Tag: microsoft

A look at windows7sins.org

When the Free Software Foundation scores a hit, it’s usually a home run. This one literally hasn’t landed yet.

Their latest campaign, Windows 7 Sins, is a brutal, gloves-are-off-now attack on Microsoft’s well-known monopolistic and anti-consumer tactics. Some of them are pretty damning.

I’ll go through each of the 7 sins and reply with my take on each one.

1. Poisoning education: Today, most children whose education involves computers are being taught to use one company’s product: Microsoft’s. Microsoft spends large sums on lobbyists and marketing to corrupt educational departments. An education using the power of computers should be a means to freedom and empowerment, not an avenue for one corporation to instill its monopoly.

To be fair about it, Apple did the same thing–not that Apple’s evil tactics, present or past, are strangers to readers of this blog either. In fact every time I used a computer in school (elementary to post-secondary) it ran proprietary software. This certainly should not be the case; the least Microsoft can do is not use the schools not to cement its monopoly.

2. Invading privacy: Microsoft uses software with backward names like Windows Genuine Advantage to inspect the contents of users’ hard drives. The licensing agreement users are required to accept before using Windows warns that Microsoft claims the right to do this without warning.

I have to giggle a bit when I read anything with “Windows” and “Advantage” in the same phrase. Seriously, the odious, obnoxious, and invasive “product activation” requirements are the reason I no longer use Windows on my PC. I’m different than most of the people who treat a computer like just another appliance; I don’t need a license agreement to tell me Microsoft does not have my best interests in mind. Though it is nice to have documentation.

3. Monopoly behavior: Nearly every computer purchased has Windows pre-installed — but not by choice. Microsoft dictates requirements to hardware vendors, who will not offer PCs without Windows installed on them, despite many people asking for them. Even computers available with other operating systems like GNU/Linux pre-installed often had Windows on them first.

It is possible to get even laptops without an OS already on them (referring here to PC hardware, of course). Local clone shops will happily give you a system with a clean hard drive and will even leave the license cost for Windows off of your final invoice. I, of course, prefer to build my own; my most recent computers were “rescued” so they do have major brand names on them. One was apparently dumped because the Windows XP install on it was busted. It’s now the firewall for our home network, running OpenBSD quite happily.

4. Lock-in: Microsoft regularly attempts to force updates on its users, by removing support for older versions of Windows and Office, and by inflating hardware requirements. For many people, this means having to throw away working computers just because they don’t meet the unnecessary requirements for the new Windows versions.

When I saw the requirement of 1G–yes, an entire gigabyte–of RAM for Windows Vista, I was floored. I hear you really needed to have 2G of RAM to get a usable system. That’s insane. I’m still getting by on a system running Debian 5.0 (lenny) with 256M of RAM; it remains relatively responsive as long as I am careful, though I probably do need to find something to replace or augment it in the not-so-distant future.

But to require 1G of RAM when the previous generation of PCs top out at that? That’s inexcusable and cruel to the people who can’t afford to buy a new computer because Microsoft says it’s time to.

5. Abusing standards: Microsoft has attempted to block free standardization of document formats, because standards like OpenDocument Format would threaten the control they have now over users via proprietary Word formats. They have engaged in underhanded behavior, including bribing officials, in an attempt to stop such efforts.

Indeed, this is probably the most unfair, unkind, unscrupulous, thoughtless, sneaky, and nasty thing Microsoft is guilty of. When OASIS released the OpenDocument standards, Microsoft shot back with the confusingly similar Office Open XML, which is despite its name not a true open standard.

Even though Microsoft is a part of the W3C, its Internet Explorer HTML viewer is pathetic enough that I refuse to call it a Web browser. I actually had to program MSIE as a mobile phone user agent because it completely bombs on this WordPress theme as used here. (Which is probably another reason I need to make a custom theme for this site, and now that I have the experience, I will probably start on that in about a week or two.)

Microsoft ignored certain parts of the TCP/IP standards or recommendations when first making a TCP/IP stack part of the Windows OS (Windows’ TCP/IP stack was adapted from BSD, yet none of the code changes or improvements were ever contributed back to that project that I am aware of). UDP port scans on early versions of Windows were much easier than a comparable Unix system. This kind of plays into the bit about security below.

6. Enforcing Digital Restrictions Management (DRM): With Windows Media Player, Microsoft works in collusion with the big media companies to build restrictions on copying and playing media into their operating system. For example, at the request of NBC, Microsoft was able to prevent Windows users from recording television shows that they have the legal right to record.

I’ve ranted about DRM enough times here that I’m not sure what new I can add. This is pretty much par for the course for Microsoft, and something they should have no problem doing. Microsoft does partner with NBC, so it’s not surprising they would cave in easily to such a demand.

7. Threatening user security: Windows has a long history of security vulnerabilities, enabling the spread of viruses and allowing remote users to take over people’s computers for use in spam-sending botnets. Because the software is secret, all users are dependent on Microsoft to fix these problems — but Microsoft has its own security interests at heart, not those of its users.

Again, to be fair about it, Microsoft is far from the only offender here; they are, however, the most egregious. I take any Microsoft initiative to tighten security with a grain of salt, if not a shaker full of it, as the exploits keep coming with no real end in sight. (Hypertension? What hypertension?)

Not-so-clever photo editing

Mashable reports on an unbelievable blooper from a company that really should know better.

Microsoft published at least two different versions of an ad, editing the photo in one. The change made was to replace the head of a black man–and only the head–with the head of a white man. While the change is not as noticeable if one only sees the Polish version of the image, it’s glaringly obvious if one sees both versions.

This was a PR disaster in the making from the beginning. To their credit, Microsoft did issue an apology in a prompt fashion. But really, you’d think Microsoft would know better. So should their ad agencies. It would make more sense to have extra models and shoot two pictures. It’s understandable to localize advertising, but it’s inexcusable to be this sloppy and this insensitive about it.

What part of “don’t automatically install” did they forget about?

It’s been a while since I’ve spotted Microsoft dropping the ball. Here’s just one example of a nearly inexcusable gaffe, reported by windowssecrets.com.

Users who have specifically chosen not to automatically install Windows patches, are finding that the Automatic Update software is installing them anyway at shutdown. Not surprisingly, Microsoft is quick to deny there’s a problem:

The forced-install behavior has been witnessed at least three times by Windows Secrets editors, but Microsoft says its procedure for Automatic Updates hasn’t changed in the last 10 months.

Leave it to Microsoft to take liberties with the meaning of “don’t automatically install stuff.”

As detailed in the article, the only way to work around the bug is to change to “never check for updates.” Of course, this results in getting nagged about checking for updates being turned off, which is ordinarily a bad idea.

Michael Jordan vs. Bill Gates: a second look

First, before I get to the main topic of this post, I think I need to say a little piece here. As many times as I have condemned the actions of corporations such as Microsoft, I have as of yet seen no reason to extend condemnation down to individuals working for the company. In fact, as a general rule I have not condemned the actions of individuals at all in my blog posts.

This, unfortunately, is unsustainable. Corporations are a function of the people that work for them, particularly their leadership. This is true of behemoths such as Microsoft all the way down to small garage/basement operations where the corporate filing fee is a relatively large expense.

I have not finished writing it, but I am drafting a post expressing my strong criticism of and contempt for something else Bill Gates has been doing, which is entirely disconnected from his involvement from Microsoft. There’s no sense leaving the gloves on now if I know I’m going to be taking them off later. With that said, on with the rest of the post…

I recently ran across this gem during a particularly lazy StumbleUpon session. I’ll cut out all the fat and leave the meat:

Is It Better To Be a Jock Or A Nerd…?
Michael Jordan having “retired,” with $40 million in endorsements, makes $178,100 a day, working or not.

(skip a whole bunch of silly things that put $40 million per year in some kind of perspective)

Amazing isn’t it? However…

If Jordan saves 100% of his income for the next 450 years, he’ll still have less than Bill Gates has today.

Game over. Nerd wins.

The premise is that one’s life is a success solely based on money. This is not always the case.

I never was Michael Jordan’s biggest fan, though mainly that was due to my rather strong team loyalty at the time; during the height of Jordan’s spectacular career, I was strictly a Houston Rockets fan, and even today I will quit following a sport’s post-season once my team has been eliminated. (Quick trivia note: the Houston Rockets never faced Michael Jordan as a player even once in the post-season.) These days, I can take a further step back and admire most great athletes strictly for their talent, regardless of which teams they play for.

I would much rather be Michael Jordan than Bill Gates today. I could not live with myself doing what Bill Gates has done. It is not the amount of money as much as the journey of getting it, looking back later, and being able to look myself in the mirror and being able to say (or not) that I am proud of what I have done.

I would never be proud of building walls between people, and forbidding them from helping their neighbors. This is exactly what Bill Gates has done, as the leader of Microsoft.

I just happen to have open an FSF Europe page entitled “Six questions to national standardisation bodies about MS-OOXML (Office Open XML). [edit: see note below] As a key shaper of the corporate culture at Microsoft, Gates played a strong role in making this kind of thing happen. Though his two decades plus of day-to-day involvement with the company ended recently, the corporate culture will take much longer to change. The questions FSF Europe raises here with regard to OOXML highlight just one example of Microsoft’s “holier than thou” mentality.

(I misread the Wikipedia article when I first wrote this; Gates was around day-to-day at Microsoft well into 2008, not 2006.)

Microsoft has changed in how it has countered the human tendency to help one’s neighbors. In 1976, Bill Gates himself wrote the well-known Open Letter to Hobbyists. Through the 1990s Microsoft ran an “Install One, Copy None” campaign, and by the turn of the century when CDs were the major form of physical media for software, most of Microsoft’s were imprinted with “Do Not Make Illegal Copies Of This Disc.”

And finally we have the obnoxious and draconian “product activation” that came into play with Windows XP. This is part of what fueled my desire to cut ties with Microsoft once and for all, and never give them another penny of my money. I had tolerated keeping Windows on one of my PCs, used primarily for running games not available for GNU/Linux. Today, I’m simply less picky about the games I play; today, the only time I use Windows–or any other proprietary OS such as MacOS X–today is on computers that do not actually belong to me.

Put Michael Jordan up against Richard Stallman, and I will agree the nerd wins. But if the choice is Michael Jordan or Bill Gates, sorry, the jock wins this one hands down.