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Election 2006 (and beyond): Digital Copyright Canada
From: aland_-at-_striker.ottawa.on.ca (Alan DeKok)
Date: 13 Oct 1998 20:15:38 -0400
Here's a few choice tidbits from the comp.risks newsgroup. Yes, Virginia, Microsoft *is* the Evil Empire. Alan DeKok. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- RISKS-LIST: Risks-Forum Digest Tuesday 13 October 1998 Volume 20 : Issue 03 FORUM ON RISKS TO THE PUBLIC IN COMPUTERS AND RELATED SYSTEMS (comp.risks) ACM Committee on Computers and Public Policy, Peter G. Neumann, moderator ***** See last item for further information, disclaimers, caveats, etc. ***** This issue is archived at http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/20.03.html and at ftp.sri.com/risks/ . [ ... ] ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 12 Oct 1998 10:25:34 -0400 From: Chenxi Wang <cw2e@cs.virginia.edu> Subject: IE4 and its "magical" features Last week my Windows 95 machine refused to boot, citing a protection error in the IO unit. My system staff, after laboring over my machine for some time, told me that it was due to a bug in the IO, and that according to Microsoft, the only way to fix it was to install IE4! So IE4 was installed, and sure enough, it fixed whatever problem the machine was having. I was doing some disk cleaning up this past weekend, and I accidently deleted some files that appeared to have been installed by the IE installation. Curious to see if IE still worked, I double clicked on the icon. Guess what happened? -- It launched my netscape communicator to the URL of the IE download site! I was incredulous... Chenxi Wang University of Virginia <cw2e@cs.virginia.edu> ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 9 Oct 1998 09:55:45 -0400 (EDT) From: "Daniel P. B. Smith" <dpbsmith@world.std.com> Subject: Unreliable reception of e-mailed WP documents Some unpleasantness occurred in a meeting recently. Person A said that the reasons he hadn't performed a task was because he was still waiting for Person B to supply some needed information. Person B said he'd supplied it a week ago in a specific memo which he'd distributed via e-mail. Person C said, "I got it and I'm almost sure I saw A on the distribution list." Person A said "I got the earlier version where all of those numbers were blank, but I've never gotten anything that had the numbers." Person B said "What version where the numbers were blank?" Person E said "You know, the one you sent out about a week ago. I never got the one with the numbers filled in, either." On comparing notes, it turned out that a single version of the memo had been e-mailed, and when opened by about half the participants a critical table was complete and had information visible in all columns, and about half of them had a column in which all cells were blank. All recipients of the damaged version had simply assumed that the blank cells were intentional. Incidentally, this was a 100%-pure-Microsoft situation, involving no version of Word more than a year old (no version skew of more than one version) and involved RTF format which is the format Microsoft specifically designates for document transfer. There was no obvious pattern to the problem; the originator used Word 97 on a PC, and some receivers using Word 98 on a Mac received it correctly while some receivers using Word 97 on a PC got blank columns. We don't know the full story but it is suspected that the set of fonts installed, the OS version, the screen dimensions and resolution, and the kind of printer the user is connected to may all play some part in this crazy equation. The RISK here is the same as with any other kind of unreliable communication that is falsely _assumed_ to be reliable. Notice that, in general, when you send a word-processing document to someone else, _the sender has no reliable way to confirm what the receiver will ultimately see and print. Unless the user guesses there is something wrong and complains, the problem is likely to go undetected. Even when the problem is detected, it is usually hard to resolve, because nothing in the system logs all the configuration information that would be needed to resolve it. Unless the recipient is a colleague in an adjacent cubicle and is willing to experiment with you in real time, problems of this kind are likely to remain unsolved. Daniel P. B. Smith <dpbsmith@world.std.com> ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 6 Oct 1998 18:59:44 +1000 From: "Eric Ulevik" <eau@astsun.fujitsu.com.au> Subject: Microsoft web site denies access based upon Windows regional settings I use home.microsoft.com as my home page under Internet Explorer 4.01 SP1 running on Windows NT 4.0. I have customized the data; I like the presentation. Today, I found that I can no longer access my home page. The browser is redirected to ninemsn.com.au - a local web site put together by Microsoft and Channel 9 (an Australian TV station). ninemsn tells me that this is "MSN strategy". But other PCs in the same office are not redirected. The significant difference appears to be that the other PCs are set to US date formats. The risk is that configuring your computer's date format has surprising consequences. Eric Ulevik <eau@ozemail.com.au> ------------------------------ Date: Sat, 03 Oct 1998 17:21:44 -0400 From: James Love <love@cptech.org> Subject: Risks of installing Microsoft's Media Player James Love, Consumer Project on Technology, P.O.Box 19367, Washington, DC 20036 http://www.cptech.org love@cptech.org 202.387.8030, fax 202.234.5176 <--begin message from Wade Ripkowski--> Subject: RE: Sony PC & Windows 98 Licensing Date: Fri, 2 Oct 1998 14:21:23 -0400 >From: "Ripkowski, Wade" <Wade.Ripkowski@psc.BellHowell.com> To: "'James Love'" <love@cptech.org> I just hate being abused by Microsoft. I just encountered a whole new issue with Microsoft's "new" Media Player that you may be interested in as well. I installed it and it changed EVERY multi-media association on the machine to use itself as the player. The problem here is that the media player I was using up until then utilized the hardware based MPEG decoder and subsequently played MPEG video better (no jumping). MS Media Player also redirected the CD Audio player to itself. Again the audio player I used before was much better. To make a long story short. I opted to "uninstall" it think my system would be put back the way it was. Boy was I wrong. It uninstalled itself and changed all the multi-media associations to use Microsoft ActiveMovie! Now I am left with a system in which I must reinstall the Audio/Video applications I want in order to use them, and to top it off, my RealAudio player no longer works either! I spoke with a friend of mine this morning and he ran into the exact same problem I did, although he has a Gateway machine. I think this is somewhat along the lines of the "browser battle". It looks as if Microsoft knows they lost the battle, but if they cant own that, then they will own the multi-media portion of the machine. They advertise "forget all the plug-ins, all media, one player". So I should have read the literal meaning -- my mistake. And they are dumping this product free to everyone on the internet. This will surely hurt Real, Inc., and possibly other similar companies. I am not opposed to one vendor writing all the software for the PC I use, if that software works properly and at an acceptable performance level. If one vender wants all the business, fine, make software that earns it on merit, not on price / availability!!! [...] <--end message from Wade Ripkowski--> ------------------------------ [ ... ] End of RISKS-FORUM Digest 20.03 ************************
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