Bad Windows Vista

Summary: Prostitution, orgies, drug use, and other shocking details about life at Microsoft

TWO years ago, Microsoft was visited by the authorities under unusual circumstances:

Microsoft Building Searched By Feds Investigating High-Priced Hookers

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Federal investigators executed a search warrant at Microsoft’s Mountain View, Calif., offices earlier this month as part of an investigation into a high-priced call girl ring similar to the one used by former New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer.

Read more at Boycott Novell

Last week, David Coursey reported that Microsoft entertainment and devices boss Robbie Bach made the prediction in an analyst briefing that Linux on mobile will lose. Why? It’s choice is a bad thing for customers and that there is too much Linux in the mobile marketplace

By Bach’s count there are 17 variants of Linux available on mobile phones. He sees this as a bad thing for customers. We, unsurprisingly, see this as a bad thing for Microsoft.

Technology markets are shaped by momentum. When a company bets on a technology, it’s not a one-time decision. They must live with that choice for years. Ecosystems around technology are as important as the technology itself, since you need partners and developers to actually make something of it. This is why I take issue with his pronouncement that Linux will not do as well as Microsoft mobile. He may have a point that individual variants of Linux may come and go. We will likely see moves both up and down for specific versions of a mobile OS using Linux. We’ve seen it in the enterprise distribution market.

Read more at The LInux Foundation

Microsoft isn’t having an easy time of it these days. In addition to the unpatched hole in Internet Explorer, a now published hole in Windows allows users with restricted access to escalate their privileges to system level – and this is believed to be possible on all 32-bit versions of Windows from Windows NT 3.1 up to, and including Windows 7. While the vulnerability is likely to affect home users in only a minor way, the administrators of corporate networks will probably have their hands full this week.

The problem is caused by flaws in the Virtual DOS Machine (VDM) introduced in 1993 to support 16-bit applications (real mode applications for 8086). VDM is based on the Virtual 8086 Mode (VM86) in 80386 processors and, among other things, intercepts hardware routines such as BIOS calls.

Read more at H-Security

Two interesting tidbits of news about Microsoft today. First is that the company is to make it legal to rent both Windows and Office. The second is an analysis on how slates will affect the Redmond giant’s bottom line. Both are interesting reading, but both also are indications of the problems that Microsoft is likely to encounter over the coming years.

See, when zealots debate the old “Windows vs. Mac vs. Linux” argument, it’s a widely held belief within the Mac and Linux camp that it is one of these platforms that represent the greatest threat to Microsoft’s dominance.

Read more at ZDNet

Summary: It is not Google’s fault but Microsoft’s fault that China managed to compromise accounts not just of Google but of over 20 other companies, by Microsoft’s own admission

YESTERDAY we mentioned Google’s reaction to attacks from China, which are now confirmed to be targeting different companies. It was not something against Google as Google is one among several victims and some people doubt there will be an exit from the largest Internet market.

How would leaving the Chinese market actually prevent Chinese crackers from connecting to Google servers? It would not

Read more at Boycott Novell

Another week, another example of how Microsoft is being forced to react to the increasing adoption of OpenOffice.org as the 2010 office software of choice. Clearly worried by OpenOffice.org’s increasing market share, Microsoft has been forced to change its licencing terms in an attempt to hold on to its internet cafe business. Directions on Microsoft analyst Paul DeGroot admits that Linux and OpenOffice.org are a perfectly viable alternative to Microsoft Windows and MS-Office for web cafes.

Read more at Unixmen

Those who buy a computer in most countries with Windows and do not accept the terms of licensing have to pay for the unused license(s). The procedure is complicated and inconsistent. In Italy, a group forming a collective complaint seeks to bring order to this chaos.

A change of regulations in Italy as of the first of January now enables official complaints to be filed in the form of a consistent class action.

Read more at Linux Magazine

Microsoft is up to its old tricks in the new year, as evidenced by a recent job posting for anti-FOSS personnel. This time, the thing that has Redmond sweating is what appears to be a mass migration of students to OpenOffice. And why wouldn’t they? “It’s free-as-in-beer and good enough — much better than the Microsoft Works that came on their computer,” noted Slashdot blogger David Masover.Well, the new year may be officially under way, but that hasn’t stopped Linux bloggers from continuing their reflections on all that transpired over the past decade.

At TuxRadar, for example, Graham Morrison looked back over the past 10 or so years and identified “15 game-changing Linux moments of the decade.”

Beginning with the release of version 2.4 of the Linux kernel back in 2001, all the way through to Oracle’s (Nasdaq: ORCL) purchase of Sun last year, Morrison zeroes in on the news he thinks mattered most for Linux.

Read more at LinuxInsider

First branded as a communist plot, then derided as a form of cancer, before being upgraded to merely a ‘grey spectre’, free and open source software (FOSS) has had a pretty rough ride from Microsoft over the years. For many in the open source community, the company represents all that is troubling about closed source software development. Recently, though, there have been developments that at least one leading open source developer has labelled a ’sea change’ following last year’s announcement that Microsoft was to become sponsors of the Apache Software Foundation (ASF).

Microsoft surprised many in the open source community for a second time in July 2009 by actually committing some of its own, hand-crafted-in-Redmond code to the Linux kernel. Initial reaction to the news ranged from shocked delight to deep suspicion and things took a turn for the worse a few days later when further information about the reasons behind the decision seemed to confuse matters. What at first had been officially described by Microsoft as ‘a break from the ordinary’, and had been talked up in blogs by various software engineers at the company, turned a little sour when open source advocates and commentators began to question the real motives behind the move. Just as debate about this had started to die down, Microsoft pulled another rabbit from the hat. In mid-September 2009, the company announced the launch of a not-for-profit organisation, The Codeplex Foundation, set up with the aim of exchanging code and furthering the understanding of open source among ‘commercial’ companies.

Read more at OSS Watch