The Archives of The Evil Empire2001 February
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25 February: MSN May Start Charging Surfers
Microsoft Corp. may soon start charging users of its popular MSN site, The Guardian newspaper said Monday. The paper said Microsoft could develop extra services for the site and charge users up to $86.90 a year for access. 23 February: Security Flaw Found In Outlook VCards
Security consultancy and researcher @Stake Inc. has discovered a security flaw in Microsoft's ubiquitous Outlook and Outlook Express e-mail applications. The vulnerability concerns the use of Outlook's vCards, or virtual business cards, that can fall victim to a buffer overflow attack or contain code that can attack a user's system. VCards can be created with malicious code that can either cause Outlook to crash, or even allow the e-mail application to run damaging code on a targeted victim's system. 15 February: XP Just Another Apple Clone?
The devil's in the details, and Mac fans are saying the new Windows XP borrows more than just a letter from the Mac OS X. 'They even stole the duck!' cries one angry Mac man. Microsoft, by the way, denies the duck heist. By Jeffrey Benner. 15 February: Welcome to .NET - how MS plans to dominate digital
music sales
Once upon a time Microsoft discovered the Internet, and the browser wars ensued. More recently it's become apparent that the company sees music sales as the Next Big Thing, but so far, the extent, intricacy and all-encompassing nature of its plans for Digital Rights Management and secure content distribution haven't been widely grasped. When they are, the browser wars may look like a sideshow. Essentially, there are three major components to the plan. First, the ubiquitous platform - Windows Media Player is reprising Internet Explorer as an integrated part of the OS, so it will become the client of choice manque, and the associated technologies will become the standard technologies. Second, there's the music business. Presented with a near-universal (one might muse that Apple can expect another visit on the subject of MS Office shortly) platform and associated protection mechanisms, the record companies can surely be induced to adopt it. 5 February: MS testers shout 'Linux!' over Whistler copy protection
Microsoft's Product Activation technology has triggered a row in the company's official Whistler beta newsgroups, with testers threatening defection to Linux or piracy over the matter. The irate testers - who, as far as we know, haven't actually been hit by a real live Product Activation Whistler build yet - seem to have been sent further up the wall by the intervention of a Microserf, who referred them to a couple of FAQs on the site. 5 February: Why Microsoft's MSN PC give away didn't work
MSN claims to have recruited 500,000 new subscribers in Q4 2000, and MSN is pulling the $400 hardware rebate it offers new subscribers in March. What do these two things have in common? 2 February: MS uses Office registrations to enforce licences, steal
customers
Microsoft's war on piracy never was a clear-cut struggle between good and evil, but now it appears the company is using anti-piracy pitches to steal customers from its own resellers. Inadvertently? Perhaps, but the concentration of business in the hands of a few key resellers and of Microsoft itself is a natural consequence of the company's current activities. 1 February: Microsoft redefines 'open source' - look, don't touch
Remember the gag about how many Microsoft programmers it takes to change a light bulb? The answer's none: Redmond simply redefines darkness. As a variation, try this one - how does Microsoft make Windows open source? It doesn't: it redefines free software - software that gives the user the right to change the source code, as software that doesn't give the user the right to change the source code.
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