COMensarations
Tuesday, October 25, 2005
The More Things Change the More They Remain Insane
Thoughts on the pernicious activities of Microsoft.
Monday afternoon, and it’s another glorious autumnal day here, along the Front Range. Not a cloud in the blue sky. The Sun, shining brightly does not overheat the air. I’ve got a fire in the back porch firepit dematerializing some of the small branches shaken out of the trees by windstorms. A fine Cohiba and a glass of bourbon.
I’ve had enough reverse engineering a poorly documented database for one day; brain-fried, core-dumped. Time to think about the doings in the so-called ‘real world’.
Today’s observation....Microsoft (MS); is there anything they won’t stoop to in order to expand market-share?
We two, the distaff and I, work with local government in our own respective areas of expertise. She’s involved with historical preservation. I’m into logistics, in this case, transportation.
Over the last week, we received various e-mails from our respective governmental committees, in preparation for forthcoming meetings. In all instances, we noticed an attached document titled winmail.dat. Trying to open them, we got nothing but gibberish. So we communicated this situation to our respective points-of-contact (POC). One of them said that he had enclosed no attachment. The other said, we should get ‘real’ and get MS software, e.g., Word.
I tend to shy away from MS software. The last time I installed any of it on my Macintosh—last March—I lost control of the computer. The cursor-mouse would lock-up at irregular intervals, for as much as five minutes. I spent a number of hours with Tech Support at AppleCare and a number of days trying different approaches to resolving the problem. We even tried a prefrontal lobotomy on the poor thing. But to no avail. Ultimately, it was decided that a total brain-wipe was necessary. THAT worked. I regained control of the computer.
So, when someone tells me that I should get with the ‘pogrom’—Go MS—I have a tendency to bit my tongue....HARD, before I say something some people might consider ‘rude’.
After all, I’ve seen this sort of malfeasance on the part of MS before. In another life, working for what used to be called USWEST, I would frequently call MS tech support about one thing or another. Of course, they had installed that nice ‘knowledge-base’ system, where you would put in some key words to search on and get a zillion hits you’d have to wade through to finally fail in finding a solution. So...naturally....you’d have to call some poor human and ask THEM what to do. Only to discovery they were equally clueless.
But, on one occasion, the human I contacted and explained that I could not even SEE their knowledge-base entries about the matter I was grappling with asked…
“What browser are you using?”
I replied, “Navigator.”
They said, “Well. Maybe you should try using Explorer.”
This was an interesting comment. As (1) being in a corporate environment, I was obliged to use what the corporation decided was best. And they had decided that Navigator was the optimal solution to seeking information on the web. However, more incisively, (2) a red star-cluster went off in my mind alerting me to an effort on the part of MS to push THEIR products over the competition.
Why shouldn’t ANY good browser software work effectively with MS’s own knowledge-base? Why should their browser work better? So good that you can actually SEE their system. Not that it’s all that good in the first place.
Not too long before, I’d picked up reports that people using non-MS products were beginning to have problems trying to coordinate with MS products. I’d even noticed that myself, in as much as MS products would not ‘share’ with Adobe products. Then too, I’d picked up a couple of reports that MS was deliberately putting code in their software that would cause problems if one was working on a Macintosh. I even witnessed such abnormal behavior. MS Excel spreadsheets and Word documents, when passed back-and-forth, several times over the e-mail system could not be opened, as they had become ‘corrupted’. Other documents, which had been generated in SimpleText, TextEdit, WordPerfect, etc., didn’t seem to have this sort of problem. Only MS documents.
Some people like to call me ‘paranoid’, but maybe that’s just my key-learnings from a life long ago and far away. Doing intell work, I tend to notice trends. After a while, the evidence begins to build regarding some organizations modis operandi. You learn to recognize machinations because of their logic. In this case, who would most likely benefit from software failing? And then they imply that if you used THEIR software you wouldn’t have these sorts of problems. What they don’t tell you is that you’d invite in another, probably more pernicious, set of problems.
So, back up to current time, as the Scientologists would put it.
Today, I noticed a report from Charles “Little Green Footballs” Johnson that MS mail has eaten his entire e-mail database. Not a good thing. He, a heavy-hitter in the blogosphere, is shifting his e-mail system over to Apple’s Mail software. Good for him. I knew he was not a dim-bulb. He’s disconnected himself from the Matrix. More on that later.
I queried my POC as to whether there had been any changes in the software the local government people were using to transmit information. The report came back that over the last several weeks a number of ‘security patches’ had been applied.
What we, in the Macintosh realm, are seeing are winmail.dat attachments, even when no attachment is sent in the e-mail.
Based on this, I did some research on the .dat files. From that I gather that MS is propagating its “security patches” via it’s e-mail. Furthermore, most MS e-mail users are not aware that they are participating in this distribution schema. At least based on the report of my POC that he had not sent me an attachment.
This brings up an interesting idea.
Perhaps someone who is MS-sauve could apply a similar approach to spreading a Trojan worm. All they would need do to spread their dastardly menace would be to make it look like a valid .dat file and get the MS OS, which is infamous for being the spreader of harmful worms and viral beasties, to work for them in their nefarious activities.
On the other hand, we notice that MS has aligned itself, in a business arrangement, with the Chinese Communists, who are very interested in suppressing the freedom of information that we, in the United States, so much enjoy via the internet.
The bottom line is WHY would ANY person or business, let alone GOVERNMENT, affiliate themselves with such an organization that is perpetrating such a dastardly activity against a billion people?
Long ago, someone said…
When we hang the capitalists they will sell us the rope we use.” Joseph Stalin
Funny that our own government seems to be aiding and abetting such activities.
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