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.'"
resume? (Score:5, Interesting)
Here's a link to a microsoft document about it. . (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:The guy who discovered Gary Glitter's paedo-fes (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Is this for real? It seems to be false (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Bill should hire new lawyers. (Score:1, Interesting)
A security consultant (Score:4, Interesting)
Does that qualify him to sit in judgement of something which he could arguably be considered uninformed or unqualified about?
Again, I don't think there's anything wrong with Barrett personally or politically, but is he really the best person to provide expert witness in this case? Wouldn't someone from, say, the Samba team be more qualified to judge whether Microsoft's internetworking protocol documentation was sufficiently made open?
Re:A security consultant (Score:4, Interesting)
Following your idea through, that would mean that Microsoft deliberately nominated a non-specialist just so that if he said anything negative, they could attack his competence. How sick would that be? And how unsurprising?
Hmm, this explains things (Score:5, Interesting)
Could this be why Microsoft projects consistently run over deadlines and behind expectations? (At least in the first iteration.)
This isn't Microsoft trying to screw the competitor, but just a peek into the hole that Microsoft has dug themselves into. Afterall, Microsoft hires can't all be dull-witted-code-monkeys, but perhaps the existing codebase has become a steaming pile of sh*t.
Working with c# and attempting to do anything beyond the immediately supported seems to support this. (Try overriding an OnPaint event on a ListViewBox for instance)
Re:A security consultant (Score:2, Interesting)
Reading through Microsoft's Criticism Report [microsoft.com] (PDF), it seems that Barrett was unknowledgeable about standard things such as "context handles" and "void pointers".
This document provides a scathing critique of Barrett's programming abilities or lack thereof. The document is provided by Microsoft, so the only way to tell if Trustee criticisms were cherry-picked or not would be to compare what was presented in this document with what was contained in the Trustee reports. However, from just an initial examination of the crticisms selected, Barrett indeed is not a programmer and was ill-qualified to provide expert testimony. Caveat: This is given only what is available for analysis in the document linked above.
Anyone got links to the Trustee reports?
No, Bill should try traditional methods. (Score:4, Interesting)
They should have used the tried and tested method of offering 'Sales commissions' and 'Consultancy fees' to key officials like Lockheed did to convince certain European leaders to spend obscene amounts of money on a mediocre combat aircraft called the Locheed F-104 Starfighter. Judges may have strange delusions of independence over here but our politicians can certainly be rented, leased or bought just like their US counterparts and politicians as we all know can 'persuade' judges to think of the 'greater picture' by dropping hints about career death.
Most Interesting (Score:2, Interesting)
"With their orders to Microsoft, the regulators are aiming to level the global playing field and make it easier for rivals' inexpensive, easily modified "open source" software to interact seamlessly with Microsoft's more-expensive, less-flexible products."
OSS - inexpensive, easily modified
MS - more-expensive, less flexible
Re:Not that I question Barrett's qualifications (Score:5, Interesting)
Haha, nice that you touch that point about documentation, just take a look at the KDevelop documentation that "comes" with the IDE suite, now *that* is what I call an unusable worth nothing piece of crap:
From the KDEvelop Handbook:
The Problem Reporter
(... to be written
Code Completion
(... to be written
Creating New Files and Classes
(... to be written
Editing the Templates
(... to be written
Class Hierarchy
(... to be written
Elements of the User Interface
(... to be written
The Workarea
(... to be written
The KDevelop Titlebar
(... to be written
The KDevelop Statusbar
(... to be written
The menubar
(... to be written
The Toolbars
(... to be written
The Tree Tool Views
(... to be written
The Output Tool Views
(... to be written
This one is GREAT:
"Class Tools
The class tool dialog is activated by right clicking on a class in the class view and choosing Class tool...."
Automake Projects
(... to be written
Custom Makefiles and Build Scripts
(... to be written
Compiler Options
(... to be written
Make Options
(... to be written
Chapter 11. Advanced Build Management
Multiple Build Configurations
(... to be written
And that is
Seriously, I may sound as a troll here but, there is *no* way you can tell me that is better than even the documentation on Borland C++ IDE!!!
Go ahead, mod me down I have tons of karma to burn but this is one of the
Re: essential bullshit, Karmaman (Score:1, Interesting)
It's interesting that Microsoft has historically called into question the credentials of the Judge [kenauletta.com] when found guilty . er