Bonum Certa Men Certa

Eye on Microsoft: Failures, Corruption, Spying, Insecurity and Voting Machines

Technical Failures



Here is an excellent new essay which explains why some Windows crashes are simply inexcusable. It uses the latest Apple-Vista 'allergy' as an example.

“Read my lips; no new taxes,” President George H. W. Bush; “I did not have sexual relations with that woman,” President Bill Clinton;” and “Windows Vista has turned into a phenomenal product, better than any other OS we’ve ever built and far, far better than any other software available today, Co-president of Microsoft’s Platforms & Services Division Jim Allchin. Three great recent lies, but there’s only one of them that’s still being maintained as the truth: That Vista is a great operating system. Please, it’s not even stable.

[...]

Better still, I'd like to see all operating system developers to take a long hard look at what Andrew S. Tanenbaum has been up to with Minix, the operating system that inspired Linus Torvalds to write Linux. In Minix 3, all device drivers live in user space and its use of what Tanenbaum calls proper fault isolation goes a long way to making sure that bad code in a single place can't take down an entire operating system.


Ed Bought [sic] is already spinning this 'on behalf' of Microsoft in ZDNet. The Apple-faithful are furious over this.

Corruption



We have covered rather convincing allegations of Microsoft corruption and Novell corruption in recent weeks. The SEC is finally said to be stepping up to crack down on this disease.

Laying out his priorities, the new enforcement chief for the Securities and Exchange Commission in San Francisco said Thursday he expects an upswing in fraud cases against public companies.


Knowing Microsoft's heavy lobbying activities, the SEC is likely to be left at bay as far as Microsoft is concerned. That's despite the many known issues (older essay).

The so-called "Gates Seven" are re sponsible—whether by accident or design—for creating this massive corruption of our free market system. This fraud is responsible for destabilizing the global economic system and creating the single greatest threat to our economic prosperity as a nation.

The Gates Seven are Sen. Slade Gor ton (R-Wash.); former Treasury Secre tary Robert Rubin; Texas Gov. George W. Bush (R); two of Microsoft's former chief financial officers, Mike Brown and Greg Maffei; chief operating officer at Microsoft Bob Herbold; and Myron Scholes, a Nobel Prize winning economist and partner in the Long Term Capital Hedge Fund.

Gorton has marshaled large lobbying groups on Microsoft's behalf, including the Citizens for a Sound Economy. This group aggressively supports Microsoft—even after receiving numerous versions of my study—and also advocates litigation reforms that would make it much harder to sue a company like Microsoft for financial fraud.


There are some more iffy mergers of lobbying groups happening at the moment. In a perfect world, they should be banned, not joined. It's an enormously ill system [1, 2.

Web/Standards



Microsoft's Internet Explorer has been spyware for quite time (at least since version 7). Going by the definition of "spyware", a lot of Microsoft software is indeed spyware (it harvests personal data) and Internet Explorer 8 will take this a step further

The data Microsoft does collect and record, however, is kept intact for 18 months, twice as long as Google will retain search logs under a new policy announced this week. At the end of the year-and-a-half-long period, Microsoft strips some information, particularly the query string, from the URLs it's obtained from IE8 users. The query string is the part of a URL that's passed to Web applications, and often includes a username and password, or other confidential information.


For those who do not keep abreast of IE development, Microsoft has known for quite some time every single page that an IE user visits. It collects people's browsing history and stores that in remote datacentres, rendering privacy an illusion at best because this data gets shared. This never prevented Microsoft from publicly and legally scolding Google, though.

“Whether through ignorance or active editorial spin the articles claim, wrongly, that VML is another standard.”We previously wrote about Microsoft's SVG snub. A reader has just sent us some interesting information about it: "There are a number of articles floating around recently criticising Microsoft for being the only web browser-maker that does not support SVG.

"Whether through ignorance or active editorial spin the articles claim, wrongly, that VML is another standard. It is not. Firstly, it's an Microsoft-only deal. Secondly, it's not a standard.

"Another point is that SVG can be used to hold JavaScript and thus function to create 'interactive' graphics and animations much like Flash or Microsoft's imitation of Flash."

Security



This new article from CNET explores the anatomy of botnets, which are believed to comprise around 320 million PCs (mostly Windows, of course).

Lately, though, Storm has been evolving yet again. This time it's isolating its network further from the general Internet traffic by encrypting packets using an embedded key and simple XOR. It also has been changing its initial infection packing or compression process. The outer layers change every 10 minutes, while the interior bot code changes packing more on the order of once a month. Neither the packing nor the encryption have so far proven defeating to security researchers.


Also worth mentioning is this demo showing the failure of proprietary and Windows-based voting machines. It is a video.

This kind of makes you question the whole e-voting system. I am not suggesting you try this, but I am suggesting you question the reliability of these systems. Are any of these machines safe? Don't forget to check out the other, equally disturbing, video on the web site.


Links are appended below for more information about this subject.

Comments

Recent Techrights' Posts

Greener Pastures for Free Software Users
This coming week we'll publish many articles about GNU/Linux and technical means of/for user empowerment
Google News, Which We Call Gulag Noise, is Following the New York Times Into the Digital Graveyard
It merely gives an illusion of volume and instead of giving readers more stuff to read it wastes people's time
Over at Tux Machines...
yesterday's posts
Software Freedom is the Future and Microsoft is the Biggest Obstacle
GNU/Linux, at its roots, was all about Software Freedom
 
"Modern" Computing Sucks and Harms Computer Users
Reprinted with permission from Ryan Farmer
Red Windows
Red Hat is not into Free software
Richard Stallman Giving Talks in the Czech Republic and Germany This Week (Tomorrow's Talk is "Artificial Intelligence vs Language Models")
This past weekend he gave two talks in the Czech Republic
Companies Faking the True Number of Layoffs With Return-to-Office Mandates and Forced Relocation
we estimate that Microsoft cut about 30,000 so far this year, having cut many more jobs last year
Links 03/10/2023: Cellphones (Mobile Phones) Banned in Classrooms in England
Links for the day
IRC Proceedings: Monday, October 02, 2023
IRC logs for Monday, October 02, 2023
Daily Bulletins Coming Soon (Hopefully as Early as Next Week)
Today we finish testing IRC logs and their upload to Gemini, not just to IPFS
Links 02/10/2023: NUC, GTK Themes, and More
Links for the day
New Union Syndicale Articles About the European Patent Office
We'll probably get back to regularly writing about the EPO in the near future
If WordPress Knows Well Enough to Self-Host Its Podcast, Why Can't GNU/Linux Shows Do the Same?
For those who want videos and podcasts, here are today's latest additions from other sites
Richard Stallman Can Outlive Many of His Prominent Haters
M.J.G. tried hard to take our Web site offline, based on lies and repeated threats
The GNU/Linux Revolution Ain't Here. Look at Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa (BRICS) Instead.
The revolution won't be televised
Chaffbot Effect: Microsoft Bing Falls to Lowest Share in Two Years (Amid Loads of Bing Layoffs This Year)
Press outlets mostly failed to report that Bing is collapsing
Forget VSCode (Microsoft's Proprietary Spyware), Use KATE Instead
KATE is great
Sometimes It's Time to Reboot
No, not Android. KDE.
GNU/Linux Distributions as "Appliances" and DRM Platforms (the Case of ChromeOS and SteamOS)
Is this what we envisioned in the 1980s and 90s?
Fulfilling the Site's Full Potential
We remain devoted to the aforementioned goal of posting more original material
Over at Tux Machines...
2 days' worth
Upcoming Talk by Dr. Richard Stallman: Large Language Models Are Not Artificial Intelligence
LLMs aren't truly intelligent and cannot quite grasp what they spew out
GulagTube is a Burning Platform (Exit YouTube, Invidious Won't Save Us From Google/Alphabet in the Long Run)
Alphabet Agency (Google) sees the future of video as a "skinnerbox" (running Android) that indoctrinates you like TikTok does
Microsoft's Demise in the Global News Cycle is Rather Telling
It should be noted that Microsoft is, in general, no longer prominent or dominant in news headlines
Gemini Migration and Backup Capsule (Archive)
At the end we'll end up with something a lot better than before and latency should be massively reduced
Links 01/10/2023: Science, Education, and pro-Russia Slovakia Leadership
Links for the day
IRC Proceedings: Sunday, October 01, 2023
IRC logs for Sunday, October 01, 2023
Links 01/10/2023: Climate, Patents, Programming, and More
Links for the day
Apple and Microsoft Problems
half a dozen links
Malware in the Ubuntu Snap Store, Thanks to Canonical Bloatware Mindset
Reprinted with permission from Ryan Farmer
Gemini Rising
There are 3523 capsules
Richard Stallman Gave a Talk Yesterday, Will Give Another Talk Today, and Will Give Two More Talks in Germany Later This Week
Those cover at least 2 different topics
Beware the Microsoft Sharks
We won't forgive and forget
IRC Proceedings: Saturday, September 30, 2023
IRC logs for Saturday, September 30, 2023
Don't be Afraid of the Command Line, It Might Even be a Friend
There's a tendency to think that only graphical interfaces were made to simplify usage, and any declarative interface is by design raw, inherently unfit for usage
One Positive Note About GNU/Linux Coverage in 2023 (Less Microsoft)
GNU/Linux users do not want this, with very rare exceptions
Snaps Were Never Good at Security, But the Media Coverage is Just Appalling
The media should focus on culling Windows, not making a huge fuss over minor things wrongly attributed to "Linux"