ONE READER has sent us a pointer to this interesting new article from The Register. It not only reinforces the case of Microsoft having staff overlap with the secret agencies (we previously wrote about the FBI's CIPAV and the FBI's malware headaches [1, 2], not to mention the DHS [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]) but it also shows an executive sort of going back and forth between Microsoft and the FBI. From the report:
Ed Gibson, who moved from his role as the FBI’s assistant legal to work as Microsoft’s chief security advisor in the UK back in 2005, said that if the self-confessed hacker had accepted voluntary extradition when he offered it back in 2003 then he would have “been out of jail four years ago” instead of facing extradition now.
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Janis Sharp, McKinnon's mum, gave us a robust reaction to Gibson's comments. "Ed Gibson is the same man that said to Gary's legal team that they'd prosecute Gary to max and state wanted to see him fry."
WBJ talks to Jan Muehlfeit, chairman of Microsoft Europe, about the current state of IT in the CEE region and the future of the industry.
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I think today there are three different business models in the software industry: one is commercial software, which is Microsoft, Oracle and others; there’s open source, where some people are selling and some have it for free, but there’s a lot of money gained through services; and the third model is the Google model, and that’s advertising.