WINDING DOWN
An idiosyncratic look at the week's net and technology news and 
comment
by Alan Lenton
November 3, 2002

The story of the week was undoubtedly Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly's 
decisions in the Microsoft anti-trust trial. It was also the least covered of the 
week, thanks to the decision to not release the material until late on Friday 
night. This meant that the sources I usually rely on were still trying to digest 
the 344 page set of opinions as I go to press. I've covered what I was able to 
glean in the shorts section, but I'm sure that we will be knee deep in analyses 
for the next week or two, especially while the nine dissenting states make up 
their collective minds as to whether they should take the issue any further.

I guess it's a sign of the times that this issue seems to be mainly about legal 
stuff in the hi-tech world. No one seems to be doing anything new any more, 
all money and energy seems to be bent on collecting lawyers fees from 
unsuspecting software companies. So much for innovation.


Story:

Security by Obscurity

There is a very important legal case due to come into existence in Sweden 
soon. At stake is the question of whether putting information on your web site 
counts as making it public if you don't provide any links to the information - 
security by obscurity if you like. 

What happened was that Intentia, a Swedish software vendor placed its 
quarterly financial results on its web site without providing a link. The intention 
was, I assume, to provide the link when the results were officially released. 
Unfortunately, they used the same system as previously to decide on the URL 
for the page, and this was guessed by a Reuters reporter who obtained the 
results and wrote a story about them before those results were officially 
published.

Intentia maintain that this is a clear case of Reuters hacking into their system - 
indeed their Oct 26 announcement was entitled 'Reuters News Agency Broke 
into Intentia's IT Systems'. (Bit of a surfeit of capital letters there folx!) Intentia 
have taken this very seriously and filed a complaint with Sweden's National 
Criminal Investigation Department. 

Since Intentia did not provide an explicit link to the report, their lawyers 
maintain that Reuters are guilty of a violation of intellectual property and of the 
computer system protection laws. Reuters, of course maintain that providing 
links is irrelevant. Putting information on a public web site amounts to 
publishing it, whether there are links to the information or not.

This is going to be an important test when it comes to court. I'd like to think 
that Intentia haven't got a snowball's chance in hell of winning. Unfortunately, 
today legal judgements around the world seem to be in the process of 
ordering hell to freeze over. This may be 'only' Sweden, but legal precedents 
set in one country have a way of sliding into law in other countries in our net 
connected world.

Let's hope that for once common sense prevails.

http://go.hotwired.com/news/politics/0,1283,56079,00.html/wn_ascii
http://www.zdnet.com.au/newstech/security/story/0,2000024985,20269450,00
.htm


Shorts:

The European Commission showed that it did have some teeth this week and 
Nintendo learned of the perils of sending out Microsoft Word versions of its 
press releases. Nintendo and some of its distributors were fined 168m Euro 
($168m) for running a price fixing cartel in the 1990s. Nintendo's share of the 
fine was $149m, somewhat more, it turns out, than they had expected. Yes, 
they got bitten by the 'feature' in Microsoft Word that keeps your deleted text! 
Journalists, of course, know all about this. They always scan the press 
releases for deleted text if companies are stupid enough to send the releases 
as Word documents. In this case they discovered that Nintendo was 'only' 
expecting to be fined $50m - which, it seems, they would have been prepared 
to pay. Tough luck Nintendo, but if you get caught breaking the law you must 
expect to get a punishment commensurate with the offense. Perhaps the next 
thing for the Commission to look at is the Hollywood media zoning rules for 
DVDs which allow the media companies to keep non-US areas, like the EC, 
from buying cheaper US DVDs.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/54/27790.html
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/54/27852.html
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/54/27848.html

Well late on Friday (1 Nov 2002) Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly finally issued 
her long awaited ruling on the Microsoft anti-trust case. Verdict? it's OK for 
Microsoft to screw over everyone else in the industry as long they can make a 
case that the consumer benefits. The late time at which the opinions were 
issued means that most of the reports have been very brief so far, not even 
really covering exactly what is in them. The bottom line, however, is fairly 
clear. She endorsed the Microsoft/DoJ settlement with a few alterations to 
tighten it up. She also made it quite clear that she interprets the touchstone of 
anti-trust law as being not whether it harms competitors, but whether it harms 
consumers. My congratulations to Microsoft on convincing the judge that 
being virtually the only company in the computing business whose prices 
have gone up while everyone else's have dropped by at least an order of 
magnitude is good for the consumer! 

http://news.com.com/2102-1001-964332.html

And while on the subject of Microsoft, it seems that its software is so good 
that even the dead write letters to their Attorney Generals urging the officers 
to go easy on Microsoft. Could this be evidence that Bill Gates really does 
have a pact with the devil, as claimed by some Microsoft opponents? The 
letters are part of a carefully orchestrated (but flawed) campaign to create the 
impression of a grass roots upsurge in support for the company. Utah state 
officials, however, became suspicious when they noticed the same phrase 
appearing in the letters, and that some return addresses were invalid. 
Investigation soon revealed that at least two of the writers were dead. I can 
only (mis)quote an election organiser I once knew - 'Write early, write often!'

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/134332634_microlob23.ht
ml

Last week I mentioned Chicago based Devine's patent on e-commerce. Well 
now another one has crawled out of the woodwork. This is held by San Diego 
based Pangea Intellectual Properties LLC, and is, if anything even more 
broad than the Devine one. This one could even cover ATMs! Perhaps the 
best outcome would be that the two companies will spend the next fifteen 
years fighting it out in court and both go bust in the process. Or maybe, just 
maybe, the whole thing will force a complete overhaul of the loophole riddled 
US patent system.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/6/27818.html

For some time now Microsoft has been running a campaign against Open 
Source software, especially where governments are concerned. Their 
success has been uneven, but, at least in the US, it convinced the military 
they should look at the issues raised by Microsoft, so a report on the use of 
Open Source software was commissioned from Mitre Corporation. The 
resulting 150+ page report was not really very sympathetic to Microsoft's 
views, concluding that there is plenty of Open Source software in place and 
there should be more of it. The report feels (correctly in my view) that Open 
Source software shouldn't be made mandatory, it should be used where 
people find it a good fit with what they want to use it for. The report 
recommends that the Department of Defence should create a 'safe list' of 
approved products and encourage interoperability with commercial software. 
It will be interesting to see what becomes of the recommendations in this 
report in the long run.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/4/27822.html

Japan's NEC have come up with a neat idea for a mobile phone interface. 
Shake it! Yes, really. If you shake it up and down it makes the menu scroll, 
while shaking it to the left and right scrolls the screen sideways. The phone 
contains two motion sensors that detect the movement and change the 
contents of the screen accordingly. I wonder how long it will take them to 
realise that a third sensor is needed - to detect motion towards and away from 
the user. This will allow it to detect the phone being slammed against the 
nearest wall in a fit of phone rage as the owner receives yet another 
unsolicited txt advert for a nearby fast food shop...

New Scientist paper edition, 12 Oct 2002


Scanner: Other stories

FBI - The distributed denial of service (DDOS) attacks against the Internet's 
core servers came from the US and Korea
http://www.idg.net/ic_961320_1794_9-10000.html

Richard Stallman on 'Trusted Computing'
http://newsforge.com/newsforge/02/10/21/1449250.shtml?tid=19

Bush Signs Voting Bill
http://www.cnn.com/2002/ALLPOLITICS/10/29/elec02.bush.changes.ap/index
.html


Have fun on the web!

Alan Lenton
alan@ibgames.com

Past issues of Winding Down can be found at 
http://www.ibgames.net/alan/winding/index.html.


