03.22.10

Government Cronyism Watch: Microsoft Inside FCC, California, Washington, and Bahrain

Posted in America, Asia, Bill Gates, Finance, Microsoft, Office Suites, Steve Ballmer, Windows at 2:31 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Summary: Latest examples of Microsoft entering the non-commercial arena and influencing decisions so as to help its bottom line

THE FCC family grows and the latest addition is covered by BusinessWeek, which says:

‘Sexiest Man’ Joins Navy Admiral, Microsoft Veteran at New FCC

[...]

Also among Genachowski’s recruits are retired Navy Rear Admiral James Barnett Jr., 56, who is chief of the FCC’s bureau of public safety and homeland security; Steven VanRoekel, 40, the agency’s managing director, who came from Microsoft Corp.; and Steven Waldman, 47, founder of beliefnet.com, which offers prayers and commentary to help users seeking spiritual guidance. Waldman, a former Newsweek correspondent, heads an FCC task force on the state of the media.

[...]

VanRoekel oversees the agency’s day-to-day operations. The former Microsoft executive and aide to founder Gates on speeches and strategy says he has worked to boost technology use since arriving to find an agency where “the status quo was the norm.”

We wrote about this tactless appointment before [1, 2]. The FCC took on Apple just weeks after VanRoekel had become the Managing Director of the FCC. But anyway, why does BusinessWeek care so much about a man’s appearance? It’s not as though people should vote for someone based on whether he is “Sexiest Man” or not.

Apropos, a couple of weeks ago Schwarzenegger put himself in Microsoft's pocket and now he’s getting bitten in the rear. From the San Francisco press we now learn:

Glitches in Microsoft’s California vouchers

[...]

Last week, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger visited Microsoft Corp.’s Silicon Valley campus to announce that the tech company would hand out more than 70,000 training vouchers through the state’s One-Stop Career Centers. The idea was to give Californians – whether unemployed or working – a chance to take online computer courses and get free tests to certify their skills.

This Microsoft-sponsored program, called Elevate America, mainly offers intermediate training in office programs – Word, Access, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and Vista – with some vouchers set aside to provide advanced online training to people hoping to work in computer administration.

[..]

Microsoft has run this same program in 12 other states and officials say the average completion rate has been just 30 percent – giving local workforce boards a chance to improve on that ratio by making sure that Californians follow through and take advantage of the training.

This is just nationwide dumping, as we have already explained. Microsoft tries to indoctrinate everyone by means of Windows and Office “training” that it “donates”. This programme is mostly being used in the US, but there are similar things going on in the UK. We gave examples.

To the US government, Microsoft is the tail that wags the dog. Last month we showed that a former Microsoft manager (Hunter) had entered the government where he is now helping Microsoft escape tax [1, 2, 3]. Microsoft’s darling press, the Seattle Times, still seems to be unwilling to cover this blunder; instead it says that “State tax break entices tech firms to build data centers”

Legislators and businesses have been worried about losing new data centers to other states since Microsoft, citing the state’s tax law, moved its cloud- computing platform Azure out of Washington to another U.S. data center. The news was distressing to the Grant County town of Quincy, where Yahoo, Microsoft and Intuit have built large server farms, drawn to the county’s cheap and green hydropower.

Server farms send data and software across the Internet to users and to Web sites around the world. Microsoft continues to operate a data center in Quincy but chose last year not to expand Azure there. Running a server farm requires large amounts of energy and bandwidth.

The Seattle Times should be shamed of itself for continuing to ignore a serious fiasco that hurts citizens of Seattle. Is this publication paid by Microsoft in any way (directly or indirectly)? There’s quite a déjà vu here because other Seattle or Redmond ‘publications’ are dedicated just to Microsoft boosting and some masquerade as government-oriented Web sites that offer impartial advice to governments.

“The Seattle Times should be shamed of itself for continuing to ignore a serious fiasco that hurts citizens of Seattle.”Here is the latest example of Microsoft promotion as an ‘article’ in one these Web sites; Microsoft seems to have gotten its own magazines to sell its products and deceive readers (under the the illusion that these are “news” sites). Here is one new example and another one. These new articles may seem like news, but they are embedded in sites that are named after Microsoft products. It’s an insult to real news sites and it dilutes authentic reporting as a whole. Shouldn’t the FCC look into such issues of misreporting (or improper media centralisation)? Oh wait, the FCC would not care because it’s partly run by a former colleague of Gates and Ballmer. It’s all just PR from a highly PR-dependent company that he used to work for, so why would he care?

Speaking of government influence, Microsoft will have a conference in Costa Mesa next week and we also learn that it has “workshops” in Bahrain, where these simply enable Microsoft to send instructions to people who make decisions:

Furthering its commitment to promote good government practices through the use of technology, Microsoft Bahrain today announced that it hosted a workshop for senior technology executives from the various entities within the Government of Bahrain.

This is wrong on very many levels. No wonder so many governments blindly sign contracts with Microsoft and sometimes get sued for it by their citizens. In some cases, the lawsuits come from competitors. Take Switzerland for example. We covered it in:

1. Microsoft Sued Over Its Corruption in Switzerland, Microsoft Debt Revisited
2. Can the United Kingdom and Hungary Still be Sued for Excluding Free Software?
3. 3 New Counts of Antitrust Violation by Microsoft?
4. Is Microsoft Breaking the Law in Switzerland Too?
5. Microsoft Uses Lobbyists to Attack Holland’s Migration to Free Software and Sort of Bribes South African Teachers Who Use Windows
6. ZDNet/eWeek Ruins Peter Judge’s Good Article by Attacking Red Hat When Microsoft Does the Crime
7. Week of Microsoft Government Affairs: a Look Back, a Look Ahead
8. Lawsuit Against Microsoft/Switzerland Succeeds So Far, More Countries/Companies Should Follow Suit
9. Latest Reports on Microsoft Bulk Deals Being Blocked in Switzerland, New Zealand
10. Swiss Government and Federal Computer Weekly: Why the Hostility Towards Free Software?
11. Switzerland and the UK Under Fire for Perpetual Microsoft Engagements
12. Lawsuit Over Alleged Microsoft Corruption in Switzerland Escalates to Federal Court

Microsoft’s manufactured ‘studies’ are another important subject that we mentioned last week (Microsoft uses these for government lobbying) and here is the latest example.

Microsoft’s Worldwide Utility Industry Survey 2010 is their latest attempt at doing this, and while this is not really a major study, there are a handful of meaningful conclusions that I think will – and should – resonate with utilities.

In the next post about the Gates Foundation we will show the latest ‘studies’ that they fund to serve themselves. This type of behaviour ought to be exposed because it only adds ‘noise’ to the debate and it harms citizens for the benefit of few large corporations. █

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03.21.10

The Brute Force and Sheer Power of Microsoft Windows

Posted in Microsoft, Security, Windows at 7:36 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

“Fuerza Bruta”

Summary: How Windows botnets enable criminals to make a lot of money at the expense of Windows users

WINDOWS means business. Sure, it stands in the way of many legitimate businesses, but at least some bad guys manage to make a living out of Windows’ flaws. Here is the latest example:

Facebook’s 400 million users have been targeted by a spam run that could infect their computers with malicious software designed to steals passwords and other data, according to security researchers at McAfee.

There are two elements at play here; first, there is the brute-force mailing, which typically requires botnets; secondly, there is malware here that only runs on Windows (the article neglects to say this, just like many others). Tracy Anne corrects this in the comments, but it really should not be required if journalists do their job properly.

It wasn’t so long ago that the SEC reported the effects of SPAM (Microsoft Windows zombie spewage) on Wall Street trade. It was reportedly the same outside the United States. Botnets were affecting stock prices with manipulation through brute-force disinformation for pump-and-dump schemes (references here). Wired Magazine reported the following some days ago:

SEC: Hacker Manipulated Stock Prices

U.S. regulators are moving to freeze the assets and trading accounts of a Russian accused of hacking into personal online portfolios and manipulating the price of dozens of stocks listed on the Nasdaq Stock Market and New York Stock Exchange.

A New York federal judge on Tuesday sided with the Securities and Exchange Commission and froze the assets of Broco Investments, believed to be a one-trader operation based in St. Petersburg, Russia. The SEC said Broco capitalized by artificially moving prices of more 38 thinly traded securities — enabling Broco to profit from up-or-down price swings.

[...]

The so-called “hack, pump and dump” scheme is among the latest illicit methods of gaming the market though hacking.

Earlier today we wrote about Bitdefender (which is supposed to defend Windows) simply castrating and breaking the operating system. That’s what one gets for trying to secure Windows. Our reader Tim wonders if “Bitdefender is spot on”:

Allegedly Bitdefender has identified several parts of Windows as a trojan, fixed them and subsequently brought down Windows.

Being flippant, one could argue that Bitdefender was merely doing its job and identifying Windows as a trojan was correct, another camp could list it as yet another issue Microsoft’s OS has stumbled into.

By the definition of the words “malware” and “spyware”, Microsoft Windows is both. Just because it’s widely used does not except it from the symptoms and the diagnosis. █

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IRC: #boycottnovell @ FreeNode: March 21st, 2010

Posted in IRC Logs at 7:22 pm 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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Xbox 360 Dies Without a “Coffin” and Microsoft’s Other Hardware Endeavours Seemingly a Dead End

Posted in Hardware, Microsoft, Windows at 6:49 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Summary: Microsoft’s attempts to sell hardware products such as consoles, portable media players, and phones seem destined to burial

BASED on the past week’s news, Microsoft’s RRoD saga takes a turn for the worse. RRoD has already cost Xbox literally billions in losses and Microsoft will be cutting corners from now on by not providing customers victims with “coffins” in which to bury their dead Xbox 360s and ship them to Microsoft/repair.

These days Microsoft is no longer shipping gamers who have a dead Xbox 360 a postage-paid cardboard packing box (affectionately called the “coffin”) for the return of the console. While Microsoft still pays for shipping both ways, it’s up to the console owner to provide the packing materials for the trip back to the repair center.

But wait, it gets worse. Both Nintendo and Sony shower Microsoft with insults and ridicule. Nintendo says [1, 2, 3] that it “Would Be Embarrassed to Behave Like Sony and Microsoft”. Here are the exact quotes:

Talking to the Kotaku blog, Reggie Fils-Aime, the president of Nintendo of America, went on the offensive, saying that “I think we would have been embarrassed to do what our competitors are currently doing,” adding that “all I can tell you is that we will innovate. We will provide something new. Something that the consumer and the industry will look at and say, ‘Wow, I didn’t see that coming’.”

Sony too is mocking Microsoft [1, 2], but it’s probably expected. Nintendo and IBM are the only large companies that actually make a lot of money from consoles.

Looking at Microsoft’s failed attempts to become relevant in phones, the latest step disappoints. To name some new articles:

1. Microsoft Doing Little to Reassure Mobile Biz Customers

There is a growing gap between what business technologists want from Windows Phone 7 and what Microsoft may actually deliver.

2. Microsoft Immediately Stumbles in Quest for Well-Designed Phone Apps

Sadly for Microsoft, when you start digging into the actual documents, you immediately realize: Microsoft might suddenly care about design in a new way. But it doesn’t mean that they’ve actually changed as a company.

3. Does Microsoft thinking copying the 2007 iPhone is a good idea?

Check out Todd Bishop’s spin (he is a longtime Microsoft booster):

4. Windows Phone manager’s exit a good sign for Microsoft’s strategy

Normally the departure of a key program manager does not signal positive things about a product, particularly with only a few months to go before it ships. But Mel Sampat said today that his decision to leave Microsoft’s Windows Phone team to start his own app development firm was actually a vote of confidence in the company’s potential to support a strong ecosystem of third-party apps.

Right. So if Mel Sampat had stayed at Microsoft, surely that would be a sign of Windows Mobile failing, according to the logic of Microsoft’s spinners. If a project gets abandoned by a manager, then it means success, right? Spin, spin, spin. Check out the latest Windows Mobile spin from Microsoft Nick. They are truly getting desperate for positive news. Chips B. Malroy wrote about Nick half an hour ago: “Nicholas Kolakowski over on the old MS Watch site is putting all the commentators to sleep with his excessive MS fawning. It’s like a ghost town over there.” █

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Jerry Seinfeld Makes “Lousy Celebrity Endorsement” for Microsoft After Reportedly Dumping Windows

Posted in Deception, Marketing, Microsoft, Vista, Vista 7, Windows at 6:06 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Photo by Alan Light

Summary: Key Vista endorser Jerry Seinfeld is named as one of IDG’s top 10 “Lousy Celebrity Endorsements”; Compatibility problems in Vista 7 stressed again to rebut Microsoft’s latest spin

Not a single headline about Vista has appeared over the past week^*, but there were about 15 clusters of headlines about “Windows 7″.

We were actually amused to find Microsoft in “10 Lousy Celebrity Endorsements”, which is this new gallery from IDG. It names Jerry Seinfeld as a top example. For those who do not recall, Microsoft buried its Seinfeld ads very quickly because — just like Mojave Experiment — they failed to sell Vista, which Seinfeld is said to have dumped (along with Windows as a whole). Some might say that Seinfeld never adopted Vista in the first place. In other words, it was an endorsement as fake as it can get.

“Some might say that Seinfeld never adopted Vista in the first place.”Instead of Seinfeld brainwash and the Mojave Experiment, Microsoft decided to pretend that it built a new operating system and it even created a new deskbar. Then, it spent half a billion dollars on advertising/spin alone (“perception management” [1, 2]). It’s still going on.

Elsewhere on the Web we now find some creative new spin about the compatibility issues in Vista 7. We wrote a lot about incompatibility in Vista 7, e.g.:

• Vista 7 Roundup: Microsoft Admits Upgrade Errors, People Wait for SP1, Compatibility Issues Identified
• Vista 7 — Just Like Vista — Incompatible with Vital Services
• Vista 7 Incompatibility Issues, Crashes, and More NPD Lies
• Jerry Seinfeld Dumps Vista, Some Users Prefer Vista Over Vista 7 Because of Incompatibility
• Vista 7 Crashes on Certain Hardware, Stifles Samba Compatibility
• Vista 7 Lacks Compatibility But Finally Gains GPL Compliance
• Vista 7 Limitations, Compatibility Issues, and Hype from the Microsoft Ecosystem
• Signs That Vista 7 — Like Vista — Will Pose Compatibility Issues
• Vista 7 Starter Edition Called “Too Wimpy” by IDG, Compatibility Problems Foreseen
• Intel Unhappy With Failed Migration to Vista 7, Radical Microsoft Spin Begins

From the same site that published compatibility spin we also gather a lot of vapourware about Service Pack 1 merely existing (no release date yet). This type of spin appears elsewhere and it’s mostly indicative of effective Microsoft PR, not actual news of much value. █
____
^* Source: Google News search.

“But this is going to end as all tragedies must, with tears. Steve Ballmer is getting taken for the biggest ride of his life, and one day he’s going to find himself dumped out of the limo by the side of the road wondering what happened.”

–Dana Blankenhorn (Liddell destroying Microsoft from within)

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Microsoft Vice President Quits in China, Others Do Too

Posted in Asia, Finance, Microsoft at 5:23 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Summary: The Great Microsoft Exodus carries on, particularly in a division that loses obscene amounts of money

MICROSOFT has suffered from some very major departures in recent years. Vice presidents, for instance, are dropping like flies. It’s easy to see why. Looking at Microsoft’s online business, it loses over $2 billion per year and there is no turnaround foreseen (or proven).

Microsoft’s financial situation is worse than most people realise. This is perhaps why Microsoft’s online man in China has just decided to leave after 5 years. Except for reports from China, everything else points at Reuters:

—Microsoft: Xiao Chen, MSN China’s VP of sales is leaving at the end of March to start up his own company, Reuters reports. He had been with the Chinese MSN venture since it it launched in 2005.

From BusinessInsider:

Microsoft is losing one of its top sales executives in China, Reuters reports.

Finally, here is the original, which comes in two versions:

Microsoft (MSFT.O) said on Thursday its vice-president of sales for its MSN China joint venture would leave the firm at the end of March to pursue his own start-up.

So, it’s not quite over. The Microsoft staff could potentially extend the company’s presence (ecosystem) from outside its main operation. We saw that before and it’s not an alien concept.

Here is another key man who quits Microsoft because Midori has “failure” written all over it.

It’s been awfully quiet on the Midori front lately. But here’s one bit of news related to Microsoft’s (mostly) secret operating-system incubation project: Midori team Jonathan Shapiro is leaving the company after less than a year.

Midori is just a lot of hype. Does anyone remember “Singularity”? █

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SCO Cash Infusion Came from Former SCO Staff

Posted in Courtroom, Finance, GNU/Linux, Novell, SCO at 4:58 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Summary: A new disclosure of names of those who fund SCO’s lawsuit against Linux reveals many former members of SCO

A day ago we wrote about SCO receiving $2 million. SCO is desperate for money because it can hardly pay lawyers any longer and its never-ending lawsuit against Linux is virtually all it has left. Based on SCO’s 8-K which covers the Ralph Yarro cash injection, those who are involved in the transaction are “private lenders including Seung Ni Capital Partners, LLC, Jan Loeb, Leap Tide Capital Management, Inc., Steven Shin, Henry C. Beinstein, Stanley A. Beinstein, Neil J. Gagnon, Robert Dyson, WBS LLC, Ne Obliviscaris, Ltd., Darcy Mott, Clemons F. Walker and Herbert W. Jackson (collectively, the “Lenders”). Other than WBS LLC and Robert Dyson, all of the other Lenders listed above are direct or indirect shareholders of the Company.”

“So now we know the list of names,” says Pamela Jones. “It’s that same ole gang of SCOfolk.” Did they put their own money in the jar or could someone have helped them out and provided assurance (as in the case of BayStar, which offered $50 million)? █

“[Microsoft's] Mr. Emerson and I discussed a variety of investment structures wherein Microsoft would ‘backstop,’ or guarantee in some way, BayStar’s investment…. Microsoft assured me that it would in some way guarantee BayStar’s investment in SCO.”

–Larry Goldfarb, BayStar, key investor in SCO

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Are Proprietary Software Users Too Dangerous for Copying and Pasting?

Posted in Apple, DRM, Hardware, Microsoft at 7:25 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Summary: The primitivism of Apple’s and Microsoft’s tablets or phones (respectively) as shown using some new information

“COPY AND PASTE” is a fundamental function that borrows its name from the analogy/metaphor of a physical action. Whether there is a patent on this digital process is a separate question, but either way, the nature of the action is one that can scare copyright maximalists. As iPad shows (it does not show much [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9]), Apple chose to sidle with the copyright cartel, which Steve Jobs has connections with. It’s all about DRM prisons and prevention of sharing — the very nature and cornerstone of the World Wide Web and modern science.

Here is more new information about the iPad. It’s information which indicates that “Apple will not replace Ipad batteries”:

EXPENSIVE TOYMAKER Apple has made it clear that when the battery dies in its overpriced keyboardless netbook, the Ipad, you will have to stump up $99 for a new discounted machine.

Apple has a powerful brand, but the same cannot be said about its products. Apple has run advertisements here in the UK about the ‘feature’ of “copy and paste” being added to the iPhone (after Apple had maliciously killed third-party software that achieved it). It’s comical. They show this on television — the simple process of copying some lump of text, which they gloat about as though it’s a “killer feature”. It’s comical because my Palm devices have been doing this for over a decade and they are PDAs, yet Apple treats it like some sort of “innovation” (the idea is trivial, simple to implement, and it goes back many decades, according to Wikipedia).

In recent weeks Microsoft has been publicly admitting that it takes inspiration from the iPhone. We have cited several reports about this. Now it turns out that Windows Phone 7 (a renamed Windows Mobile 7) will omit “copy and paste”. The British press confirms this too [1, 2].

Ready for another long, drawn-out copy and paste controversy to overtake your every waking moment for a year or two? Good: Microsoft just mentioned in a Q&A session here at MIX10 in no uncertain terms that clipboard operations won’t be supported on Windows Phone 7 Series… so that’s that.

What a disaster. So Microsoft is making its phones even dumber and less capable over time. Users — in turn — will have no way around this.

Last night we quoted Tim Anderson (Microsoft booster) as saying that “Win phone 7 marketplace can automatically revoke apps – delete them from your device!” (he said this off the record — so to speak — over in Twitter). That’s another antifeature that Microsoft copied from Apple.

“Win phone 7 marketplace can automatically revoke apps – delete them from your device!”
      –Tim AndersonNow we find that Anderson is repeatedly boosting the product along with a colleague and Microsoft booster, Gavin Clarke (he also boosts IE 9 despite the true problems [1, 2, 3, 4]). What has happened to The Register that made it so full of Microsoft boosters? This news site is still belittling Google and defending Microsoft (we gave examples before and we keep seeing this pattern every day). The Register is hardly worth following anymore (personally, I read it just once a week now). The ‘old’ Register (the one I once knew) is not the ‘new’ Register, even though it has kept the same name (different writers and funding sources).

Anyway, to wrap up some points that we have raised before, Windows Phone 7 is about taking even more control away from users and Tim Bray says the same thing about Apple (we covered his rants last week).

What about Apple’s attack on GNU/Linux? This sure doesn’t make Apple any less aggressive than Microsoft when it comes to the mobile marketplace. Apple’s anti-Android/Linux lawsuit and prior attacks (e.g. patent FUD against Palm) [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6], which received Microsoft’s support by the way [1, 2, 3], are followed by yet more patent applications from Apple. This new one is about “Mobile Social Networking,” according to IDG News Service.

A recently disclosed patent request suggests Apple may be working on a mobile social networking application that would presumably let iPhone users form ad-hoc groups based on their locations.

That’s a software patent. █

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