Thursday, May 11, 2000

Microsoft Goes After Slashdot -- 11:06 am CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Microsoft has gotten a little hot under the collar regarding some posts made under a Slashdot article entitled Kerberos, PACs And Microsoft's Dirty Tricks. M$ has fired up the lawyers to get Slashdot to remove those comments. You can see the full text of M$'s email here.

If I understand the gripe semi-correctly (which I doubt) parts of the Microsoft Authorization Data Specification v.1.0 for Microsoft Windows 2000 Operating Systems were posted and links were given to full copies of the text. M$ had it available for download, after agreeing to a EULA. I guess the lesson learned is that, following the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, you'd better watch what you say or Big Brother will sue your pants off. Especially if you make a big company with lots of cash look bad.

J.t.Qbe comments: The real issue at hand is that Micro$oft has taken Kerberos, an open and standard authentication protocol, and made proprietary adjustments to it. Thanks to that, if you want to authenticate W2K desktop machines via Kerberos to use network services, you have to have a W2K server as well (=big buck$). There's a pretty good description of the issue here.

Once this became known, it made M$ look bad and for good reason: it's tying the desktop OS to one particular server. Once the pressure started to build, M$ "graciously" published the details of it's extension to the standard. However, you could only download and read the document if you agreed not to use it in any way to duplicate the protocol. IOW, they revealed the details but made them useless. Then Slashdot got into the act, and the idiots who post there made the data generally available, and naturally the Redmond overlords didn't like that. . .

The Master comments: And those self-same idiots have given Microsoft the legal ability to destroy one of the popular Anti-Microsoft forums, because (1) MicroSoft's EULA and Copyrights WERE violated, and (2) SlashDot is going to try to resist this-illegally.

News for 05/11/2000

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