Former Hacker Irks Microsoft in EU Dispute 204
Carl Bialik from WSJ writes "The Wall Street Journal profiles Neil Barrett, 'a former computer hacker who once infiltrated the system controlling a telescope at a Hawaii laboratory' and is now an expert witness causing problems for Microsoft in its antitrust battle with the European Union. Barrett 'has helped put the British glam rocker Gary Glitter behind bars for pedophilia. And he also has helped prosecute a teenage hacker from Wales, who claimed to have stolen Bill Gates' credit-card number and sent the Microsoft founder a shipment of Viagra. [...] In the corporate world, Mr. Barrett once met a challenge to hack into a large multinational company's system in four days to win a security assignment. He stole the company's undisclosed new logo as a trophy, he wrote.'"
Re:Not that I question Barrett's qualifications (Score:4, Insightful)
Looking at Microsofts history and some of their stunts they pulled off I wouldn't put it beyond them to indeed produce unusable crap.
Re:Not that I question Barrett's qualifications (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Not that I question Barrett's qualifications (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Not that I question Barrett's qualifications (Score:5, Insightful)
Bill should hire new lawyers. (Score:5, Insightful)
Thier lawyers seem even better at p****ng off European judges. Only this time there is no President of Texas to ride to the rescue. They are not a major generator of jobs or revenue for any european state, and, they cannot legally contibute to any European polititions campaign fund. Thier only hope was a sound legal case and ass kissing, but, its too late for that now. I think this is just starting out and Microsoft will be paying anf paying for years to come.
Re:Not that I question Barrett's qualifications (Score:2, Insightful)
Maybe yes, maybe no. But given your experience, and given Barrett's experience, wouldn't it be better to ask Barrett to do the deed rather than you?
No one is questioning his ability to do what he does well (maybe someone is, but they are irrelevant). But what he does well and what is being judged are not overlapping fields. He is a network security consultant. The manual is for network filesystem programming (unless I'm way off base here and thinking of another trial).
Re:resume? (Score:5, Insightful)
As part of his job he is asked by the authorities to examine evidence they already hold - in the case of the Welsh hacker and Gary Glitter where the police already had the evidence.
As ANOTHER part of his job, he does systems penetration tests.
He doesn't do illegal stuff these days - it would completely destroy the reputation he has built up as a credible expert witness. Why bother illegally breaking into systems when people will pay you to break into their own?
According to your thinking, every CSI and other specialist investigator is a "backstabbing little shit" as they turn over all the info they find to the authorities (who also hand it over to the defense as required to do so if they are using it in a court).
Re:Bill should hire new lawyers. (Score:5, Insightful)
The results are:
1) Ireland gets a lot of tax revenue
2) Ireland does what its told to by MS and others
This is also why Ireland was behind the EU attempt to introduce software patents.
All that trouble to get independence from Britain
Re:Not that I question Barrett's qualifications (Score:5, Insightful)
If the sentence is hard then tough luck, dont break the law in the first place. Its a punishment and its supposed to sting. It doesnt matter one bit if its hard to document the protocols but its pretty strange they arent already documented.
Its not surprising that it takes for ever to do patches when nobody inside Microsoft seems to know how things should work. They have to test every single line they alter because they dont know how things are supposed to work.
Re:The guy who discovered Gary Glitter's paedo-fes (Score:5, Insightful)
Rightly so. He "helped" catch one pedophile, but so what? We all know that paticular suspect was under surveillance for quite some time anyway. And you're simply naive if you this this paticular tech only snooped once and just happened to stumble over one celebrities hidden cache. Dollars to doughnuts the tech regularly slurped customers hard discs for porn and the like.
To paraphrase:
It were better that Ten Suspected Pedophiles should escape, than that the Innocent Person should be subject to warrantless seizure.
Re:Bill should hire new lawyers. (Score:1, Insightful)
I was impressed with their arguments in the US. Not that the arghuments made sense but that somehow they were able to convince the court (or maybe it was just the DOJ) not to apply punishments that could harm the company, and largely their punishment was that they were barred from acting illegally.
Re:Not that I question Barrett's qualifications (Score:2, Insightful)
Sounds like you're talking about commenting within the code. Which is there to help some one who comes along later to work on it to understand what different routines are doing and why.
Mr. Barrett was talking about interface documentation intended to be given to other developers working on thier own projects so that they might properly interact with Microsofts' OS.
So if all they did was put out comments from witin the code then, yea it would be totally useless for the porpose for which it was intended, i.e. an interface document.
But I don't think this is what they did. It sounds as if they threw together a bunch jargon laden instructions, obfuscated it with interchangeable naming conventions, put it in a book and said "See what a good boy I am?"
Re:Bill should hire new lawyers. (Score:5, Insightful)
The good thing... (Score:5, Insightful)
That's really the wrong spin to put on it. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Not that I question Barrett's qualifications (Score:2, Insightful)
If anything, I think this highlights the difference between programmers who write programs and sysadmins who shepherd boxen. A valuable lesson, and one to consider when submitting that Ask Slashdot requesting programming help.
Hello?!? MSDN (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:What does the EU want from microsoft? (Score:4, Insightful)
The only way to way to resolve the situation is to force behavorial changes. That means blocking monopolistic business practices (all the things microsoft does to OEMs because they are a monopoly and the OEMs have to do what MS says for example). That means forcing microsoft to open those things which it is using to maintain its monopoly like Windows Media Player file formats, MSN Messenger protocol, office document formats etc.
That means real change (A complete breakup of microsoft might be the only way to solve this for good)