to use Open Document files without OpenOffice.org.

jOpenDocument is Open Source (under GPL or commercial license).

More DOF events are being organised, such as this one in LinuxCON 2009.

OASIS ODF Adoption TC Chair, Don Harbison, will present a session entitled:

“OpenDocument Format v1.2 – Interoperability, Conformance & Tooling”

This talk will focus on the application implementation implications of ODF V1.2, for IT leaders and developers of desktop, and cloud solutions. Beyond the completion of ODF 1.2, complementary work has progressed to support ODF interoperability and conformance needs. A new ODFDOM API and tools are available from the ODF Toolki Union, enabling the development of excitig new document-centric solutions. The talk is introductory in nature.

Roberto Galoppini on the ODF Plugfest:

The Dutch government is showing the way to go: the Minister for Foreigng Trade Frank Heemskerk opened the now famous ODF Plugfest saying that a joint course of action for developing effective ODF support in each other’s products is needed.

We previously mentioned the ODF Plugfest in [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7].

Meanwhile, however, guards of the Microsoft monopoly are working to block ODF-compliant software like OpenOffice.org. Watch the picture. We often learn from readers that Microsoft has many people out there in IT departments who are compulsively blocking competition to Microsoft. How about this new example from Orange?

Orange UK exiles Firefox from call centres

[...]

This technician tells us that about a quarter of the Bristol staff had moved to Firefox after growing increasingly frustrated with IE6′s inability to open multiple pages in the same window and overall sluggish performance. But a recent email from management informed call-centre reps that downloading Firefox was verboten and that they would be fined £250 if their PCs experienced problems and had to be rebuilt after running Firefox or any other application downloaded from the net.

“Under no circumstances should Firefox be downloaded,” the email read. “Downloading any application from the internet is against Orange policy. There is NO support for Firefox in the operational environment. Orange Web applications are all designed to run on IE6 and therefore there is a likelihood that functionality will be impaired on Firefox.”

According to the reader who alerted us about it, this “begs [the question] how they can install applications on a supposedly secure and locked down desktop.”

Microsoft Internet Explorer is a very bad thing to standardise on because it deliberately deviates from Web standards [PDF]. In fact, YouTube is now ditching IE6 support.

Judging by this screenshot taken by an IE6 user who was watching some videos on YouTube, it appears the Google company will be phasing out support for the browser shortly. I don’t have Internet Explorer 6 installed on my computer, so I can’t verify this first hand, but illogical it seems not and a simple Twitter search shows multiple people confirming the news. Heck, some are even downright ecstatic over the news.

Even Digg has begun pondering an IE6 ditch:

Should Digg block IE6?

Currently, IE6 usage accounts for 10% of Digg visitors and 5% of page views on Digg. While this is down from 13% and 8% a year ago respectively, IE6 still accounts for a fairly large portion of Digg usage. That said, a lot of time is spent by Digg engineers supporting site activity like diggs, buries, and comments in IE6, and while it accounts for 5% of site traffic, IE6 accounts for only 1% of diggs, buries, and comments.

Watch out for Microsoft and its followers looking to block ODF, OpenOffice.org, and Firefox. It happens all the time, but the issue is scarcely reported on. █

“Microsoft sees what’s coming. Things like Word and Excel sort of like a drug now getting ready to go generic.”

–Market Watch

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It’s Official: Microsoft Windows Servers to Blame for Attacks on Korea and the United States

Posted in GNU/Linux, Security, Windows at 5:37 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Korean War Memorial in Washington, DC

Summary: Windows victimises nations as it is used as a weapon on the Web

LINUX TODAY has just shared this finding about the source of the cyber attacks. We mentioned this a few days ago on a couple of occasions, but it could not be confirmed at the time that Windows zombies were behind the attacks. Well, it’s confirmed now:

In order to locate the source of the attacks, we have fought against C&C servers and have gained control of 2 in 8 of them. After analyzing the logs of these 2 servers, we discovered the IP address of the master server, which is 195.90.118.xxx. This IP is located in UK. The master server is running on Windows 2003 Server Operating System..

No change should be expected because following many “critical” flaws, some known ones remain unpatched and they won’t be addressed until August (at the earliest).

Microsoft released six bulletins – three covering critical flaws – on Tuesday as part of its monthly Patch Tuesday update cycle.

It’s back to the same familiar cycle. They ought to upgrade to GNU/Linux. █

“Two security researchers have developed a new technique that essentially bypasses all of the memory protection safeguards in the Windows Vista operating system…”

–Dennis Fisher, August 7th, 2008

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ODF Officially Approved as Malaysian Standard, Brazil Offers Massive Endorsement Too

Posted in America, Asia, OpenDocument, Standard at 5:18 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Original

Summary: Latest raves and wins for ODF at the government level

Yoon Kit proudly announces that according to MAMPU, “There are nearly 300 agencies using ODF already – and a detailed study will be conduct to roll out further.” Also he adds: “Glad to say after all the work, ODF has been approved by the minister as a Malaysian Standard!” John Drinkwater points it out too.

Malaysia is not the only country where such positive transformation is occurring despite sheer abuse from Microsoft (and possibly violations of the Malaysian law). Here is a wonderful report from Brazil (also in Portuguese):

After the speech, when I left the room where the President spoke, I was very happy to see the joy of Furusho, because he gave an ODF cap to Lula and the crown took some photos of Lula with the cap. This is the kind of stuff that made Furusho’s work to be recognized by the ODF Alliance with the ODF Awards (and detail: it was Furusho’s initiative to produce the ODF shirts and caps and endure into the crowd to deliver them to President Lula. I really admire this crazy Nipo-Brazillian folk ).

Here is the famous photo (Brazil’s president wearing an ODF hat), with many more here and more extensive coverage here. █

“That particular meeting was followed by an anonymous smear campaign against one of the TC members. A letter was faxed to the organization of the TC member in question, accusing the TC member in question of helping politicize the issue (which is, of course, untrue). I too had the dubious pleasure of hearing first hand how Microsoft attempted to remove me from the TC (they did not succeed, thanks to integrity and cojones of the organization I am affiliated with).”

“If this unethical behaviour by Microsoft was not sufficiently despicable, they did the unthinkable by involving politics in what should have been a technical evaluation of the standard by writing to the head of the Malaysian standards organization and getting its business partners to engage in a negative letter writing campaign to indicate lack of support of ODF in the Malaysian market. Every single negative letter on ODF received by the Malaysian standards organization was written either by Microsoft, or a Microsoft business partner or a Microsoft affiliated organization (Initiative for Software Choice and IASA).“

A Memo to Patrick Durusau

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Confirmed: Novell Puts Mono (and Moonlight) at Centre of the GNU/Linux Desktop

Posted in Debian, GNU/Linux, Java, Microsoft, Mono, Novell, Search at 4:57 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

“We could refresh the look and feel of the entire desktop with Moonlight”

–Miguel de Icaza

Summary: Another new roundup of Mono news

YESTERDAY we wrote about Moonlight and Mono-based applications getting more tightly integrated. We now see it confirmed by Novell employees Miguel de Icaza and Jonathan Pobst [1 2], so our suspicions were correct from the very start. This is all part of Microsoft’s ambition to fill the Web with Silver Lie content and the desktop with .NET/WPF, which in turn imposes a patent tax on GNU/Linux and makes a poorer experience for GNU/Linux users. From ITPro news:

The first version of Silverlight was launched in April 2007, while version 2 arrived in 2008. It runs on Windows and Mac – and even Linux. The latter is developed by Novell in conjunction with Microsoft, a project known as Moonlight.

“[I]n conjunction with Microsoft,” says this article, but the Microsoft/Novell Web site calls it “Microsoft Moonlight”. It serves Microsoft’s interests.

Microsoft’s Anti-Java

In the blog post where Mini Microsoft suggests laying off 15k employees we also find this comment which reminds us why it’s good that Bing is dying. Microsoft uses Bing to smear .NET’s (and Mono’s) main competitor, Java. From the commenter:

“Regarding Bing, I believe there are untrustworthy behaviours under the hood, specifically black list result filters. Try this searching for “transferhandler.export to clipboard swing”. Google finds about 100 results all related to Java. Bing finds exactly two results. One is my comment on this subject elsewhere and the other is in French. How can it be possible without deletion of “things Java” ?”

This is not surprising because Microsoft applies the same type of treatment to all major competitors of Microsoft, GNU/Linux included. See our previous posts on the subject, e.g.:

Attacks on Stallman

For the past fortnight or so (shortly after Stallman’s official statement on Mono and C#), Stallman has come under attack from many directions, usually from defenders of Mono or users of Mono (including Canonical employees). He is still not impressed by Microsoft’s “Community Promise” (CP) [1, 2, 3] and this makes him no friends. Stefano Forenza wrote about these attacks on Stallman only to be called “misguided” by Caonical’s CTO.

The first meme being directed to Richard Stallman for citing ‘eMacs virgins’ in a speech and the other one only gods knows whom.

While the latter is just is yet another generalist campaign (like the infamous “hey, even double click is patented!”) the first is a frontal attack to Richard Stallman as a person: knives coming out all of a sudden.

Even the Canonical CTO blogged about it.

While the video isn’t available yet, I have big doubts there is something even remotely offensive in such Stallman talk. It’s very easy to take feminism as an excuse, as many people (not just girls) will jump in no-matter-what without even knowing what it’s being talked about.

The new method in place seems to be that if you support Stallman and support his stance on Mono, then you’re also a chauvinist. It’s not said explicitly, but it is being implied that to be associated with Stallman is also to accept his sometimes-tactless humour/modest proposals.

Sam Varghese correctly points out that Mono’s most vocal defender inside Debian is himself quite chauvinistic. That person is Josselin Mouette.

Mouette, it may be recalled, is the developer who had posted what were considered sexist posts to the Debian project mailing list meant for important announcements for developers.

(Mono is an open source implementation of parts of Microsoft’s .NET development environment; many sections of the FOSS community fear that Mono may prove to be a patent trap down the line as .NET is totally Microsoft technology. Recent statements have done little to dispel this impression.)

I asked the Debian leader Steve McIntyre a few queries about the Mono change and he, as always, sent back straightforward replies. McIntyre, I may add, has always been open and upfront in dealing with iTWire.

But after Free Software Foundation chief Richard Stallman called the Debian move risky – he based the statement on the inference that a decision on including Mono in the Debian default install had already been taken – Debian spokesman Alexander Reichle-Schmehl decided that the project had to speak up and did so by trying to explain things through a post on his blog.

For those who have not been following the whole Mono kerkuffle (a lot has happened recently), here is an excellent summary, which concludes thusly:

Well there are issues around Mono, including patents. This means that some people, myself included now refuse to use it. Those that are pro-mono don’t seem to understand exactly why everyone isn’t shouting hosannas over their projects. Indeed one of them classified Tomboy as ‘An Exciting Program’, which stunned me. Tomboy? Exciting? I didn’t think so.

It is “exciting” for Microsoft, that’s for sure. Its APIs spread to the competitors’ platforms, which makes Microsoft more powerful. It does not bother Novell. █

“Our partnership with Microsoft continues to expand.”

–Ron Hovsepian, Novell CEO

“[The partnership with Microsoft is] going very well insofar as we originally agreed to co-operate on three distinct projects and now we’re working on nine projects and there’s a good list of 19 other projects that we plan to co-operate on.”

–Ron Hovsepian, Novell CEO

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IRC: #boycottnovell @ FreeNode: July 15th, 2009

Posted in IRC Logs at 4:19 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Read the log

Enter the IRC channel now

To use your own IRC client, join channel #boycottnovell in FreeNode.

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Update on Novell and Microsoft’s Virtualisation Pact

Posted in GNU/Linux, Microsoft, Novell, Ron Hovsepian, Virtualisation, VMware, Windows, Xen at 4:11 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Summary: Bits from the press about Novell and virtualisation for the most part

MANY people may not remember this, but Ron Hovsepian admitted giving power to Microsoft in the datacentres. It was part of the deal that Novell should permit Windows to run as a host and SUSE usually be a guest. Novell was the feeble party in this relationship and by signing that notorious patent deal, Novell sort of passed its inferiority onto other GNU/Linux distributors.

Moreover, it cannot be stressed strongly enough that Citrix bought XenSource only to advance Windows for the most part. Here is a new article from The Register:

Citrix Systems and Microsoft are co-mingling some of their virtual desktop technologies. But Redmond stopped short of endorsing the XenClient bare-metal PC hypervisor that chip maker Intel and Citrix are working on for delivery later this year.

Also new from The Register is an article about FastScales:

Novell’s SUSE Linux Enterprise Server is not yet supported, and neither are other hypervisors, such as XenServer from Citrix Systems or Hyper-V from Microsoft, and this could be a problem. FastScale said back in April – when VMware launched its ESX Server 4.0 hypervisor and its related vSphere 4.0 tools – that it would support these by the end of the year.

Here is the Boston press about Novell:

Matt Rosoff, an analyst at Directions on Microsoft, a Kirkland, Wash., firm that specializes in tracking Microsoft, said that by creating a rival operating system, Google is leading with its chin.

“I don’t see why Google has to get into this business,’’ Rosoff said. “It seems like they’re waving a red flag directly at Microsoft’s core business.’’

Microsoft has crushed a host of erstwhile technology titans that posed similar head-on threats – browser maker Netscape and networking software company Novell Inc., for example, he said.

Matt Rosoff would be biased because of his professional focus and location (Kirkland, just like Gates), so by “crushed” he probably means broke the law to put competitors out of business and thus obtain a monopoly, then pay fines for the crimes and benefit from the outcome of the crime (financially) over the years. The article above is noteworthy because of another new article (from Alibaba) about VMware and Microsoft. Microsoft executives are pretty much running VMware right now. The article states:

But Maritz knew how to play hardball: He made decisions that helped vanquish past Microsoft rivals, including Lotus, Novell and Netscape.

“Play hardball” or break the law? How the press attempts to soften the seriousness of crimes over time. We see it constantly, even days ago. As Comes vs Microsoft exhibits show, Paul Maritz participated even in vandalism. There are many more examples, some of which are yet to come. █

“We are going to cut off their air supply.”

–Paul Maritz, former Microsoft Vice President, referring to Netscape

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Microsoft Propaganda (PR), Embargo, and New Convictions for AstroTurfing

Posted in Fraud, Marketing, Microsoft, Office Suites at 3:42 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Summary: Microsoft manages the press in order to hype up Office 2010 and it can be fined severely for AstroTurfing now that laws and enforcement are in place

AS WE pointed out some days ago, Microsoft is likely to be breaking the law when it sends full-time workers to promote Microsoft products in other people's blogs, without disclosure. As the links at the bottom show, our encounter is not an isolated incident and as part of “perception management” [1, 2] Microsoft is looking to control how journalists cover Office 2010. It uses embargoes to limit what they know about the product and how it gets covered. One person spilled the beans on what Microsoft did for Office 2010 coverage.

Well, perhaps. It’s only Office, after all. But then the official Microsoft twitter account @MicrosoftEMEA twittered a link – with a smiley – to the embargo breaker’s copy. A hack twittered back, saying “Thanks for applauding someone breaking the embargo” only to get a direct message saying “I’m not sure if you taking the Michael? ”. A similar tweet from me got a “me, “official”,??? I couldn’t possible endorse that kind of behaviour.”

Hard to see as MS holding up its end of the embargo deal.

Yes.

Witness how to the so-called “reliable press” actually works. It is an orgy of influence, selling people “perception” (or selling privileged audiences to corporations). That would be Microsoft's PR department. Returning to the subject of illegal AstroTurfing, according to the following report (there are many others), Microsoft can probably be fined millions or even billions for its practices.

The online journal gave a chatty account of a problem-free face lift. “You will never regret it,” the patient wrote.

But the seemingly satisfied customer actually was an employee of the firm behind the Lifestyle Lift, writing as part of a company campaign to plant plugs for the procedure online, state Attorney General Andrew Cuomo said in announcing a $300,000 settlement with the company Tuesday.

His office said the settlement appeared to be one of the first to address so-called astroturf marketing, or creating a bogus grassroots buzz about a product.

People should complain about Microsoft because it is doing the same thing at a massive scale and there is plenty of evidence. Andrew Cuomo may be known for his anti-USENET stance, but he would at least be valuable if he could also put an end to Microsoft AstroTrufing (or “astroturf marketing” as the article above calls it… our server administrator calls it “Internet Astroturfer”). █

Related:

“I’m a huge fan of guerrilla marketing.”

–Joe Wilcox, Microsoft Fan

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$100,000,000 in Marketing (Imposed Ignorance) Bought Microsoft Nothing in Search

Posted in Google, Marketing, Microsoft, Search at 3:14 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Summary: The Bing Experiment has failed based on simple arithmetic, despite breaking of the rules by Microsoft

THE other day we wrote about Bing failing, only to be visited by a Microsoft employee whose job is to shill (without disclosure) and police the image of Bing [1, 2]. Some of the press is literally paid by Bing in order to praise it, but there are honest new reports coming right now, such as this one from Business Insider:

Survey Confirms: Bing Will Bomb

Analysts are positively gushing about Microsoft’s Bing. Initial Comscore numbers showed a pop in Bing traffic! Some observers have gone so far as to suggest that Bing will usher in a whole new era in the search war between Google and Microsoft.*

Keep dreaming.

We have noticed a pattern of what seems like AstroTurfing in the comments of each negative article about Bing (The Inquirer and WebPro for example).

As Search Engine Land puts it, comScore shows that “Bing Barely Gaines Share In June 2009.” So even a debut filled with advertising had almost no effect and it only managed to eclipse the launch of Wolfram Alpha.

Now a third major ratings service has released search engine share figures for June 2009, and like the others, they show that Bing made only a tiny gain in the wake of its launch and major ad campaign.

Lastly, adds one person:

In a report, Douglas Anmuth, an analyst for Barclays Capital, wrote he had been expecting Bing’s share to come in between 10 percent and 11 percent. He said the comScore data was good news to investors of Google and Yahoo concerned about Bing’s initial impact.

So here ends Microsoft’s latest annual attempt to enter search, for which Microsoft broke the rules as the links at the bottom show. █

“It’s not the first entry for Microsoft, They do this about once a year.”

–Google CEO, regarding Bing