09.14.10
Microsoft Still Profits From Its Software Being Broken
Summary: Child rape case cannot have a verdict served because of Microsoft Word problems, which “Microsoft specialists” are called to help with
FOR SOMEONE to profit from one’s own shoddy creation is rather unjust, but that’s just what Microsoft attained and accomplished by making money from problems it created/enabled, such as Conficker. Vista 7 is currently being discussed in the context of insecurity… in fact, because of a worm called seven.exe:
Last week, as usual, my USB drive got infected from a public computer. What is interesting here is that this was a Windows 7 system. Coincidentally, the malware that jumped to my USB drive was called seven.exe so I checked online to see what it does, partly in jealousy because Megatotoro reported that he got his first beacon.
It turns out that seven.exe is a worm that has been around since 2007 (hence the name) and, consequently, predates Windows 7, which was released in 2009.
In Windows, USB drives usually self-execute files. What a terrible design decision from Microsoft. No wonder if makes so much money selling services and “security” addons; its operating system is built almost to just require that. It is too tolerant to malware.
According to this summary/translation from Slashdot, a high-profile case is hindered by Microsoft incompetence and Microsoft “specialists” are then being invoked to make some money:
The disclosure of the full verdict has been postponed from September 8 to a yet-to-be-announced date, allegedly because the full document was written in several MS Word files which, when merged together, retained ‘computer related annotations which should not be present in any legal document.’ (Google translated article.) Microsoft specialists were called in to help the judges sort out the ‘text formatting glitch,’ while the defendants and their lawyers eagerly wait to access the full text of the verdict.
The two issues are, first of all, the mistake of using Office in such an important scenario; the second is the hiring of Microsoft folks to resolve the problems which Microsoft is probably responsible for (it created files that hide personal data and disrespect the user and that’s a subject for another day). █
