Bad Windows

A while ago, Graham Morrison wrote: “The trouble with Linux: there’s too much choice”. Implicitly, the article refers to “more choice than with Windows”. The article led to reactions from Carla Schroeder [1], Caitlyn Martin [2], Alastair Otter [3] and Ron Miller [4]. While the articles provided for an interesting discussion, none of them addressed the fundamentals of Linux distributions and choice of desktop software in my opinion. Because from an objective point of view, Windows users face as many choices as Linux users do. But most Windows users are just not aware of all the choices they’re making.

Read more at LXer

“The worst thing that could come of this is I could fall down the steps of the FTC building, hit my head and kill myself,” quipped Microsoft Chairman William H. Gates in 1992, as the Federal Trade Commission launched an investigation of his company. But nobody joked on the third day of April, 2000, as Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson delivered his decision on what had morphed into the biggest software antitrust case in history: The United States of America vs. Microsoft.

“The court concludes that Microsoft maintained its monopoly power by anticompetitive means and attempted to monopolize the Web browser market,” Jackson declared.

Ten years ago, on September 26, 2000, that trial took a crucial turn towards the settlement that would allow Microsoft to retain its vast control over the personal computer operating system market. Let’s revisit the essentials of that case, and follow the aftermath—a legacy of endless negotiation and struggle with the entity that, to this day, is the OS on 91.32 percent of the world’s PCs.

Read more at ars technica

Microsoft on Friday warned users that a critical bug in ASP.Net could be exploited by attackers to hijack encrypted Web sessions and pilfer usernames and passwords from Web sites.

The vulnerability went public that same day when a pair of researchers outlined the bug and attack techniques at the Ekoparty Security Conference in Buenos Aires.

According to Microsoft’s advisory, the flaw exists in all versions of ASP.Net, the company’s Web application framework used to craft millions of sites and applications. Microsoft will have to patch every supported version of Windows, from XP Service Pack 3 and Server 2003 to Windows 7 and Server 2008 R2, as well as other products, including its IIS and SharePoint server software.

Read more at ComputerWorld

Microsoft is preaching about standards and open source again, having just had managers vilify both (sometimes resorting to outright corruption); IE9 another new example of harming Web standards and snubbing Open Source

IDG’s pseudo-open source blog has a new hit today. It’s Microsoft’s Walli [1, 2] again and he wants to educate us dumb communists, explaining to us what “Open Source” really means. “Please Don’t Confuse Standards with Open Source Software” says his headline and one can imagine the rest of those Microsoft talking points. Microsoft loves proprietary software development methods and when it comes to standards, it loves labeling its own proprietary APIs/protocols “standards” (recall what Microsoft did to ISO).

Read more at TechRights

MICROSOFT rarely brags about its extortion (or racketeering [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7]) of Android (with Linux inside), saying that it both elevates its cost and makes money from it (two injustices at the same time). Yes, Android is not always free because Microsoft helps create new laws that simply declare Linux to be the property of Microsoft, even though Microsoft writes no code for Linux (unless it violates the GPL, demotes Linux, and promotes Windows).

Read more at TechRights

Windows 7 has been around for almost a year now, but lots of people are still sticking with Windows XP. Now, Microsoft is getting ready to pull the plug on Windows XP sales. No! Really! They mean it this time. Would they lie to you?

Just because Microsoft has extended XP sales over and over again doesn’t mean that they’ll keep selling XP forever. Well, yes, they are supporting XP for years more to come, but this time — cross their hearts and hope to die — Microsoft really is killing XP sales on October 22, 2010. Some companies, noticeably Dell, are pulling the plug on XP even sooner.

Microsoft spokesperson Brandon LeBlanc has written that most Windows users may “not notice much change.” I disagree.

Read more at TechWorld

Have you ever thought about measuring the Internet in terms if malware per minute? Me neither, but someone has and it makes for uncomfortable reading if you are a Microsoft Windows user.

How fast is the Internet? It depends on the metric being used, of course, but one new report published this week has an interesting new take on this old question. How does four malware apps per minute grab you? According to German security vendor G Data, the number of new malware applications has already hit a record for the first half of the year with more than a million recorded in just six months alone.

Read more at DaniWeb

You probably know by now that I don’t touch anything but Linux in my private life. I got a Linux laptop, a Linux mini-laptop, a Linux eBook reader, a Linux television and an Android cell phone. However, in my professional life I do not have that choice.

In the Netherlands virtually every single company uses Windows. Windows is not a very secure Operating System, so everything is bolted down. I cannot install new programs, I cannot kill system processes, I cannot add any buttons or change the menu. The whole thing usually boots from the network. So, don’t comment that “this program adds that functionality” or “open up a settings menu and change this or that”. It doesn’t work.

Read more at The Beez’ speaks..

When I tell people that I use Linux, they look at me with pity. In their minds, I have just confessed to being a fanatic who is willing to undergo daily hardship and inconvenience in defense of my beliefs.

When I go on to tell them that the KDE desktop is in many ways more innovative than Windows 7, the looks of pity changes to caution. I am not only a fanatic, they conclude, but delusional and potentially dangerous.

After all, everybody knows that Linux requires you to do everything from the command line. Such graphical interfaces as exist must be crude and awkward, and I can only be in denial.

All the same, it’s true. The few occasions when I venture into Windows 7 (these days, generally for a comparison article, or to help out a neighbor), I feel hamstrung by the absence or at best partial implementation of all the tools I take for granted. Compared to desktops like KDE, my experience on Windows seems defined largely by what I cannot do.

Read more at Datamation

The Microsoft camp is attacking Oracle’s OpenOffice.org (OOOo) while pretending that Oracle is an “evil empire” (whereas Microsoft “loves” open source)

THANKS to Comes vs Microsoft exhibits, last year we posted Microsoft’s blatantly anti-GNU/Linux (and highly confidential) presentation. it also covered and encouraged bribery (against GNU/Linux).

At the end of last year we also showed that Microsoft had begun hiring people to fight against OpenOffice.org adoption [1, 2, 3]. That’s how a monopolist works, by targeting any sign of competition and then derailing it or bribing those involved (see the Munich story for example).

Read more at Techrights