Re: MS Gets Quick Appeal

[dski@cameonet.cameo.com.tw (Dan Strychalski)]

This is a longish post in three parts, with the device -=%@%=- between parts.

On Wed., Dec. 31, Mark Hinds quoted from a report carried on the Wired site --

   William Neukom, Microsoft's senior vice president for law and corporate
   affairs, argued that leaving the fate of Windows 98 in such an uncertain
   position could endanger the entire US economy. He cited previous missed
   release dates causing stock market tumbles to back up his assertions.
        <http://www.wired.com/news/news/business/story/9437.html>, 97-12-30

So, I thought to myself, they would take the U.S. economy hostage and demand
ransom from the U.S. government. Twelve years of dictating how millions of
people use computers is heady stuff, and I knew Gary Reback wasn't just
a-whistlin' Dixie when he said BG "does not deserve to be more powerful than
the president" <http://netd.fastrans.net/wired-5.08-reback.html>; also, it
has long been clear that some big gambit was in the works, and this is one
form it could take -- but it seems premature, and it amounts to saying that
there is indeed no competition to take up the slack, that the U.S. software
industry is indeed one very sick puppy. Better check this report out....

Wired was quite emphatic about it. Also on the Wired site, by Dan Brekke:

   Microsoft Corp.'s latest legal salvo in its antitrust battle with two
   branches of the federal government argues that a judge's decision to
   clamp down, for the time being, on the way the company markets its
   Internet Explorer browser poses a grave threat not only to the
   company but to the US economy and the American public, too.
        <http://www.wired.com/news/news/business/story/9223.html>, 97-12-17

I checked ABC and CNN -- nothing. I checked M'soft -- at first nothing;
then I found this at <http://www.microsoft.com/corpinfo/doj/doj.htm>:

   Given the strong media interest in this case, we have posted our Court
   submissions and other documents to this site for your convenience.
   Please refer to the links below for more information.
 
(Dunno when they put that up, but it seems to have been after their motion
for an expedited hearing was granted. Now I see ABC has a link to it.)

One of the links was named "Motion for Expedited Consideration(12/16/97)"
(yup, no space after "Consideration"). So, straight from the horse's mouth,
at <http://www.microsoft.com/corpinfo/doj/12-16motion.html>, we have --

   MOTION FOR EXPEDITED CONSIDERATION AND FOR AN EXPEDITED BRIEFING SCHEDULE
    . . .
   II. The District Court's Preliminary Injunction Will Irreparably Harm
       Microsoft, a Number of Third Parties and the Public Generally.
    . . .
   Indeed, significant segments of the United States economy may be
   affected by doubt surrounding the release of Windows 98. That this
   possibility exists is vividly demonstrated by the precipitous decline
   in the Dow Jones Industrial Average (15 points in a matter of minutes)
   when rumors circulated in late June 1995 that Microsoft had delayed
   the release of Windows 95 to computer manufacturers. [ . . . ]

Now, that was delivered to the DOJ on December 16, and Wired reported it on
December 17 (if "poses a grave threat... to the company[,] the US economy
and the American public..." can be regarded as _reporting_ what M'soft
said). I saw nothing in any other medium until Mark quoted Wired's 97-12-30
piece on the granting of the motion (in which Wired had progressed to
"could endanger the entire US economy"). Dunno what the other services were
doing between 97-12-17 and 97-12-30.... Intentionally or not, they appear
to have done M'soft a favor by not reporting this claim.

I rarely read Wired, so I don't know if the exaggeration I see in these
reports is par for the course. They're on the ball, I'll give them that.

                                  -=%@%=-
 
All this talk of the economy and stocks and stuff brought to mind a Usenet
post I read a while back, so I went a-searchin' on Deja News and found the
long post that the indented passage below is quoted from. *I cannot find
anything to prove or disprove the claims made in the post quoted below.*
Perhaps someone else can provide more information.

On November 23, 1996, responding to an article by Steve W. Turner in the
newsgroup comp.sys.super and using the subject line 'Re: "Beowulf"',
Glen Clark of State College, PA wrote --

   OK... time for some facts. Draw your own conclusions. Pull up a
   Lexis/Yahoo/Hotbot search on "Futures" magazine. Go back about 6
   months. Search on the keywords Microsoft and/or NT. Pull up the
   article on the New York banks and investment houses going from unix
   to NT. Look at what the unix penetration numbers were initially and
   then look again at what they were just 90 days later. It was not an
   evolution or migration. It was a slaughter.
 
   MSoft put a strike force in Princeton, New Jersey for the specific
   purpose of bringing the New York investment community to NT. They
   didn't say "Gee, Princton is a nice town with quaint stone cottages
   and tree-lined streets. Maybe we should put up a field office there
   and see if it gets any business". Like the German generals around the
   situation table with their plastic tanks planning the invasion of
   Poland, the investment community conversion was planned and
   choreographed down to the last detail. Then one day it was over. And
   while I don't enjoy Reich politics or MSoft software, in the same way
   a pure military man *has to* admire Rommell, any admirer of good
   planning and efficient execution has to admire the Princeton strike
   force. Joe Montanna never ran a play that worked as well. They should
   all get medals.

                                  -=%@%=-

Finally, all that talk of Windows NT brought to mind a passage I recently
saw in a router manual (routers make the 'net go 'round, you might know). 

Among the whimsically named protocols used on the Internet is one called
CHAP, the Challenge Handshake Authentication Protocol, which is used to
make sure the machine at the other end of a connection is the one it's
supposed to be. When CHAP is used, the system administrator can set both a
"name" and a "password" (sometimes referred to as a "secret") by which
machines can authenticate each other.

Well, now there's MS CHAP, a proprietary authentication protocol from
M'soft. And here's what that router manual says:

   MS (Microsoft) CHAP

      Your [router] and a Microsoft Windows 95 or Windows NT server can
      authenticate each other using Microsoft's proprietary CHAP algorithm.
      No special setup is needed to support MS CHAP. Everything is done
      through PPP negotiation between the router and the server.

Everything is just one click away, yessirree.... Perhaps our NT pros can
enlighten us as to the advantages of such an authentication protocol. The
thought that it is being used at financial institutions kinda gives me the
willies, y'know?

Oh yeah, this is from a network management software user's guide:

   The PING utility does not work under Windows 95 since this environment
   does not support raw data.

If the reason given is correct, it seems that W95 checks -- thoroughly --
every bit of every byte going into or out of the system. Whether that is
true or not, one can't help but wonder if _incoming_ pings are processed
correctly. Is this a case of "We can see if your machine is up and on the
'net, but you can't see if ours is. Hardee-har-har...."?

Dan Strychalski
dski@cameonet.cameo.com.tw