Earlier this year a method to get access to date encrypted with the Open Source software True Crypt was published by security researchers which involved physical access to the protected computer system. Back then many commenters and so called security experts mentioned that this was one of the main differences to Microsoft’s Bitlocker encryption.
Legitimate products were wrongly classified as harbouring the Dell-MZG Trojan or other strains of malware and whisked off to quarantine following the publication of a dodgy update. Avast has published a new update that eliminates the wrongful classification glitch. However, that still leaves users who applied the earlier update with borked systems.
Yes, the bullies from Redmond are now attacking many businesses for spreading their software. Only weeks ago Microsoft admitted that it does not mind this, having previously said that it benefits from it. “It’s easier for our software to compete with Linux when there’s piracy than when there’s not,” said Bill Gates in 2007.
“Microsoft declares ‘consumer action day’ to help fight piracy [sic],” says this article.
Software giant Microsoft declared yesterday to be a consumer action day, and took part in a global effort to clamp down on software piracy.
A Lubbock judge has ordered a Plainview businessman to pay Microsoft more than $1,000 in damages after the court ruled he violated Microsoft copyrights and trademarks, KCBD-TV reported.
Microsoft asked for nearly $1 million in punitive damages. The judge said in his written order that Microsoft’s request was excessive. Instead, the judge ordered Rose to pay $1,500 in actual damages and $3,000 in attorney fees.
Microsoft is attacking the very same people who helped Microsoft be more ubiquitous. What if they had sold GNU/Linux? What would Microsoft do then?
Microsoft is running out of steam (it already borrows money), so it is not surprising that it behaves like the MPAA/RIAA. Why does anyone still do business with this company? It treats its customers like criminals. █
Summary: The press which is in Microsoft’s pocket uses its position irresponsibly to brainwash the masses by the spread of marketing and not reporting
THE reality behind Vista 7 cannot be distorted, not even with obedient, self-appointers reporters who comply with norms, pressure, PR agencies, and hearsay. Some of them are also paid by Microsoft. They made a big mistake when they spread the message that Windows Vista would be a great success (even after it was released) and they are doing it again with Vista 7.
“They made a big mistake when they spread the message that Windows Vista would be a great success (even after it was released) and they are doing it again with Vista 7.”Shifting of focus from Vista to Vista 7 is perfectly clear to see and there is even a shift of focus to vapourware that we call “Vista 8″. We’ll come to this later. Not a single headline about “Vista” has appeared in the past week’s news*, compared to 20 clusters of headlines about Vista 7 (which is also relatively little). This is typical.
So who is responsible (at least in part) for hyping up Windows? Well, there is the unofficial ‘Microsoft press’ (they recently set up a biased “visualization” site), which writes positively about Vista 7 and quotes Microsoft as taking pride in waste. The same publisher also shows what Comes vs Microsoft once revealed — that Microsoft may want to abolish SQL.
Think the “NoSQL” movement isn’t prominent on Microsoft’s radar screen?
Think again. Not only is the company tracking it, some people inside Microsoft have actually jumped on the anti-SQL bandwagon. This came to light when Microsoft Technical Fellow Dave Campbell took some pot-shots at the latest threat to the company’s bread-and-butter database strategy during the recent Professional Developer’s Conference.
This is an old plan that never materialised (more lock-in). It is interesting that the ‘Microsoft press’ can bring this up, along with baseless and ridiculous claims from Doug Barney, who shockingly claims “Mobile Windows Surge Due”. Where does this man live? Based on several surveys from planet Earth, Windows Mobile is sinking like a rock, but that’s just the reporting one ought to expect from the ‘Microsoft press’ (they have a whole bunch of domains now), which sometimes seems to act like a peripheral marketing agency of Microsoft.
After 13 years and countless kicks at the can, it’s time for Microsoft to call it a day.
Going back to Vista 7, Microsoft is looking for free labour, just like the in “Show Us Your Wow” campaign that left submitters’ contributions dumped altogether, along with the campaign Web site.
Perhaps even more interesting is the level of fantasy, which includes hype and vapourware one findswhen it comes to Windows. Vista 7 is hardly adopted and Microsoft is already talking about future versions. Why? Probably to “freeze the market,” to use Microsoft's own words. They always fail to deliver what they promise, but it keeps people deluded and unwilling to explore other options.
German researchers have devised five methods that determined attackers can use to bypass hard-drive encryption in recent versions of Microsoft operating systems.
A Missouri man has lost his legal battle against an online prescription processor that suffered a security breach that exposed highly sensitive subscriber information.
John Amburgy alleged that Express Scripts was negligent because it failed to adequately safeguard customer data, including names, dates of birth, social security numbers, and prescription drug histories. He argued that the breach in October 2008 that exposed an unknown number of subscribers’ details put him at risk of identity theft for which he was entitled to compensation.
The US$10 webcam that Anna Giesman bought her daughter at Office Depot over the Thanksgiving weekend sounds like one of those deals that’s too good to be true. And for her, it was.
A week later, she’s worried and upset because a CD that came with the camera contained a Web link that apparently infected her PC with fake antivirus software.
“Well the initial impression is how much it [Windows 7] looks like Vista. Which I think is…uh…the thing I’m not supposed to say.”
–Microsoft Jack Schofield
Summary: More new parallels found which show the similarity between Vista marketing and Vista 7 marketing
THE reality behind Vista 7 continues to fascinate. It is like a proper duplication of the disaster known as “Vista”.
A lot of people may not remember this, but back in 2007 when Vista was “hot” (according to the mainstream press), Microsoft spread Vista buses to promote the operating system. Microsoft also resorted to using celebrities to promote Vista as we noted some days ago when covering the Sugababes move. Now it turns out that Microsoft will use both celebrities and buses to promote Vista 7. Oh, deja vu!
In addition to this, let it be remembered that Vista was hailed by Microsoft in 2007, with the conformist press acting as “yes men”. Our reader “Goblin” wrote earlier in the day: “It actually appears a little worse than that, a claimed Microsoft engineer explains how realistic reports about Microsoft products are dealt with at Redmond. Why let problems of Vista get in the way of your MS career…say its great, get promoted!?!”
Whilst the content of the letter is nothing that hasn’t been covered here before, what is interesting is a comment a little further down the page by a claimed former Microsoft engineer.
You are so right. As a former engineer at Microsoft since the early days, I witnessed a change in General Manager and Regional Vice President level management, where they punished converyors of realistic feedback and only escalated good feedback to show good results on their commitments so they can get promoted and get good performance reviews, then move on to higher paying jobs. It got worse around the Vista timeframe. From what I hear from my former friends, this has not gotten any better.
Their actions helped advance their careers, while customers suffered, and their actions effected the company’s bottom line and public pereption on Microsoft’s core competency product.
So lets look at these comments. ”Punished realistic comments” I expect most people who have a blog and have posted dissatisfaction in Microsoft products have been “punished”. There certainly a lot of that going on at comp.os.linux.advocacy when a post is made that upsets someone with a Microsoft opinion.
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and I would agree. My opinion is that Steve Ballmer was well aware of the Vista shortcomings prior to it hitting the market, but by then far too much money had been spent on “the project” and they were committed for release, at the very least to recoup as much of their investment as they could. The good early reports are convenient since Mr Ballmer can put that as a justification for releasing Vista and in my opinion explains why the claimed Microsoft engineer was stating the good comments were made to further careers.
Actually, according to unsealed/leaked E-mails (deposition period) from Steve Ballmer and other people of executive ranks, they all knew very well that Vista was trouble, even ahead of its release. It did not prevent them from pretending for years that it was a fantastic operating system. We are seeing some of the same symptoms right now with Vista 7.
“Linux doesn’t have to worry much about competition,” writes an anonymous person in reply to the above. “It appears that Microsoft will collapse from within due to mismanagement. They can’t compete on an even playing ground, and can only win if they monopolise the market, which it appears they are doing with their .NET and Silverlight streaming video product.” █
Microsoft has apologised for a brief outage which saw its search site Bing disappear from the internet.
The outage lasted for nearly 30 minutes between in the early hours of 3 December. At that time anyone visiting the site got an error message.
This is good news to Free software not just because it demonstrates the weakness of Windows and the rest of the Microsoft stack; Microsoft’s presence online is poisonous because its search results are hostile towards Free software (by design) and Microsoft again uses its “MSN” portal to attack GNU/Linux and Free software. We gave many examples like this before, but this one is brand new.
Microsoft is also hooking standards-hostile software onto its Web presence, as this new article reminds us:
Today at their Bing Fall Release event, Microsoft showed off some nice updates to their search engine, including further information about how the much anticipated Twitter and Facebook data integration will work. But by far the most interesting thing they showed was the new beta version of Bing Maps. While it looked very nice, the real reason why it was so interesting is what it requires: Silverlight.
The Microsoft-faithful crowd is fraudulently spinning this as “open”, as we noted yesterday.
Google has launched Google Public DNS as an alternative domain name service for any Internet user. Designed to replace the DNS services provided by ISPs or companies, Google says that its DNS will be faster and more secure than many other DNSs, and won’t filter content.
Google has entered the domain name resolution business, part of its ongoing effort to control just about everything you do on the net.
This morning, the Mountain View Chocolate Factory unveiled the free Google Public DNS, a service that lets you resolve net domain names through Google-controlled servers.
In order for the Web to stay free as in freedom (Independence) and open as in accessible, it is highly important to ensure that no single vendor has too much power over it, not even Adobe. █
Yes, it’s almost time for Microsoft’s holiday edition of Patch Tuesday, December 8th. This is one set of gifts you shouldn’t wait to open and install. Microsoft announced that the patch presents would contain “six new security bulletins addressing 12 vulnerabilities in Windows, Internet Explorer and Microsoft Office products.” And, the important news is that three of them have the maximum severity rating of Critical.
For my money, the most important of these is Microsoft Security Advisory 977981. This is the latest IE (Internet Explorer) bug, which could, in theory, be used to take over your Windows PCs.
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As for the rest of your December patch presents, Microsoft will be fixing both a Windows and Office problem that could be used to take your PC over with a remote code execution attack. You will need to re-boot your system after applying these patches.
So, if you’ve been good little Windows users, be sure to download and install these patches. If you haven’t been, well don’t be surprised if you get a lump of malware coal in your computers instead.
Miscreants have developed a ransomware package that blocks internet access in a bid to force infected users into paying up by sending a text message to a premium rate SMS number, lining the pocket of cybercrooks in the process.
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The ploy is a variant on previous ransomware packages that encrypt and block access to document files. One strain of ransomware detected in January 2008 locks up Windows machines, seeking payment via SMS. That threat wasn’t specific to Russia and didn’t affect a net connection as such but is otherwise very similar to the latest attack.
Cameroon (.cm) web domains supplanted those in Hong Kong as most likely to harbour malware, with more than one in three (36.7 per cent) of domains registered in the West African country hosting viruses or malicious code.
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