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.'"
Shipment (Score:1, Funny)
resume? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:resume? (Score:5, Informative)
Last year, Mr. Barrett studied the manual Microsoft produced for four days, tried to use it to write programs and, in December, pronounced it "totally unusable." "There is apparently no structure and no logic in the whole documentation," he wrote in his report
OGRE? (Score:2)
Re:resume? (Score:2)
Re:resume? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:resume? (Score:2, Funny)
Rich ones.
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:resume? (Score:3, Informative)
But I can't find anything on this guy that would that say he actually did anything illegal in the past. He seems to be a real Hacker as in "Linus is a hacker".
All I found is this 'http://bcswiki.walmsleys.com/NeilBarrett/show?tim e=2005-11-16+17%3A32%3A07'
if that's the same guy. Look indeed like a real "IT-CSI
Here's a link to a microsoft document about it. . (Score:4, Interesting)
Your link doesn't work. (Score:4, Informative)
"neil barrett" site:microsoft.com Google search gives two (pdf) results, the one you were linking to is here [microsoft.com]
Re:Your link doesn't work. (Score:3, Informative)
Slashcode inserts spaces in long words to prevent page widening trolls. That's why it's always good to use 'a' tags and 'href=', rather than relying on Slashdot to autolink.
That must have hurt... (Score:2)
In any event, if you read MS's response, they seem to disagree less with his conclusions than object to the way he reached them. In fact, I flipped through the entire document and didn't find any disagreement with the conclusions.
MS is too smart for me. In fact, I think MS is sometimes too smart for their own good. Maybe they should have just
The guy who discovered Gary Glitter's paedo-fest.. (Score:5, Informative)
Re:The guy who discovered Gary Glitter's paedo-fes (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:The guy who discovered Gary Glitter's paedo-fes (Score:3, Informative)
IIRC, Mr Gadd brought his laptop in for repair for something mechanical (battery issue or something), and specifically told the technician not to look at the contents of the hard disk.
Third-rate glam rockers clearly do not make great study of basic human psychology, it seems. The technician proceeded to think 'hmm, I wonder why he's so worried about people looking
Re:The guy who discovered Gary Glitter's paedo-fes (Score:3, Informative)
So, in order to confirm that everything was fine again, he opened some random files to check everything was ok. Oops.
Re:The guy who discovered Gary Glitter's paedo-fes (Score:2, Funny)
That being said, I've not tried the Microsoft "One Care" solution
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:The guy who discovered Gary Glitter's paedo-fes (Score:2)
It doesn't say he discovered Glitter's kiddie porn. It says he helped put him behind bars as an expert witness
Guess who's paying him? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Guess who's paying him? (Score:2)
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:Bill should hire new lawyers. (Score:5, Informative)
They are not a major generator of jobs or revenue for any european state.
Oh yeah? From http://www.enn.ie/news.html?code=8883686/ [www.enn.ie]:
With about 1,700 employees, Microsoft operates three businesses in Ireland -- a European operations centre, a European product development centre, and its Ireland sales, marketing & services group. After its headquarters, the Irish facility is the company's second largest in the world, alongside an operation in Japan.
Microsoft spends around EUR350 million each year in the Irish economy, and the software behemoth accounts for about 6 percent of national exports.
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:Bill should hire new lawyers. (Score:2)
All that trouble to get independence from Britain ... and a few decades later they sell themselves to the US.
With god knows how many tens of millions of Irish Americans and Americans of Irish descent, one might say we are just looking after our own.
Re:Bill should hire new lawyers. (Score:2)
Re:Bill should hire new lawyers. (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Bill should hire new lawyers. (Score:2)
Yes but half of those will claim Irish descent if their great great great great great grand pappy once had a guiness.
:p
Yup, you're English alright.
Re:Bill should hire new lawyers. (Score:2)
Re:Bill should hire new lawyers. (Score:4, Funny)
Its true I didn't say it wasn't true, but by not saying what was unsaid I was saying what would be the truth if I had said the truth, if indeed I didn't say the truth in the first place. Faith and begorrah.
Re:Bill should hire new lawyers. (Score:2)
The good thing... (Score:5, Insightful)
wut (Score:2)
Other member states see how Ireland gets revenue from taxes not paid in countries where the actual business was done.
Erm wut? Thats a good trick. As far as I know, if you do business in a country, you pay that country's taxes. If that means a company will go to where tax rates are lowest, then thats where they go. No one is evading taxes. Don't like it, reduce your own tax rates. In a competitive market, it just so happens that Ireland's offer is the most attractive. No one owes Italy, France, or any ot
Re:The good thing... (Score:2)
Re:Bill should hire new lawyers. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Bill should hire new lawyers. (Score:2)
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.
Re:Bill should hire new lawyers. (Score:2)
Re:Bill should hire new lawyers. (Score:2)
Under the regime of "Bill the Bonker" as he is known here the DoJ were winning the case against MS hands down. Queue the "Bush Brothers" and after a bit of vote rigging in Florida the DoJ were instructed to quietly drop the case.
deKernel wrote:
You spout unsubstantiated statements like they are facts when, in fact, all have been disproven.
I recall that after Bush came to power the DoJ settled with MicroSoft when (according to the papers I read) they had all but won the case. Also, the
Is this for real? It seems to be false (Score:2, Informative)
http://www.google.com/search?q=Neil+Barrett+hawaii +telescope [google.com]
He does seem to be a normal expert.
http://money.guardian.co.uk/creditanddebt/creditca rds/story/0,1456,717426,00.html [guardian.co.uk]
This looks like a Microsoft inspired misinformation campaign.
Re:Is this for real? It seems to be false (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Is this for real? It seems to be false (Score:2)
Re:Is this for real? It seems to be false (Score:2)
Only 5? I would've thought you'd have to get even farther down Microsoft's own list to find someone who is relatively unbiased.
Re:Is this for real? It seems to be false (Score:2)
Re:Is this for real? It seems to be false (Score:2)
It's hard for me to sympathize with Microsoft. They do make some good products, but they bring these problems on themselves. The emails that were revealed during the last two anti-trust cases here in the U.S. illustrated perfectly that they knew that they were breaking the law, and they laughed about it, and came off as a generally arrogant and unruly company. It seems to be their culture. Then again, they always manage to get away with it too, so I guess it works for them. So I don't begrudge anyone g
Worthless slimeballs (Score:5, Informative)
It's just a shame that all that this will lead to are chump-change fines that probably won't even equal the money made by all the lawyers - the real winners. I'll go as far as to say that the EU would have spent its money better on OpenOffice development.
Re:Worthless slimeballs (Score:2, Informative)
I'm the dumbass (Score:2)
Re:Worthless slimeballs (Score:2)
To repeat... (Score:2)
However, having considered all the available evidence, I have concluded that I acted in good faith, even when I did not, and should not be punished in any way.
All well and good.... (Score:4, Funny)
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:Hmm, this explains things (Score:2)
Evil Microsoft aside. Let us suppose that this is the same level of documentation Microsoft's internal development teams get.
With one advantage. Most Micosoft teams have been on the same campus so they can go around and talk to the team that developed it or to others who have talked to the team that developed it.
Re:Hmm, this explains things (Score:2)
I have written an entire design surface control in C# complete with resizing, scales, transforms, rotations, layers, and rubberband selections all without flicker. It is not difficult to create custom controls for either Windows Forms or ASP.NET, especially when you compare it to using MFC or the Win32 C APIs. BTW...if you want to handle your own drawing in OnPaint, the proper way to implement this is to inherit from UserControl rather than a
True Occupation of a Hacker (Score:5, Funny)
HABERDASHER - Seller Of Men's Clothing
HACKER - A Maker Of Hoes
HACKNEY MAN - Renter Of Horses & Carriages
HANDWOMAN - Midwife Or Female Attendant
So the true definition of a 'Hacker', was a Maker of Hoes.
Re:True Occupation of a Hacker (Score:2)
Well now they're simply makers of holes, so everything works out in the end. Hooray for english!
Re:True Occupation of a Hacker (Score:2)
Re:True Occupation of a Hacker (Score:3, Funny)
Re:True Occupation of a Hacker (Score:2)
chrs
Re:True Occupation of a Hacker (Score:2)
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
What a wonderful morning! (Score:5, Informative)
* Microsoft offered a list of people, including Neil Barrett whose opinion they would respect
* EU rejected most of them but accepted Mr. Barrett
* Mr. Barrett evaluates the Microsoft offer of compliance and deems it useless
* other [competing] professionals agree
* Microsoft changes its position regarding Mr. Barrett because of Barrett's opinion
Yay!
Just love it.
EU: Gimme a list of people you think could be unbiased when evaluating your offer of compliance.
MS: Blah blah, Blah blah, Neil Barrett, Blah blah,
EU: Our experts don't like your Blah blahs but Neil Barrett will do
EU: Neil? What do you think about MS's offering?
NB: Uh... it sucks. I talked to everyone I'm allowed to speak with about it and they couldn't make it work either.
EU: MS, your stuff sucks.
MS: Neil is the devil!
Re:What a wonderful morning! (Score:2)
Re:What a wonderful morning! (Score:2)
What does the EU want from microsoft? (Score:2)
But documentation for what?
What things are microsoft being asked to document?
Re:What does the EU want from microsoft? (Score:2, Informative)
The actual documentation as I understand it is the core protocols/APIs for connectivity between MS applications.
What they got was a limited copy of the connectivity source code with no explanation of the APIs referenced, and that's why it was deemed to be useless.
MS provides:
Re:What does the EU want from microsoft? (Score:2, Informative)
In summary:
Taken from European Commission press release IP/04/382
http://europa.eu.int/rapid/pressReleasesAction.do? reference=IP/04/382&format=HTML&aged=0&language=EN &guiLangu [eu.int]
Re:What does the EU want from microsoft? (Score:3, Funny)
The New EU Complience Director.
Who's side are you on?
That would be telling.
Wat do you want?
We want documentation.
You won't get it.
By hook or by crook we will
Who is the Comminishoner?
You are the defendent.
We am not the defendent. We are Microsoft.
Ha Ha Ha Ha!
Re:What does the EU want from microsoft? (Score:4, Informative)
If the EU really wants to see the details of windows file sharing and such, they should go read the SAMBA source code, as far as I know SAMBA is a 100% working implementation of the protocols in question (correct me if I am wrong here)
Personally, I want to see the EU (or some other agency) force some real penalties on MS. Examples:
Ban MS from having secret contracts with OEMs and force them to have transparency in dealings with OEMs and restrictions on telling OEMs what they can and cant ship alongside windows (e.g. if microsoft says to an OEM "If you ship Firefox/OpenOffice/BeOs/Linux/" as well as shipping windows (either on the same PC or on different PCs in the lineup) you will have to pay more for windows, that would be a violation of this)
Force microsoft to disclose more of their "secret recipies" such as the office document formats (is there anything that can read an access MDB file without going through microsoft libraries?) or the NTFS file system or the MSN messenger protocols or the Windows Media audio and video formats (obviously an exemption would be given to allow them to keep the DRM parts of the format a secret
Force microsoft to publish more APIs that they are using but not disclosing to their competitors (including APIs in dlls related to internet explorer, windows media player, themeing etc). This should include some kind of way for people who find an API that isnt documented by microsoft to go to the "review board" monitoring the MS penalty and point out that microsoft is not in complience. (they documented a bunch of APIs as part of the US lawsuit but there are plenty of APIs that are still completly undocumented)
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)
That's really the wrong spin to put on it. (Score:3, Insightful)
Lol... (Score:2)
Ex-hackers cause problems to Microsoft's lawyers.
Poor Microsoft, hackers are so bad with you!
Hello?!? MSDN (Score:4, Insightful)
Non sequitur? (Score:2)
Does anyone else see this as a non-sequitur to the whole article? In general, original article [wsj.com] is very interesting, and more than a little amusing - but the OP on /. is, to say the least, addlebrained and lacking any resemblance of article summary (which is what it really should be). The arti
Were I the EU regulators... (Score:2)
I dislike how some companies feel like they have a right to bend the rules and laws, just because they get caught doing something illegal. Instead of admission of guilt and a promise to do better, they say it isn't fair. Last time I checked, a slap on the wrist by a certain administration wasn't exactly "fair," either.
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: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 n
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 req
Re:Not that I question Barrett's qualifications (Score:2)
Oh, nothing beats this one!
I was working on an asp project a few years back, and did something just like this; except it was far, far worse.
Basically, a variable was coming back from a SQL statement after hitting a NULL value, and I needed to evaluate it. Trouble is, not matter what the logical statement was, the chec
Re:Not that I question Barrett's qualifications (Score:2)
Then you either must have gone to a very strange school of programming, or have been using VB and ASP for far too long.
In fact VB supplies a two ways to check for null;
Yes I know. Neither worked. If the variable was present in a logical expression, the expression evaluated to false.
Re:Not that I question Barrett's qualifications (Score:2)
All very well, but in a weakly typed langage like ASP, NaN and NULL are both the same data type as everything else. It's all very well to say that x!=x should be true if x is an integer, but when x is simply an ASP var, the rules based on numerical evaluation cease to apply. The result should always return true if var compari
Re:Not that I question Barrett's qualifications (Score:2)
How would that even work?!
Re:Not that I question Barrett's qualifications (Score:4, Funny)
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
Re:Not that I question Barrett's qualifications (Score:5, Insightful)
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: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
See also: SWT (Score:2)
And one of my big beefs with Ruby is the quantity of completely undocumented code in the standard library. I've been trying to help improve the situation, but some people don't even seem to understand that there's a problem.
Re:Not that I question Barrett's qualifications (Score:2)
I have 2 big problems with what you say
- Kdevelop has nothing to do with an API, and most devs (me included, even though I'm no dev) can use it without doc. What's even better, you can ask the authors or the community about a feature you don't find or don't understand in Kdevelop.
- You're quick to assume every doc in FOSS is in the same state
So you failed to talk about the equivalent t
Re:Not that I question Barrett's qualifications (Score:5, Insightful)
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?
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 Tru
More details (Score:2, Informative)
Trustee is to provide ad hoc opinions to the Commission on issues pertaining to whether:
Section 3.b.i: the Interoperability Information that Microsoft is required to make available under Article 5(a) of the Decision is made available completely and accurately.
Microsoft claims 1) that Barrett is unqualified to make such a judgement based on his Trustee Report which they claim shows he knows very little
Re:He should have sent Bill a copy of OS X... (Score:2)
Re:He should have sent Bill a copy of OS X... (Score:2, Funny)
Re:To play devil's advocate (Score:2, Informative)
The way it generally works is that some company springs up and sweeps the market. At some point it is generally considered a monopoly. At that point, someone/something brings some sort of law suit against the monopoly, at which time it's market dominance is assessed.
If it's market control is broad, that's okay, so long as it's not at the expens
Re:What? (Score:2)
Great one.
Wipedia says: "the paraphilia of being sexually attracted primarily or exclusively to prepubescent children"
Sure it is an orientation. It described an attraction, not an act.